Thankfulness Day 12 - Hooray for Coupons!

Today I am going to express my gratitude for coupons. I wasn’t a “couponer” before coming to Italy, however after I was informed of a program that sent military members coupons, I decided it really couldn’t be easier, so I might as well give it a go. I signed up for the program and was matched with 5 people from the states who volunteered to find, clip, and mail coupons to me overseas. Wow! How cool are those people? Well now I carry my coupons with me to every shopping trip and I usually save around $10 a trip with them. (And we make our trip once a week). Being overseas, we are limited by the food they ship over here, but we still manage to save a lot of money with the coupons.

The coffee store on base also has a huge file system where people can go and put the coupons they don’t use and pick up one’s other people have discarded. Sometimes I will sit in the coffee shop and dig for specific coupons I am looking for. Our savings with coupons definitely dropped with my new diet. Coupons for fresh produce doesn’t seem to exist… however we still save on frozen veggies, dairy and meats that my hubby eats, as well as cleaning supplies and soaps, etc. I find that most of the coupons seem to be for the unhealthy foods. Sugar cereals, ice cream, cookie packs, sodas, etc all seem to have an abundance of coupons available. Healthier food options have fewer coupons. Regardless, we still save enough money to make it worth it, and I’m very thankful to have coupons, and to have people stateside who spend their spare time clipping and mailing off their coupons!

If you happen to be a couponer and would like to donate your spare coupons to military members, go here: http://www.couponstotroops.com/ to sign up!

Euro

This is a brief post. I just wanted to show those who don’t know, what Euro looks like. Each bill is a different size and color. Though it may be hard to tell from the picture, each bill size gradually increases with its worth.

I am quite enjoying the colorful money! When I go into the bank to withdraw cash, I ask for it by color. “Three blues and a pink please!” haha. I typically get a funny look or a snicker, and I’m not sure how much the landlords appreciate receiving the rent payment in all manner of random bills, but holding a rainbow fistful of colorful money always makes me smile. “It’s the little things”. :)

One of the differences in Euro that often makes me stop and double check, are the Euro coins. Coins range in value from 1 cent to two dollars! So when walking along the street and you spy a coin, there is much more incentive to pick it up because it could be worth dollars! One must also be careful because the dollar coins look and are sized very similar to US quarters. On the military base everything is in US dollars, and off base in the Italian towns it’s obviously in Euro, so naturally I have both forms of cash in my wallet. A few times I have nearly grabbed the silver 2 dollar euro coins instead of giving over 50 cents in quarters! Luckily I caught myself in time, but that’s definitely something to look out for, and I now keep my coins in separate pockets in my wallet to help avoid the confusion and not lose money!

Each Euro coin has a “common side” and a “national side”. The common side would be something like a design for 2 Euro, and that pattern is the exact same on one side of all the 2 Euro coins. However the flipside is the “national side”, in which one of the member countries has their design on it. (Much like how each of the US states has their own design for the backside of quarters). If you would like to know more and see pictures of each country’s design of choice, go here: How to Identify Euro Coins

          
          Also, the current conversion rate is that 1 Euro is equivalent to $1.307 in US dollars. It usually helps my spending decisions if I make that conversion in my head because we get paid in dollars and the dollar amount is always going to be bigger, so it scares me off from buying whatever the item is.  

          I hope this was informative, and that you enjoyed the colorful Euro as much as I do :)