It's Cool to Be Frugal

Meet Dom. He's a 20-year old college student. He's in a fraternity, and he loves to go out. He also sings for coupons. That's right. He sings. For coupons.

I'll admit that I get a vicarious thrill from watching Extreme Couponers create stockpiles of tomato paste and mouthwash. I imagine what it would be like to swim through their seas of surplus toothbrushes and candy bars. I try to picture just how crunchy my hair would be if I aimed all of those cans of drugstore hairspray at my head at once. And sprayed. And sprayed. And sprayed.

If you have ever watched an episode of Extreme Couponers, then you know the face of the extreme couponer is often a female one: she's the single mom, the military wife, the mother of five teenage boys. If you watch often, you may catch the occasional couponing house husband. However, it now appears that young men are entering the arena of competitive couponing as well. Dom is not the first boy to appear on the show. A 17-year old named Cole, nicknamed "The Couponing Kid," made his professional couponing debut in the show's second season. Which begs the question: where my girls at?

It's no secret that the grocery store is my least favorite place to spend money. I will spend 10 minutes silently debating the merits of purchasing the apple that is two cents less per pound than my favorite apple variety. What's that? You don't have a favorite apple variety? I thought everyone did. Weird. Yet, I do not clip coupons. My grandma clips coupons, and my mother clipped coupons, but I do not. It's not that I don't want to save money, it's just that clipping coupons has never saved me enough money to be worth the time it takes to clip them. And yet, boys like Dom are funding toga parties by singing for coupons and going recycle bin diving, so there is clearly something to the sport of competitive couponing. It concerns me that my ladies are not taking advantage of very real opportunities to line their vintage Coach purses with dollar bills while teenage boys are recognizing the benefits of competitive saving. In fact, the female extreme couponers are to a woman married, with children, or married with children (i.e. saving for a family), while their male counterparts are unabashedly saving for themselves. Or for, you know, a toga party.

Time recently ran a cover story titled "The Richer Sex" about how more women than ever before are overtaking men as family breadwinners. With women outnumbering men in undergraduate institutions and in most graduate and professional programs (including law school) across the country, we're likely to see this trend continue. But as most personal finance experts agree that the key to personal wealth is not just earning more money, but saving more money, it concerns me that younger women appear not to be as excited about competitive saving as young men are.

Right about now you are probably saying, but don't you write about shopping? Absolutely. But I have often wondered if there was not also a way to write about saving money in a way that is as fun (and snarky) as writing about shopping. If maybe, just maybe, instead of celebrating a sister's new shoes, we could instead congratulate her on pouring her tax refund into her Roth IRA or paying off a credit card? That would, of course, mean that women would have to start opening the dialogue about money. It's funny how in the age of Sex and the City (the series and the movies) and Girls that money talk truly is the last female taboo topic. But it doesn't have to be. If a 17-year old boy can realize the importance of saving money and can brag about it on national television, why can't we?

So what say you: do you think a competitive shopper can become a competitive saver? Do you clip coupons? Would you ever discuss (gasp!) money with your friends?

You can catch Dom and his frat brothers singing for coupons when Extreme Couponing premieres tonight at 10 p.m. on TLC. 

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