Coupons

You all know, I love a sweet deal. I love to get the most for my money. All my life, I thought I understood coupons. I would clip coupons here and there and save a buck or two. Yeah! Well, then I got married and realized the brand names, even with a coupon, were more than the store brands. I'm not much of a "brand snob" (well, I am on some items) so I just bought all the off-name brands and I saved money. I thought I was doing so well. Until last year....

Our ward held a Super Saturday activity were they brought someone from Grocery Smarts. I actually missed the activity because it was deer hunting weekend and I was with family. I was lucky enough to have a friend show me how it worked. Then, several months later, I had another friend invite me over to her house where one of her friends explained Grocery Smarts. Basically, it's a website that lists all the stores and deals for the week. Then they actually find coupons (some from the newspaper and some from Internet sites) that go with those deals to make them even sweeter deals. I'm personally amazed someone does this work each week. I know I would not want to do it. I'm glad I don't have to do all the leg work; I just have to open their website each week.
The other key thing with their coupon concept is to buy multiple newspapers, thus increasing your coupon supply and your surplus of items. I, personally, only get one newspaper and my mom buys the paper and then brings me the coupons. There are certain times where I wish I had more coupons, but I get by with what I have. I now buy brand names and get them cheaper than the off-brand names. I feel like I have a better food storage supply and it's nice to have lots of certain ideas that I don't have to buy all the time. I used to feel like I went without a few items that I liked, but knew I didn't need. Now I buy some of those items when they are cheap.
Yes, I occasionally buy things that I probably don't need, but I've learned what those items are and don't buy them anymore. It's all a learning experience that takes time. I'm still learning.

This year, I'm changing some things up to see if it will help me use more of my coupons. The Grocery Smarts program tells you to get the coupons from the newspaper, write the date on them and then file them away without looking at them so you aren't tempted to use coupons before the best sale time. Well, I did that and I know all too well that I threw away lots of good coupons. Not everything in the coupons will go on sale. I then started to look through the coupons and clip some things I knew I would use and store them in a little coupon holder that I carried around in my purse. I still would forget to use them. I still would be at the store and buy something at full price when I knew I had a coupon at home. I still would search through all my files looking for a certain coupon that I knew I had and that would just take time and often times it would be expired.
About 6 or so months ago, I started following Hip2save. I love this website! She posts about more savings than just groceries and I think I've saved more money through her than Grocery Smarts. She has taught me lots about coupons and ways to save money. I don't know how she manages to keep up with all the deals as well as being a mom to 3 small children.
Anyway, I'm now incorporating her way of organizing coupons. The coupon binder! Her website even has "Follow Me Mondays" where she video tapes her doing certain things to help save you money. One of these videos was making a coupon binder. I've been debating and debating trying this and I'm finally doing it! I will now have no idea when certain coupons were in the newspaper like I did with Grocery Smarts, but will now have things "categorized" so I will just look them up by category instead.
It took me about 2 days, but I did it! I'm so excited to try this new method this year.
Here's just a small pile of the coupons I've been setting aside over the holidays. Now to cut out what I want. Side note: I still keep all all the unclipped coupons, just in case.
Some of them cut out and kind of organized.
I had to buy these at the store. Baseball card holders and tab dividers (I later returned these dividers and bought a different kind).
My old binder/coupon filing system. It was just a big, heavy binder full of TONS of sheet protectors.
Here's my new binder. It's small and looks so organized!
I only used 16 tab dividers and 20 baseball card holder pages, but I'm sure this will grow. It feels so good to have this done. Now the hard part will be maintaining it and seeing if it will work any better for me.
Real quick, I must make a shout out for another website that I just started following. She is very similar to Hip2Save, but it's done by a friend of mine. Her site is The Krazy Coupon Lady. It does take time to look at all these sites and look through all the coupons, but I consider it my job to spend the least amount of money as possible since I'm not working at a paying job. So if you see me in the store with my binder, don't laugh.....I'm working!