Organizing Your Coupons

There are probably nearly just as many ways to organize coupons as there are hardcore coupon shoppers out there. The key is to experiment a bit until you find a way that works best for you and your household! After a year of coupon shopping, I've finally come up with a system that works well for me. I can't guarantee that it will work for you, but I will share in the hopes that it might help some of you who are just starting out or those who've been doing it a while and haven't yet felt like they found a good working system. Here's a little video I made illustrating my current system:

I highly recommend the use of a zippered binder for you to carry coupons to store. Some folks will use giant boxes (no I'm not kidding!) and cart these around while shopping - and this will allow for some really awesome deals when you spot stuff that's unadvertised or clearance deals but for me, personally, that is too much of a chore. I'd rather have stuff planned out ahead of time and have my coupons ready for use then lugging an oversized box around and then hunting around in it for minutes on end when shopping. Shopping with kids in tow is difficult enough as it is...especially when one is strapped to your chest while you're shopping.

My carry to store binder has a section where I can pop in receipts and copies of submitted rebate forms/receipts, a zippered section on the interior where I can put coupons that won't fit into the standard baseball card sized insert, a pair of scissors and a handheld calculator (because like the old Talking Barbie of my youth, I suck at math!). In the front of the 3 hole punched section, I have pockets for rebates which I have not yet qualified for so I can pop the receipts in when I purchase qualifying items, 3 pages of baseball card inserts for good winetags and FREE coupons that I can use wherever and then sections for each store I shop at (CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, Harris Teeter, Lowe's Foods, Kroger, Food Lion, Target and Misc). My CVS section also includes all 3 of my CVS ExtraCare cards and their corresponding coupons/ECBs.

At home, I have a file system for inserts and All You Magazine coupons. These are placed in file folders labelled with date of insert/magazine- inserts are also filed by type of insert (RedPlum, Smart Source or Proctor & Gamble). When Sundays roll around, I'll tear apart each of my inserts (I typically have 10-12 on hand) and separate them based on pages so that each like page will be filed with each like page. This makes it easier to clip many of the same when needed for shopping or trades.

I used to clip every single coupon from every single insert and then file them in an oversized baseball card collector book by category (ie bread, personal hygiene, snacks etc). This just got to be too much work. You'll learn as you go that there are many coupons in the inserts that you'll never use or need. Why bother clipping if you're not going to actually use these? I switched to filing the entire insert pages unclipped and it's saved me a lot of time and hassle.

Each day, I typically get A LOT of non-insert items from trades, coupon trains (these are fun things you can join as a trader on http://www.hotcouponworld.com/) writing manufacturers for coupons or collecting blinkies/peelies/tearpads from stores. I have a separate expandable file for these that are separated alphabetically by brand name. This makes it easy to just pop them into after I receive these and also easy to recover when trading or getting ready to shop.

You can do a search on the internet for methods of organization and find hundreds of ways to do so. You'll also find that you'll usually want to tweak a method once you adopt one. Don't throw your hands up in frustration if something's not working for you- change systems or tweak the one that you have until you find something that works well for you!