Mad Clippers: The Truth Behind (Some) Extreme Couponing

Okay, my friends all know I am in love with coupons. I clip the Sunday paper, troll online sites, email companies, etc. in order to get them. We are broke and both of us have been since we can remember. My mother was a crazy coupon lady. On a trip to Harvey's once, she paid under $10 for over $200 worth of groceries. I'm still impressed. My own shopping trips haven't gotten quite as awesome, but I do all right. I get things for free occasionally, and I get things for damn near free a lot of the time. However, I don't do coupons for the fun of it. Sure, I get a kick out of it, but that isn't the point. The point is to make sure we can afford the groceries and household items we need every week.

So, where in the world is this headed, you ask. I finally found a site online to watch TLC's Extreme Couponing, and I am, for the most part, I am horrified. Some of the people are awesome. One guy bought an insane amount of hba items (like around 200 toothpastes, etc.), but turned around and donated a ton to deployed soldiers. One woman did the same with food items, but donated over half to a food bank. Those I get. Those I think are awesome. However, even they have something in common with the others that makes me livid: the stockpile.

All of the people profiled on the show have stockpiles that take over garages, rooms, closets, you name it. Some of the families are large, so a reasonable stockpile makes sense. Buy 50 bottles of shampoo for nothing or near it, and you don't have to worry about it for a while. BUT they don't just buy it like that. One man had a literal wall of toothpaste which he was stockpiling for his 4 person family. There is no way they will be able to use a fraction of that before he buys more. One woman has hundreds of packages of diapers in her garage that she got basically for free, but she has no kids! She is neither married nor dating anyone with whom she is planning on having a child anytime soon. She simply bought them and stored them for "the future." While it makes sense in a way, it just seems excessive and wasteful to me. If I had the space and money to spend, I would do the crazy coupons for those things and donate them, but I don't. My "stockpile" might be 2 or 3 bottles of the same shampoo when I didn't need it yet but which I spent maybe 50 cents on. The difference is that I won't buy anymore shampoo until that is gone.

This whole thing aggravates the hell out of me. I have nothing against saving money; it's wonderful. However, this is no longer actually doing that. The diaper woman was shown buying Mylanta or a similar product which she admittedly never uses, but she couldn't pass it up because it was such a good deal. A "good deal" is one that saves you money on an item you use. It would be like me going out and buying 20 boxes of pregnancy tests to keep in my stockpile because they were extremely cheap. I have no use for them, so any money I spent on them is automatically wasted. Therefore, not a good deal. *sigh*

All of this is not to say that all extreme couponers are like this. On the contrary, there were a few who simply built up items their families needed without being ridiculous about it. Anything over their own need that they got for free or spent pennies on, they donated or gave to extended family. Those are good deals. What these other people are doing? Well, compare an episode of that show to Hoarders, and the only difference you are likely to see is how neatly the items are contained. They are simply escaping the stigma and label by throwing up a shield of coupons and being on a different show. Just sayin...

Not Without My Books, or Change is a Four-Letter Word: Hoarding Rears Its Ugly, Cluttered Head

This afternoon Anna had a sudden urge to see what the living room would look like rearranged. So she found a program online, and I spent the better part of an hour or so calling out the measurements of everything. Basically, it all came to nothing because the stuff we have simply doesn't seem to work in any other configuration, but I do have a point to this...Afterwards, Anna was saying that we have too much stuff--primarily books. It isn't that she doesn't like books. Quite the contrary. She loves to read as much as I do, but she simply doesn't have the need to keep them once they're read for the most part. I like to keep a great deal of mine, mainly because I'm always certain that, at some point in the future, I will want to reread it or will need it for something, and therefore in order to save the trouble of finding and buying it again, I should keep it. In the past, I have been proven quite right in many cases. Some of my books show the wear of many, many readings. Some I may have only reread once or twice, but they are either difficult to find or simply things that I love and want around. Some are, well...

Anyway, during the course of the conversation, I burst into my usual frustrated tears. My immediate response was to go on the defensive. "I did good! I've gotten rid of a ton of stuff!" And I have been good and gotten rid of a ton of stuff. Our closet can testify to that. My gods the amount of crap we cleared out over the past few months, when one counts the storage apocalypse as well as the closet! But certain things, books in this case, I absolutely panic at the thought of clearing out. Take my "school" bookshelf for instance. There are things on there that I have used many times, and were I in graduate school right now, I would be using them again--books I have kept from various classes, some from my honors thesis, and a few (*cough* 9 *cough*) versions of the Bible for comparative purposes. The problem is that I am not in grad school and don't look to be for quite a while. I can't afford to retake the GRE without a job, nor can I afford the application fees. And besides all that, even if I got into a graduate school right now, we certainly couldn't afford to move to wherever it might be. But I just can't get rid of them. If and when I needed them, it would prove difficult and expensive to replace some of them, so I should keep them. Not to mention the fact that if I got rid of them, it would be like I was admitting defeat in a way, letting FSU's rejection decide that I'm not going to do what I want to do...

When really...it's just trading in or selling some books that I'm not using at the moment...I hate OCD.

The Cleansing of the Articles: Hoarder Self-Intervention, Part Oh, Who Knows...

Well, I cleaned out the binders today. An entire bottom shelf of one of our short bookcases was lined with binders filled with articles from various classes over the past four years. I kept, well, everything; my justification was that I might need them again for a paper. I was right quite a few times, but not 16 binders worth. So, I made myself sit down and go through all of them this afternoon. There are now 4 with articles, 1 containing all my honors thesis stuff, and one containing a photocopy of a book I want to keep. Not too bad. Of course, the entire time in my head all I could hear was, "But you might need that article! Don't toss that one!" *le sigh*

I also tried to reorganize the bookshelves a bit, and that turned out semi-okay. I still have major problems letting go of books. You know, because I might want it later on...

"But I might need that later!": Ramblings of a Minor Hoarder with a Semi-Clean Closet

Guess what? I cancelled my last appointment with the head shrinker, and I quit taking my meds a little over a month ago. This was less a conscious decision about my distrust of the medical and therapeutic professions (though those do exist) than a reality check about the fact that I am still unemployed and my FSU health insurance runs out in August. (Of course, I have been having the attendant weirdness that comes along with dropping things like Zoloft cold turkey; the insomnia, general discombobulation, and minor hallucinations have been the worst.) Anyway, this means that I have been dealing with my OCD symptoms all by my little lonesome (as Mema used to say), and it has not been pretty. I've had some pretty gnarly mood swings from the manic depression, and my poor brain once again feels like it's being shaken around quite a bit. However, there's not a lot I can do about this. There are, as my former therapist mentioned, low-income helpers for people like me, but I've been through that before. It is not as easy or as helpful as she thinks it is, unfortunately, and I'm sure my low SES buddies with similar probs can back me up on that one.

In any case, the last few weeks have been exceedingly stressful, and all of this has been pushed to the front of my long line of worries/concerns lately. Today's particular mental discussion panel covered my relatively low-grade hoarding (partially because of a friend's blog, which can be seen HERE). A few weeks ago, Anna and I finally tackled the closet. Now, that may sound simple, but as my faithful readers will attest, not so. The last time was nightmarish (as can be seen here, and again here, and one more time in this one), and that closet was minuscule compared to this one. Here we have a walk-in closet, and it was stuffed to the rafters with decorations, clothes, general crap, and also several large plastic tubs from when we raided the storage back home last year. We could barely get in and out to dig up clothes, and a small but noticeable mountain had begun to form in the back. Every time I opened the door, I felt the panic rising, so I knew it had to be done. However, knowing this and actually doing it are two different things. My poor Anna suffered through a two-day ordeal in which I managed to purge WAY more than either of us ever thought would be possible, but still not enough, says the responsible monkey in the back of my mind.

One of my big things is office supplies. I love pens and pencils and notebooks, and if I find them cheap, Katie bar the door. So, when we were purging, you would not believe the number of journals, notebooks, pens, pens, and did I mention pens. Clearance is a beautiful thing just after school starts in the fall, and so very many places hand out free pens. I had at least 20 of one particular free pen. No joke. But I cleared 'em out. I still have a drawer with a basket o' pens, and there's a storage bin under the bed with a good number of journal and notebooks type lovely things; but all in all, I did good. I got rid of a lot of random crap I had been hanging onto for no discernible reason, and a good (if dusty and panic-stricken) time was had by all. Friends dug through some of it like ferrets, and then a junk-buying lady from craigslist took the rest. We were both quite proud of me.

BUT, and there is always a but when my OCD is involved, I still think I could have done better. At the same time, I know that if I had gotten rid of too much more, my brain would likely have liquefied and come gushing out my ears. I did well considering my issues surrounding stuff in general, but today I sat looking at our bookshelves thinking that I intentionally avoided them. Yes, we do purge them every so often because our apartment is too small to support the book habit we have had for so long. But school enabled me to hang onto extra books--"I'll need them later." I would say, and most of the time, I would be absolutely right. I used them for papers and my thesis, and was proven absolutely right. Now that I'm effectively thrown out into the world, I can't really claim that for a chunk of them. Oh, I plan on getting into a grad school eventually (I hope) and continuing some of my research interests, so a part of them need to stay right where they are. There are others, though, that I know I will likely never use again, and if I do, it will be years and years away, making the space worth more than the money I might save by not buying it again later. Other books are simply hanging around because I love them. I won't get rid of certain things EVER, but some are peeping around double stacks of overflow and I know I will likely never read them again despite the fact that they were wonderful or entertaining. But I panic worse at getting rid of books than almost anything else in the world.

And so, you are wondering, where is she headed with this long, rambling post? I absolutely hate the hoarding part of me. She drives me nuts when she starts mumbling about "keep this. We might need it later." and "For Goddess' sake, don't throw that out!" I know I don't need fourteen of the same pen or every single cute notebook I see. In fact, since I am floating in a non-academic limbo right now, I don't even have an excuse to buy them anyway. But I still do it. I still see stuff and want to take it home when I know that a) we don't have room and b) it serves no purpose at all. As many hoarders do, I say it's collecting, and some of it is; but not nearly all of it. Another case of I know it's nuts, but I can't do a damn thing about it. I'm staring at a row of binders stuffed full of articles, and hoarder Dawn is whispering, "don't even think about it. We'll need those later."