Coupon 101 - Part 2 - Getting organized

Some of you have seen my amazing, handy-dandy coupon binder (which I have learned to carry in the car with me at ALL times). For those of you who haven’t been as privileged, I’m including some pictures. I keep my coupons in an ordinary 3-ring binder with one of those clear covers that you can slide pages into (or in my case, slide coupons into). Inside the binder is a zippered pencil pouch and lots of baseball card protector pages.

The pencil pouch is mainly for restaurant coupons. If we’re having trouble deciding where to go out to eat I just whip out my coupons and we let them help us decide. I do have some restaurant coupons shoved in my front cover, mostly because they’re too big for the zipper pouch. There are also some random coupons in the front cover – free coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts (so I’ll remember to use it before it expires), 40% off coupons for Michaels and AC Moore (since they’re only good for a week I try to keep current ones in there).

Now for the baseball card protectors… I have all of my coupons categorized in the slots, which are labeled by my good ‘ol label maker (Yes, I am a bit OCD. Go ahead, poke fun I don’t mind!). The first page is for coupons that are specific to one store (some could be from the Sunday flyer, mailings, or that machine that prints them out at the checkout) – so there are slots for Target, Safeway, Harris Teeter, Rite Aid, Walgreen’s & CVS (Note that CVS takes ALL competitors coupons!). The next 2 pages are for personal items like toothpaste, deodorant, make-up, hair products… you get the picture. The other pages are for grocery items. I basically tried to mentally walk myself thru the grocery store so they would be in order or at least somewhat together in the way that you’d find them at the store (cereal on the same page as granola bars, yogurt on the same page as butter). I have had to go back thru my binder and get a bit more specific with my categories, but that’s only because I had so many coupons that some of the categories were just holding way too many coupons (“dental products” got broken down into “toothpaste” and “tooth brushes & floss”).

I do use the inside pocket of the binder for some random things that are too large to put anywhere else – Costco booklet of coupons, Wegmans booklet of coupons.

The only other thing to address here is where I get my coupons…. Well, that will be in my next post on this topic – probably Thursday because tomorrow I’ll be busy shopping super doubles at Harris Teeter :)