Organization

I've gotten several questions lately on how I stay motivated with all of my couponing. First off, the amount of money I'm saving is certainly the biggest factor in what keeps me going. I've found, though, that staying organized and on top of my game from week to week is really important as well. I thought I'd share my process with you so that you can see how I make sense of so many papers each week and manage to keep them in some semblance of order. We all know that the most frustrating thing in the world is knowing there's a coupon for something somewhere in all of our "stuff" but having no idea where it is.

Here's how I process my papers each week.

1. First, I separate the insert into individual pages and collate them by page. I usually do five papers each week so I tear each insert apart and stack them five at a time. This helps later when I'm clipping them because I clip all five at one time by stacking the pages. It doesn't always make for the prettiest coupons, but it gets the job done a lot faster than trying to do each page individually. This week I was behind by a week (NEVER A GOOD IDEA!!!) and so I had a HUGE stack of paper to get through. Here's the stack before I actually started to cut...

2. After I separate the coupons out by pages, then I lay out my index cards. I have one index card for each page in my coupon binders. As I cut the coupons I sort them by category. They fill my coffee table:

...and they also carry over onto the floor as well.

3. Clip, clip, clip. I only do this after the kids are in bed and while there's hopefully something relatively interesting on TV because--no doubt about it--this is BORING. It has to be done, though, so it's best to multitask while you're working on it.

4. As I clip, I sort by category and lay the coupons out on the index cards as I go through them. It ends up looking something like this:

Once everything is clipped and laying on the index cards, it only takes a second to flip through your binder and insert the coupons into their appropriate pages. I keep the index cards in order so that this part of the process goes really quickly. I hate all the flipping around in the book, so that's why I created this system to organize before I start trying to put things into the books.

If you stay on top of things each week, this really doesn't take all that long once you have your system down. Is it fun? Not really. Is it helpful and useful and worth every minute? Without a doubt!!