Organizing/Clipping

I thought I would explain to you how I clip and organize my coupons! I have a way of doing it that I feel is fast, easy, and organized. I use to save each insert and not clip them until I needed a coupon out of them. I have found an easier way. I found that not clipping them would just leave me a messy pile of inserts later as more and more coupns were individually clipped from them.

Here is a video….and below are detailed instructions!

Here is my Sunday ritual:

1- Go to the Dollar Store and buy my newspapers. You would be surprised how much that extra .50 savings adds up every week with 10 newspapers, and let’s face it, we all love to save money!

2- Go home and pull out all of the inserts from each newspaper. There will be a Red Plum, Smart Source, and some weeks an extra insert or two such as General Mills. (Keep a look out for those). I then give the remaining part of the newspaper to my parents who have a parrot whom loves doing his “business” on them! I sometimes will keep some of it for my kiddos to do their art projects on them as well as carving pumpkins.

3- Start out with one type of insert. So let’s say Smart Source first. Take your pile of Smart Source and find the “center” or somewhere near it. Open it up and lay it in an open area (you will need a lot of space).

4-Now do this with the rest of the Smart Source pile. Make sure each insert is opened to the exact same page.

5- Take one page from each of the opened inserts (make sure they are the same pages) and staple the coupons on them. Make sure you staple every coupon front and back and staple over the PICTURE, NOT on the barcode.

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6- Now you cut out each of the stapled coupons. This will leave you with a stack of 10 of the same coupons stapled together. Continue to do this with every single page and then do the same with the Red Plum, but make sure you separate all of the Red Plum clipped coupon stacks from the Smart Source coupons. This is so that if I refer to something such as 9/12 RP you need to know where to find it and if you have all the coupons together you won’t know what coupons were from which insert. Next 2 steps will explain how I keep them separate.

7- So now you have all your inserts coupons clipped. I leave them stapled together. This makes it so much easier when at the store so I don’t lose random coupons. Then say you want to use 2 out of the 10 coupons you can just pull them off slowly, it’s really easy. Or say you want to use all 10, then you can just hand the stapled stack to the cashier and yes, they will accept them stapled together.

8- I buy freezer ziplock bags (from the dollar store) and label them with the date and what insert it is on the front. So I would put 9/12 Red Plum or 9/12 Smart Source. Put your stapled stacks in the bags and voila! When I refer to something saying 9/12 RP you know exactly where to find it!!

9-I have crates in my garage that I store the coupon filled ziplock bags in. On the front of the crate I put a label with the month. So that means in each crate you will have 4 weeks of coupon inserts so if there were two inserts in every paper that month then you will have 8 ziplock bags filled with coupons.

I have found that this is the easiest way to organize the coupons because you can easily find the coupons if you are using something like the “Grocery Game”.  It is more organized and a LOT less messy then having stacks of cut out inserts. If you’ve been doing it this way you know how messy those inserts get after clipping a few coupons out of them!

BTW- I pull out my FAVORITE coupons, the ones I know I am going to use or need to use and add those to my coupon binder so I can have them at the store.

Also, Check out my post here about how to make a coupon binder and lots of readers tips!