I have said it before and I will continue to stress the importance of being organized with your coupons! If you have to spend hours sorting and clipping you are using valuable time that you could be spending with your family.Your time is worth more than you think! If couponing has become all consuming and you only have time to coupon shop and nothing else you will get burned out rather quickly! 

I am going to talk to you about two different methods that most couponers use for organization. The first is date filing. It looks something like this:

How it works: 

Every Sunday you get your local newspaper, for a discount delivery go here, Sunday Only Delivery. When you get the paper sort through it pulling out the coupon inserts which look like this:

 To check what inserts you should be looking for each week go to Sunday Coupon Preview

After you have pulled all your inserts out you file them in a weekly folder. You can use the above style, accordion with tabs, or regular school folders with pocket. The date you write on the tab or outside of the folder is the Sunday date that the coupon inserts were in the paper. 

Your work is done! That is until you are checking out the store deals on my site, for those of you who have been following me on here or been to my classes, I now have my own site that does the weekly coupon match up of sales and coupons! The site address is The Coupon Navigator . When you visit the site, you will find each store's ad with the match up of the Sunday coupons. At which time you would go to your container and pull out the appropriate coupons! 

If you are needing items that are not on sale, but you are wondering if you have a coupon go here to search our coupon database for any available coupons. If the coupon is in the Sunday paper it will be listed here by date, if it is available for print then you can print it right from the database!

This method will save you hours of cutting and organizing! 

There are some who prefer the binder method. Which looks something like this:

The way this works is each Sunday you take your inserts out, cut out the coupons and file them in categories. You chose which categories work for you, some do very broad and some do very defined, which ever works for you! 

I would like to make a suggestion if you do this method do not toss the inserts, keep them for future use, there will be times that these coupons will make you money to buy other items you want and now you have donations! 

Taking it one step further is to do something to organize your printed coupons. I personally use this: 

This helps me to keep my printed ones from being lost all over the house. I print a lot of coupons! 

Then taking it one step further, being organized for your store shopping trips. Using something like the accordion file, and instead of it being categories of merchandise it would be store names. I personally use a zipper pencil pouch for each store. I do my match ups, cut out the coupons and then keep these in the car with me so that when I am out and about I can make a quick run in the store. 

I know all of this sounds like a lot, and you do not have to do all of it, any part of it will help! You chose what you think will work best for you! 

What are you guys doing that you find works well? Share your ideas with us! 

Happy Organizing! 

Melissa