Mary graduated from the University of Northern Iowa with a BA in Psychology. She lives in Manchester, Iowa, with three of her eight children. Mary currently writes a weekly couponing column for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, where she is touted as the "Tri-State Area's Coupon Queen." She holds couponing and writing workshops for NICC and Hawkeye, area community colleges, writing workshops at the River Lights bookstore in Dubuque and does public speaking for women's groups, libraries and writing conferences. In addition to her career as a couponer, Mary has worked as a freelance writer for 20 years and has had over 300 articles and essays about parenting, saving money, and homeschooling published in newspapers and magazines such as Home Education, The Sun, Backwoods Home, Back Home, The Writer, Woman's World and the online magazine LiteraryMama.com. Her essays have been featured in seventeen anthologies, including five Chicken Soup books. An essay of hers was featured in the January/February issue of Poet & Writer's magazine.