How to Organize Your Coupons

If you arrive to this website, you are probably an active user of coupons. You have probably collected between 5 to tens of coupons. The question is how to organize these coupons so that it’s easy to retrieve them at the right moment.You don’t really want to fall into a situation when you have plenty of coupons, but they expire because you forgot about them as they were hidden from your sight and your mind.

My best advice to you is: Keep things organized!

Organizing coupons is my bread and butter. I would not say that I am a discipline freak, but I try keeping everything organized. When it comes to money (yes, I consider coupons as earned money), I know it’s good to have a good system to handle all the “paperword” coming my way from coupon inserts, internet-ordered and printed coupons.

I’ve seen and used these 2 methods of organizing coupons.

#1: Clip & File

Invest several dollars and buy a big binder, card sleeves and tab dividers. Come up with a system of categories. These categories may be generic or specific – it’s up to you to decide which is to your liking.

I am using these categories:

- frozen
- refrigerated
- drinks
- canned products
- baking
- produce
- sweets
- salties
- baby products
- personal care
- oral care
- 1st aid & medicines
- household

I also heard people categorize their coupons by brand or even by product type.

Clip your coupons with scissors if the coupons come from a newspaper insert and them all into the sleeves in the appropriate category.

Add new coupons whenever you get them into the binder under the respective category.

Make sure you remove the coupons with the expired date. You want to be sure that your binder keeps only current coupons.

Did you make a move to reach out for scissors? If yes, then the clip & file method is definitely for you. Go ahead and range your binder!

The benefits of this method are evident: handy, easy to look up a coupon.

The main inconvenience is that it’s a load of work to keep your binder up-to-date.

#2: File All Inserts

Get a hanging file box and some hanging file folders. Once you get new inserts, mail-in coupons from online sites like Save.ca and Websaver.ca, put the coupons in one of the files and label the file with the date. My advice is to file the newest coupons toward the front – I will explain why a bit later.

With this method you will only clip those coupons that you plan on using.

What is also important, you don’t have to look for expired coupons and remove them. Just throw the inserts or ordered coupons after 3-4 months.

I am a big fan of this method. It’s main inconvenience is that my coupons are not very portable – the box is sometimes very heavy to move around :)

Within this method I also have a small binder for any random coupons I find at stores or print out from the Internet.

If you have any other methods that work for you, share in the comments to this post!