No matter what system you have in place, organizing your coupons is necessary to maximize your savings. When I started out couponing I couponed off and on for years. My coupons were kept in an envelope because I only kept a few each week out of my Sunday paper. Coupons didn’t seem to make a huge difference in my savings during a shopping trip for many reasons which included:
- I was brand loyal, unwilling to try a new brand because I was unsure of the quality and how it would perform
- Coupons for the products that I purchased were sporadic and only came out in the paper every three to four months.
- I only purchased one Sunday newspaper every week which gave me one coupon to use for the entire three or four months.
- Because I normally only had one coupon I couldn’t wait for a sale and get the best price with the combination of the sale and the coupon
Once I determined that I needed more than one coupon for a particular product to make a difference in my savings I started asking relatives for their coupons which netted me about three more copies of the Sunday paper each week. This was great, now I had multiples of coupons that I used. I quickly discovered that I was having a hard time keeping up with these coupons and forgetting what I had. I purchased a little coupon organizer about the size of a wallet with six or seven separate compartments which helped for about two months. As I added more and more coupons to my little organizer it became apparent that the little organizer wasn’t working.
Next I decided to leave the coupons in their original inserts and just cut out what I needed as I shopped. This proved to be a terrible mistake for me. I spent a lot of time checking a database to determine what insert the coupon was in, locating the insert, and then cutting the coupon out. In using this system I found myself missing a lot of coupons that I could have used while grocery shopping.
In addition to obtaining more inserts for the coupons each week, I also branched out and started keeping more coupons for products that I didn’t normally purchase, and began trying new brands. Keeping more coupons resulted in one big chaotic mess.
I moved my coupons to an old Huggies baby wipes container and divided the sections of my coupons with index cards turned on their side. This actually worked for more than a year. The baby wipes container would have probably still worked, but I wanted to upgrade my system. I waited for more than a year before I purchased a zippered binder and baseball card sleeves which is my current system. Looking back, I think I waited for this length of time because I wanted to be certain that it would be a system that I would stick with since switching to the baseball card sleeves for my coupons was a big investment.
I went through several systems before arriving at one that I felt comfortable with. Every persons needs are different which will cause your coupon organization system to be different. What works for one person may not work for another. When starting a new coupon system, organizing the coupons and the system actually takes a few hours to start and then takes routine maintenance each week. The routine maintenance is easy once the system is in place; clip coupons, put these into the binder, and throw away the expired coupons.