Save Some Bacon

I'm a really list-oriented and label/organizational person by nature, so I want to preface this post by stating here and now that this could come off as a pretty crazy and overthought method of coupon filing. This is essentially couponing at its most basic -- I get six newspapers every week (between the different households in our family) and I am in desperate need of an easy way to keep a handle on them all.

I do share my couponing "empire" with everyone, I give away free items at least a few times a week and am constantly throwing spare coupons at my parents and Cory's family. I also donate a good deal of things to non-profs like Hospice, the local foster group home, and Metropolitan Ministries (especially at big holidays). Spread the wealth, kid, spread the wealth.

I save the FULL insert every weekend and don't bother wasting time clipping individual coupons. I just don't have the time -- clipping for the weekly shopping already takes forever, I can't imagine what it'd be like to have to do that with 6 of each insert. Yuck.

And anyways, it's pretty typical that the inserts have NOTHING in them for that week's store ads. Most people clip what they'd normally purchase, then throw the rest of the pages away. What a waste! 

If you knew there was a $20 bill sitting in the middle of your newspaper, would you throw it away?

So it's true I wouldn't normally have purchased the Birds Eye Voila meal, I've never tried it and it's always been too expensive...at $5 a bag, what the hell's a $1 off coupon going to do for me?

So let's imagine that, three weeks after that coupon's published, Publix has a BOGO (buy one get one) sale on Birds Eye Voila. For $5, you get two bags. There's also a Publix store coupon (which you can use at the same time -- manufacturer and store coupons may be "stacked") for $1 off of one bag.

The math:

Birds Eye Voila BOGO $5

Use two manufacturer (insert) coupons for $1 one bag = -$2

Use two store coupons (from Publix) for $1 one bag = -$2

Now you're getting two bags of Birds Eye Voila for $1.

Good deal, dude.

Just a matter of keeping an eye on the ads and using coupons that were published a few weeks back.

So I keep the inserts in this case that I can lug to my car for "just in case" shopping trips. I used to keep them in a zippered binder before I got overrun with coupon inserts, but this one just works better for the massive amounts of inserts I have. I'm sure a coupon supply of just two weekly inserts is more than comfortable within a Trapper Keeper (for the throwback old schoolers) or a few folders thrown on your kitchen counter.

My case flips open so I can use the top to keep my pens and scissors at hand, and the whole thing houses the file folders that I mark with appropriate dates and tuck in with their appropriate week's inserts.

I keep about three months of inserts rotating in there. It's just not worth keeping anything older since a majority of the coupons in the insert are expired. I just recently cleared my old ones out -- we're now in October, and the June ones were almost completely worthless. I might have found five or six coupons in the whole month worth of inserts that were still current.

Anyways, so the inserts are inserted into their dated folders in full booklets. 

If you're operating on a smaller scale with a smaller number of inserts, it's just as easy to write the date in black Sharpie on the outside cover of each insert booklet, then throw them all into a big envelope to shove into the closet when you're not working on them. If you go bigger scale, like my six weekly pubs, folders are a much easier way to keep them organized.

Online coupon databases keep their lists organized by date, so you'll need to keep your inserts organized the same way. That's where the Sharpie pen writing on the outside cover comes in handy. If you're in a pinch, by the way, the

date is also printed along the spine of the publication.

Use HCW's Coupon Database or Coupon Mom's Coupon Organizer to look up the Qs and their dated insert.

Each has their own benefits. I like the HCW one for searching everything that has ever been published with a discount for these products. As long as it's not a coupon that came out THAT DAY, you can pretty much find every coupon in publication here in this database. It goes down to every single wine tag, peelie, and coupon printed on the inside of your toilet paper wrapper. Everything.

If it's Sunday morning, though, and you're trying to figure out a few last minute deals, take a look at Coupon Mom's database. It's updated to reflect that day's coupons at midnight (as are, by the way, the store sales lists and their corresponding coupon matchups). 

So having them filed by date makes it super easy to find the correct one when the database says your Colgate toothbrush coupon is $1/1, and you can find it in the 9/28 SS. That is, it's for $1 off of one toothbrush and is in the September 28th SmartSource insert. Grab your scissors.

So the next question is how to store all the loose coupons. You not only have to consider the ones you find in blinkies, in the mail, on tearpads at the gas station, whatever...you also have to have a place to organize the coupons you've clipped for other sales that you weren't able to use. Refiles.

My thing is accordion files. Some people use shoe boxes, some people use baseball card sheets they can organize by category or alphabet.

I have an accordion file for food, one for non-food. Both live in the big case, which lives in the trunk of the minivan. 

Straight stylin'.

So I have these two files, each of them categorized, essentially, by what was at the top of my head on the day I decided to organize these puppies. Paper products, pet items, cosmetics, drinks, refrigerated, cereals, other, etc. I try to go through them every month or so to get rid of the expires. They move pretty quick, but I do sometimes get a little carried away with IPs (internet printables) for products I purchase fairly regularly. They take up a lot of room since the computer paper is a lot thicker than the stuff used for weekly inserts.

If you get really inspired, and sometimes the mood does hit, you can grab the data from one or the other of the sites and make yourself a nice little spreadsheet. You know the clearance shelves on the endcaps at Target, Walmart, Walgreens? Where they throw the makeup on $2 clearance? If you had a list of recent coupons (copied straight from the internet database, no real work) showing a Revlon Q for $2 off any product, wouldn't you jump on the chance to score a free lipgloss? I keep a fairly recent list of the last few months of coupons on my PDA/phone so I can look it up pretty easily. I'm a techie geek, so it's probably not for everyone...but definitely has scored me a few freebies that I would have passed up otherwise.

I actually have a smaller accordion folder that lives in my purse, too. It's organized by store, and I use it to file the shopping lists and corresponding coupons for that day/week. Since this stays in my purse all the time, I also have slots in there for other places, like stores I'd go to on the fly (Bed Bath & Beyond, Chuck E. Cheese, Best Buy) or restaurants (Beef's, fast food, whatever).

It seems like a lot of work, it's really not. I do tend to go overboard on organization -- you should see my computer, I have files buried so deep it requires a map. It's not at all necessary, though. You can just as easily grab a big envelope and just keep all your stuff in it. Boat floating and all that...

The problem with organizing all these damn coupons is that these stupid inserts really take up a lot of room. Once you start up with things and realize how much you can save, you'll be greedy for multiple issues of the inserts every weekend. Keeping them all organized is ESSENTIAL to doing this kind of shopping, so however you choose to keep them, make sure it's not going to take you a year to find what you're looking for.