Maintaining an organized coupon binder is one of the easiest steps that you can take to help your shopping trips go smoothly, prevent you from missing deals, and help you put together a shopping list faster!
Start by separating your coupons into 5 main categories:
- Food
- Beauty and Personal Care (razors, soap, lotions, deodorant, etc)
- Cleaning Supplies
- Pet
- Healthcare and Feminine Hygiene
If you want to break it down even further you can also add subcategories:
- Food
– Frozen
– Snacks
– Pantry
– Canned
– Beverages - Beauty and Personal Care
– Makeup
– Men’s Soaps and Razors
– Women’s Soaps and Razors
– Baby - Cleaning & Household Supplies
– Cleaning Supplies
– Paper Products
– Laundry - Pet
– Dog
– Cat - Healthcare and Feminine Hygiene
– Medicine
– Vision
– Pads, Liners, Tampons
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How to Organize Coupons in a Binder
You can place the clipped coupons into trading card or business card sleeves. I use a mix of trading and business card sleeve pages since some coupons are strangely shaped and they won’t all fit into the same size slot. Use binder dividers to separate each coupon category and make it easy to flip through to the desired coupon.
Alternatively, you can use an individual pouch for each category and then just keep the coupons loose in each pouch instead of having to slowly insert each one into a plastic card sleeve. It can be tedious to maintain a binder with plastic sleeves as you constantly have to remove expired coupons which in turn create empty spaces scattered randomly throughout the binder. I prefer the pouch method because the random blank spaces in binders that inevitably appear after picking through for expired coupons are annoying to fill back up.
I keep things extremely simple and use 5 small pouches for my coupons. I have 4 pouches that I keep in a business manila purse:
- Beauty/Personal Care
- Food
- Cleaning
- Medicine
- Pet/Miscellaneous
Watch the video below to see my clipping and sorting process in action:
I bought my pouches from Dollar Tree or you can also get them online for super cheap. I will remove any expired coupons from my pouch sorting system whenever I clip and organize new coupon inserts. These small coupon pouches are super easy to slip into a briefcase-style purse or messenger bag. I vastly prefer being able to store and carry my coupons around in a sleek purse instead of carrying a clunky 3 ring binder under my arm. Check out your local thrift stores, these laptop/business bags are constantly donated. I snagged mine at a Goodwill Outlet for less than $3! This bag setup also lets me easily carry any unclipped inserts that I haven’t dealt with as well as my handy dandy Slice tool for a last-minute clip if I find a deal in-store that wasn’t planned in advance.
How to Organize Coupons Before a Shopping Trip
It’s important to know which coupons you’ll need to hand the cashier when it comes time to check out and having these sorted ahead of time and easily accessible will help your shopping trip go smoothly. I use a small zip-up credit card wallet to organize my coupons for specific shopping trips. This is actually meant to hold dozens of credit cards, but it just happens to be the perfect size for coupons! You can easily flip through and grab the ones you need without rifling through a giant binder.
Having your coupons separated into sections for each store makes it a breeze to check out. Sort them ahead of time and just hand the section to the cashier without having to worry if you have them all or if you’ve forgotten any. Getting flustered at the register because you feel rushed or there’s a long line and forgetting a coupon or two is the worst!
What Should Be In Your Couponing Bag?
Here are the most useful things to carry along while going on a couponing haul:
- Scissors or Slice tool
- Notepad
- Pen
- Calculator
(or just use your phone) - Your store’s coupon policy
(or again use your phone)
Keep things even easier by going digital! There’s a vast selection of couponing apps where you can get deals without clipping a single paper coupon. Check out my top 10 apps for extreme couponing here!