Angelia Gant spends her nights guarding the elderly and going through their trash.
“Every night I go up into their recycling bins and get all the coupons out,” she said. “They don’t go grocery shopping. They get fed three meals a day.”
The 46-year-old security guard at the Atrium at Gainesville said she has collected more than 2,000 coupons.
She gets most of her coupons from discarded newspapers at work, and she mastered a few methods for getting the best savings out of them.
On July 21, Gant shared some of her secrets at the Alachua County Headquarters Library. About 12 people joined Gant in a small room upstairs as she presented “Couponing: Tips, Tricks & Tactics.”
She gave the audience handouts equipped with the latest coupon lingo describing everything from Blinkies, machines that spit out coupons at the store, to Peelies, coupons that peel off the actual product.
Gant said some stores take manufacturers’ coupons up to two weeks after the expiration date, and some honor coupons from their competitors.
Most sales run in six-week cycles, she said. If you miss a sale on an item, you’ll probably find it on sale again.
Carrie Roberts, a 30-year-old mother of two, asked Gant the most questions.
“Saving money is always something I’ve been interested in,” Roberts said. “Take a little time to get the coupons and you can actually save a lot.”
Gant started her extreme coupon clipping as a way to save money.
“Basically, when my husband lost his job, it got to be real tight,” she said. “He was complaining that there wasn’t enough food in the house.”
She took a class and began saving. Gant estimated she saved about $1,000 over the past year or so from coupons.
Gant and her husband have no children, and she said she doesn’t know how her friends with kids put food on the table.
“It’s like feeding a family of four,” she said. “My husband, he eats like three kids.”
Gant has used so many coupons, at checkout some stores give her cash back. She said she received about $100 back in the past two years.
Gant arranges her thousands of coupons by month and store, and said it’s not hard to keep them organized.
“Give it about a couple of months and you’ll get the hang of it,” she said. “It’ll flow real easy.”
Angelia Gant, a 46-year-old security guard at the Atrium at Gainesville, poses at her home in front of her stockpile of goods collected through couponing.
