Beating the System: An Amanda Story

So my wife is a fiend for beating the system.

Some women like to shop, though I know there are those that do not-my mother, for instance, collapses into a prostrate wreck at the prospect of having to go to Wal Mart. Amanda likes to shop as well, but to her shopping is an eternal gauntlet thrown in her face, a gauntlet that says You have to pay full market value for this shit and to which she replies Silence, Capitalism, I will rape your face. And the hell of it is, then she does.

The proof is in the pudding. I don't make that much money; it is decent money for a console jockey, but with not enough for a single income family. And yet we make it work, and live a pretty plush suburban lifestyle without going into more debt, simply because she does exhaustive research before every freaking thing she buys, scours Freecycle and Craigslist, and thinks ahead to what she will need rather than what she does need. She checks what coupons do and don't stack, calculates percentages, compares and cross references brands, subscribes to every newsletter of deals and cheats and actually reads that shit. And then puts it into practice.

I mean seriously, when I just downstairs I was looking into a chest freezer full of frozen convenience foods that cost us like seventeen motherfucking dollars in real money, because she collected approximately nine million coupons and found them on clearance at a place that was handing out 5$ gift cards for every seven frozen food items you bought. And she did it all with nothing more than skull sweat, planning, and some extra patience. (Well, some of that patience was mine-I really wanted a fucking cigarette)

Goddamn I love this woman. And frozen burritos. I love those too.