I’m married to a penny-pincher. He’s always on the hunt for the best deal. And his habit has rubbed off on me. So much so, that I suggested our newest adventure: couponing!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am now one of those people in the supermarket checkout line, the ones you dread being stuck behind. Don’t worry, though, we have committed to keeping our coupons organized so the checkout process is as painless as possible.

So how does this “couponing” thing work, you ask? Isn’t it time consuming and complicated?

We’re just learning how to do it. It might end up being time consuming. It might get complicated. But if it saves us the amount of money it has saved other people, it’s worth it to us. Because we have stuff we need to pay for! We’re currently finishing the room that is going to become Husband’s office, which we’ve been able to pay for but it’s been a bit of a stretch, and next spring we’re going to be landscaping the front and back yard. And in the future, we’ll be replacing all the carpet in our house, finishing the bathroom attached to the office, finishing the basement, and hopefully upgrading some general fixtures and things around the house. It’s a lot, and to us it doesn’t make sense to go into debt for it if we don’t have to. So we’re doing everything we can to start saving up towards those projects.

Hence, couponing.

There are a few ways to go about it – watch deals online, find blogs by couponing families, use coupon websites, and good old fashioned cutting coupons out of the newspaper. We’re doing all of these things. We started getting the Sunday paper, because they have the best coupons. We get circulars from all the local grocery stores, so we compare coupons to sales. We save coupons for things we might get in the future, and watch for them to go on sale. It might take a while for us to get the system down and start knocking a big chunk off our grocery bill, but if we can stick it out, it will be worth it.

It means a lot to me, too, that my husband is so supportive of and excited by this idea. He works hard to provide for us so I can be a stay-at-home mom. He’s doing his absolute best to manage our finances and he’s doing a great job. I know it’s a burden on him, and I know it stresses him out sometimes. So as the mistress of our household, the person who is basically in charge of what goes on in our kitchen, it’s the least I can do to contribute towards lessening that stress. So I can spend part of my Sunday afternoon clipping and organizing coupons. In the grand scheme of things, that’s really no big deal.

Because the way I look at it, being a stay-at-home mom doesn’t mean I just get to sit on my duff and play with the baby and sip coffee all day long. It also doesn’t mean my marriage is some caveman-ish hierarchy. My husband is a good, kindhearted man, and he is an excellent head of our household. He makes it easy for me to be under his covering of authority. And one of the reasons it’s easy is because he demonstrates a lot of respect for my opinion and for the job I do every day of taking care of our baby and our home. That makes me want to demonstrate respect for him by being a good manager of our house, and contributing to managing our finances by being wise with our meal planning and groceries.

That was totally not where I intended this post to go. And now I’m feeling convicted. Because I’m not a perfect household manager – far from it! But now I’m feeling motivated, so I’m going to go re-do my chore chart (which is on a marker board and was working great for about a week before my nephew decided it would be fun to play with and erased most of it) and get moving today. I love my husband, and I want him to feel respected and loved in return. And when he walks in the door after a long day at work, few things make him light up more than a clean kitchen or a vacuumed floor or a pile of freshly folded clean laundry. See, he’s sort of a neat freak, and I’m really not (really not!), so it blesses him when he sees me make an effort to take care of our house so that we have more time to spend as a family on evenings and weekends.

So today, thanks to this little entry about couponing I wanted to make, I’m going to start fresh. Beware, dust bunnies! Watch out, dirty laundry! Here I come!