A Coupon Binder

This is my coupon binder.  I have a fancy one with a zipper and a strap.  Many people keep a simple binder and put it inside of a bag.  Personalizing a binder and adjusting it to your tastes and needs are important.

Inside of my binder, I keep my weekly ads.  

I also have several dividers. Some of them are the cheap paper dividers, some are pocket dividers.  On each divider, I write a category. Meats, produce, dairy, grocery, snacks, beverages, frozen foods, paper goods, His self-care, Her self-care, pharmacy, cleaning and restaurant are the tabs that I have.

 These are the coupon pockets.  This is the baseball card size. You can also find a coupon assortment which has several sizes. These make your coupons easy to organize and find while you are shopping.

A coupon binder can be quite a bit of work.  Coupons should be clipped and sorted into the binder weekly and the expired coupons need to be removed from the binder weekly.  This extra work often has huge payoffs.  The beauty of having spent extra time organizing your coupons in such a fashion is that you can go down clearance and sales isles and maximize your savings.  Many, many times I have come across items that are not advertised and they match up with a high value coupon and make the item completely free.  Everything from toothpaste and razors, to cereal and pet flea spray, I have found for free in a clearance isle because of my organized coupon binder.

Here are a few tips for keeping one:
1. Don't get behind on your coupon clipping.  It can become overwhelming if you have 8 circulars to clip out.
2. You can store coupons back to back inside the pockets so that you can see coupons on the front and back side of each page.
3. If you have identical coupons with different expiration dates, you can keep them in the same pocket, just put the one that expires first in the front.
4. As you are in the store, flip through your sections and compare all of your coupons with the sales in those isles.
5. Copy your stores coupon and comp policy and keep it in the back of your binder.
6. Hole punch your comp. shopping list and keep it in the front of your binder.
7. Pull out any coupons that you know you want to use during your shopping trip and slip them into a front pocket or divider pocket.
8. Keep your shopping list in your binder.
9. You can find the coupon organizer pockets in the craft/scrap booking isle.
10.  Baseball card organizers work well to organize coupons, too.