For the Beginner

If you're just starting out in the coupon world...take notes!
First...you MUST start purchasing the Sunday Paper. You can either get a weekly subscription or grab them from local apartment complexes or grocery stores. Most of them carry them throughout the week until they run out.

Clip EVERY coupon. Every single one, I MEAN IT! Except for coffee or pet food if you don't have a pet. Seriously. I am kicking myself this very moment for not saving a glucose monitor coupon which is now a moneymaker at CVS. Trust me, you'll kick yourself if you don't save them ALL!

You will soon realize that you are up to your eyeballs in coupons and will get overwhelmed if you don't have a good filing system. Use one of the two samples posted on 4/23, or come up with your own.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Three-Ring Binder System

You will feel like you are drowning in coupons if you don't have an organization system. So let me show you mine. I use a binder filled with baseball card holders. I then separate them into categories so I can easily flip through them.

My categories are:

Grocery
Baby
Meds/Vitamins
Cleanins Supplies
Personal Care
Paper Products
Store Coupons

And I organize them within each category into sub-categories.

When I have a trip planned I pull all the coupons to use and the list of what I am buying and put the in an accordian file like the one in the previous post.

File Folder System

Each green folder holds a different month. Then within each month, each week gets a different manila folder. I just file them away by the date that they came. Websites like The Grocery Game will tell you what week a coupon came out, or there are master lists like on Taylor Town where you can look up when you received a coupon.


Then I clip the coupons when I need them and put them in a little coupon organizer. Each section of that is labeled with a different store and each coupon goes into the appropriate slot.