Thursday, September 6, 2012

How do I start Couponing?

This is the first question many people ask, and it simply starts by trying something small, or one item so you can see that it really does work.  The first thing I recommend is buying at least 2 newspapers every Sunday.  That way if you find a buy one get one free item, you can use both coupons on the sale and gain the maximum benefit.  I personally recommend buying a paper for everyone in your household, I have 6 in mine, but I focus on buying 10 newspapers.  After a year of using coupons, that seems to be the right amount of anything that I purchase (10) for my stockpile. 

Once you get your newspapers, there are many methods of organizing your coupons, and you will have to find the right one for you.  I've tried 3 or 4 ways throughout the year, and I've settled one one method for the time being, but I will tell you all of those that I have tried. 

1)  Keeping uncut inserts as a whole.  The inserts are dated on the binding like a book, so you can keep all of your inserts uncut and grouped together, and easily find them when looking for a coupon.  Then you only clip what you are planning on using and leaving the rest unclipped.   All of the coupon posts tell you which paper to go find the coupon on in.  And alot of websites have a coupon database, so if you are looking for a coupon you want to use, search it in the database, then go find it in your inserts and clip.

2)  You can clip all of your coupons and organize them in a binder.  I bought the baseball card pages with 9 slots, and had them all clipped and organized in my binder by category for about 8 months.  What I found is that the binder is bulky, and the coupons are hard to get clipped to the right size and to organize takes some time.  It made them easy to find, but for me very time consuming.

3)  Clip the coupons and store them in a filing system, or box.  Right now I am using 2 picture boxes I got at Michaels, I made my own dividers using post it labels.  I sort the pages out of my 10 papers, staple the coupon and slice them out with a paper cutter.  I take the pack of coupons and quickly shove them in the right category in my box.  This process is taking about an hour per insert right now, but I find that I can locate the coupons on the fly and grab them to take with me shopping.

The other way you can get coupons is to print them off of the internet.  I am finding coupons at Wamart.com, target.com, publix.com, coupons.com, redplum.com, smartsource.com and on facebook.  There are so many coupon sites out there, it is easy to find plenty of coupons to print. 

The key to quick couponing for busy people is to have some method of pulling  your coupons to prepare for your shopping trip.  I use walklet size photo albums that I picked up at Walmart for $1.  Once I've planned my trip to the store, I pull all the coupons and match ups I plan on using and file them in the photo album.  Then I throw it in my purse and go.  What I think is great about the photo album, is that I can flip through it as I shop to remind myself what I was looking for. (As we get older that brain dementia kicks in, LOL)

One of the future topics I will cover is how to combine coupons - Store and Manufacturer to get awesome savings on items.

So - to start couponing, get your papers and start printing!

Chris

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