Grocery Coupons: Organizing Your Coupons

If you think about it, coupons are as good as money.  Coupons need not be strewn away carelessly like clutter.  You should have a plan for organizing your coupons or else they will mess up your room, your wallet or your mind.  

Here are a few tips from veteran coupon queens:

Find something with which to file your coupons neatly.

• Envelopes securely hold your coupons and can be conveniently labeled. Stack them in a box or magazine stand and they keep coupon clutter at bay.  But some find the act of opening and closing them too cumbersome.  

• Folders are easy to file but hold coupons not as securely as do envelopes.   A big advantage is the ease with which you can insert coupons into or take coupons out of them.  

• Index file boxes are also great for storing your coupons.  Small and neat, they are the unobtrusive fix to your coupon clutter problem.

• Expanding files or accordion folders are very efficient storage for coupons.  Secure, easy to access and neat—they are favorites of most.

• Expanding wallets are just perfect as you can bring them to the grocery.  Yet most shoppers still need to have a home coupon storage box aside from the expanding wallet. 

• Coupon organizer binders are still another innovative option especially for heavy coupon users.  A coupon organizer binder is usually a zippered binder armed with inside pockets for coupons.  You can stash many coupons, plus perhaps a scissor, pad of paper and calculator, too, then just zip the binder close.

Find a coupon filing method which works for you.

It’s not enough to have storage gadgets for your coupons.  You also need to have a method, system or strategy for filing your coupons.  The following suggestions are very efficient:

• Organize your coupons by expiry date.  It makes perfect sense that the ones which are about to expire should be the first you see and the easiest to extract from your files.

You can also take a step further by organizing coupons according to product categories like shampoo, pet food or canned goods.  But don’t forget to sort the coupons so that the about-to-expire ones are in front.

When you have a neat and methodical file for your coupons, your coupons will feel like a special collection instead of a pile of mess.  And you will then find it easier to locate them—and best of all, really use them.