Couponing 101 - How to Organize Your Coupons

How to organize your coupons with a binder:

Supplies:
Binder
Dividers
Baseball Card Holders

Organizing your coupons is easy! There are several ways to do it, but I’m going to show you how I keep mine organized.               

It takes a little time every Sunday when I get my inserts, but it saves a lot of time when I’m preparing for a grocery trip. Having an organized binder is also awesome when I’m at the store and find a great deal that I can use a coupon on! I can open up my binder and quickly find the coupon that I need.



I use a pro platinum zip up binder from Wal-Mart. I divide up my baseball card inserts with the dividers in different categories.

Some people have a lot more categories than I do, but I found this was good for me.

Categories:
Breakfast- items such as cereal, pop-tarts, breakfast drinks, etc.
Boxed/Canned- items like pickles, hamburger helper, pasta sauce, snacks.
Baking- sugar, spices, oil.
Frozen- pizza, ice cream, frozen meals
Meats- Hotdogs, chili, lunch meat.
Condiments- Ketchup, salad dressing, mayo
Dairy- Eggs, milk, cheese, butter
Drinks- Tea, juice, water
Hygiene- lotion, shampoos, tooth brush, etc
Household- laundry soap, air fresheners, cleaning supplies
Baby- diapers, food, etc
Makeup

There is an accordion section in the front of the binder; I use this section to put the things that need to be sorted. If I printed some coupons and I'm in a hurry I will usually put them in that section.

Accordion Method:

The method I used when I first started couponing was the accordion method. I labeled each slot into categories such as food, hygiene, baby, etc. Then each week when I would get clip my coupons and organize them into the categories. Instead of just throwing them in the slots I would paperclip them first, so that when I looked at the coupon match-ups I could easily find the coupon I needed.

For example: If the deal was on John Frieda Shampoo, and the coupon was 6/12 SS, I could just look in my hygiene section, pull out the 6/12 stack and find the coupon.

This is a quick and easy way to organize your coupons, but it’s just easier for me to use a binder now