Coupon 101: Clipping Multiple Inserts

I thought this was a great week to explain what I do when I buy multiple papers and have multiple inserts to clip.  I have 2 Sunday papers delivered to my house each week.  On weeks that there are a lot of coupons in the paper, I’ll go out in buy 1 or 2 more papers.  Yesterday I bought two papers at Walgreens.  I had too many register rewards, so I just used 1 of those to pay for the papers.  I’d like to find a better way to get more inserts without all the paper waste.  We do have a Paper Gator at church, but I still have to convince Matt that jumping in there to find discarded inserts is a good idea :)

I use a coupon binder to organize my coupons once I’ve clipped them.  Head over here to find out more about that.  I also have a little accordion file to put my Internet coupons in.  They are organized alphabetically.

I’ve learned over the last few months that it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the coupons and trying to keep them organized.  I’ve started to cut back on the coupons that I clip right away.  I tend to clip the personal care and household coupons (for items that our family uses or ones we can donate).  I’ve started to clip less food coupons and leave them in the inserts until I need them.  I do this for two reasons.

1. It’s less work.  I found that I was clipping coupons that I never ended up using.  And it takes a lot of time to file them all.  I sometimes look forward to the weeks without coupons, because I can get caught up.
2. I like to carry most of my coupons into the store with me in case I find a great clearance item to match it with.  Most the time the clearance items I find are personal care items or houshold/cleaning items, not food.

So ideally I’d clip everything and have them perfectly organized, but then there is reality.  This is what I’ve found to work.

Clipping multiple inserts

Sort your inserts into piles

Take one stack of inserts, pull them apart, and make piles of the same page

Straighten out the stack of pages that are the same.  If I’m planning to clip them later I just staple the stack of like pages together.  When I’m ready to clip my coupons, I staple the stack of coupons together before cutting them out.  This keeps them in a nice neat stack and makes them easy to file.  When I need to use one in the store, I just pull the top on off.

I put all the mini stacks back into the “cover” page.  Then I label it with the date and what insert it is.  It works great to put it into a file folder labeled with the date and insert name.  You’ll be able to easily find the coupons later when you need them for a sale.  Many of the websites including mine refer to coupons be telling you where to find it.  Eg. SS 8/2/09 which means you’ll find it in the Smart Source from 8/2/09.

I hope that helps.