Organization is the Key

Have you seen a sale, but you have no clue if you have a coupon to make the final price even less? Have you gone shopping and found out a few days later you had a coupon for that item?  This has happened to me quite a bit and has caused much frustration.

There is a solution to it the problem.  Organization.  Time is not always our friend so you might be laughing at the word organization.  Organization does not have to be cutting and filing your coupons. That is one obvious way to get organized.  Let's explore this option for a minute after clipping your coupons you can file them away in a coupon box.  Or another way that is becoming more and more popular is a coupon binder.  Using baseball card sheets and tabbed dividers your coupons would be easier to find this way.

Clipping and filing the coupons are not high on your list, but you still want to save.  Here are two other ways I have tried to organized my coupons and reasons why it worked or didn't for me.

Make three piles for your coupon inserts.  Pile 1 will be Red Plum.  Pile 2 Smart Source.  Pile 3 P&G, which you will only get once a month.  Within each pile sort the inserts by date, the dates of the inserts are on the outer spine.  The reason for sorting the inserts this way is to help you find your inserts quicker when on a couponing website that mentions a deal.  Most couponing websites that discuss actual deals list the insert name and date.  This will help cut down on flipping through all of your inserts to see if you have the paper towel coupon you are looking for.  For me this didn't work.  Here's why I would never remember if I used a coupon and would flip to where it should be and find I used it already.  Also since coupons are regional I would be disappointed when I would look for a certain coupon to find I didn't receive it in my insert.

So, organizing the inserts by date didn't exactly work for me, but then I revised this idea some.  On a Saturday or Sunday when I would get my coupon inserts I would flip through the inserts, write down on a sticky note the coupon names that are inside and stick it to the cover.  I could quickly glance at the insert covers to see if I have a coupon for things we might be running low on.  When I would take a coupon from the insert I would just cross it off the list.

When I have inserts that are piling up, I will try and use the sticky notes, but to be honest sometimes that doesn't even happen.  Ultimately I really enjoy my coupon binder.  I never would have thought I would have a binder just for coupons, but it's what works best for me.