There is no denying that most Americans are worried about the economy. The recent stock market crash, massive declines in housing prices and skyrocketing energy costs are forcing everyone to look for ways to save. The most recent trend is grocery coupons.

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It is no surprise to learn that Americans have one of the highest food bills in the world. That's because most households don't plan their food purchases. We are a society based on credit and impulse buying, and these habits carry over to our food shopping.

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Grocery coupons can provide huge annual savings totaling well over $500 per household, but most consumers don't take full advantage of these savings. There are two main reasons for this. First, most Americans don't have access to the right coupons at the right time and second is because it takes time and energy to cut out the coupons when we find them.

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Only the most diligent grocery coupon buff will carefully hoard coupons, organize them, and schedule the purchases to meet the coupon expiration date. Most of us just can't spare the time and effort it takes to use grocery coupons effectively.

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So we set out to find the best way to cut our grocery bill in half with the least amount of effort.

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The first solution we came across was a community coupon-sharing program. It works as follows:

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Friends and neighbors pool their grocery coupons together to create a coupon bank. Whenever one of the members needs to go shopping, they turn to the coupon bank for their coupon needs.

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When we tried this idea we found that we still had to cut out coupons from local flyers and organize them before submitting them to the coupon bank, an idea none of us liked.

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After exhausting ourselves with scissor and coupon organizers we decided to try an online grocery site. The site we tried allowed us to print out coupons directly to our home printer. We originally liked this idea, but when we entered our zip code as instructed we found that the selections for our area were very limited.

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By this time we were feeling pretty disappointed but decided to try one more option.

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A coupon website that offers real grocery coupons without the hassle of coupon clipping. One such program we came across was selectcouponprogram dot com, which offers free coupons when you sign up for a small monthly membership. Once registered we found hundreds of coupons for almost every major brand, my favorite were the candy coupons since I have big sweet tooth.

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According to Stephen Samtur, President of the Select Coupon Program ?grocery savings are one of the easiest ways to cut your monthly bills, and our program makes it even easier by providing coupons consumers really want when they want them?.

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So there you have it, finally a way to cut our grocery bill in half without having to sit around with a scissors and a coupon organizer. In these trying times, any savings is good, but BIG savings is great, especially when the answer is just a click of the mouse away.