Thursday, July 23, 2009

Coupon Organization

Here's my current coupon organizing technique....I thought I would hate it, but I don't know how I ever lived with the plastic shoe box and envelope system (see bottom of this post)!



This is the binder....pretty pink, don't you think? It is zippered so none of my coupons fall out. It has a couple pockets on the front where I can store my coupon cutter (iSlice from PC), some pens and my trusty calculator. Inside the main compartment there is a 4 section expanding file built right in. I use that for large coupons, my receipts and ads for the week.



The first section is by store. I used self stick tabs for each store so I can flip right to it. Here I have my store cards (not credit cards, just MVP-type cards) and store specific rain checks or coupons. When I plan out my shopping for the week, I will take my coupons on items I know I will buy at that store and put them into the store's page. These pages are standard baseball card holder pages.....3 across and 3 down.



Here is an example of one page, for my cleaning sprays.

I use dividers to divide up sections like I did in my coupon box. The dividers were on clearance at Walmart and Walgreens for .25-.75/pack. The binder was my only real investment at clearance price of $9. The baseball card sheets were stolen from my son's Pokemon collection because he had a ton of unused sheets.

I used smaller self stick flags to further divide up sections (I didn't really need additional dividers - that would cost more and take up more room in the binder). For instance, the household section has flags: C, P, A, B, L, etc (cleaning, paper products, air fresheners, bags/wraps, laundry).

This is what I used to have. It worked for a while during my beginning stages of couponing and it was a technique I learned from MoneySavingMom's website here.

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