Tips, Hints and other Bits for Beginners

The best savings are acquired by:

Store Sale
+Manufacturer coupons
+Store coupon
+Store promo
+CAT/RR/+UP
= GREAT SAVINGS!

Keep that in mind, as it will maximize your savings week by week.

If you haven’t read the post about what to do first, check it out!

After you begin saving your inserts, you have many options as to how to go about organizing them. A friend of mine, who began couponing at the same time, have very different methods, and they work for us!

TJ’s method: leaving inserts intact, organized by date and insert

This is a small file folder I picked up at Freddy’s for about $5 but any file box will work!

Pros:

• When matching sales I can pull the insert I need out
•  No late-night/early-Sunday coupon clipping, clip when and what you need!
• Very tidy

Cons:

• Not the easiest to tote around (I don’t!) so you may miss out on clearance deals!
• You don’t necessarily know which coupons you have
• Takes up more space, as there are plenty of extra insert pages you won’t use

I often have various miscellaneous coupons I’ve received from companies, friends, family and ones I buy from a clipping service. For those, I use ……..

J’s method

A zipper binder with baseball card pages for clipped coupons. 

Pros:

• You can organize by product, coupon value or any way that works for you!
• Take with you anywhere ::think:: Target endcap clearance!
• You know which and how many coupons you have

Cons:

• You may feel overwhelmed with the constant clipping 😦
• When doing matchups (via databases), you may not know which insert it’s from
• You need different size card holder pages, all coupons are different!

Disclaimer: If I am too lazy to organize my clipped coupons, I do the envelope method: put them in an envelope until later!

The KEY to good organization is to know what works for YOU! There are other methods out there but these are the two that work for me!