How to Create and Organize a Coupon Binder

Make a binder to organize all the coupons you clip.

Using coupons can save you hundreds of dollars per year on items you would have been buying for your household anyway. However, clipping coupons is not very helpful if you don't have them organized and easy to find and use when you need them. One of the best ways to organize your coupons is to create a binder with the coupons filed in clear plastic sheets designed to hold baseball cards. That way, you can see your coupons in each category at a glace.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Three-ring binder, at least two inches thick
• 60 plastic baseball card organizing sheets, three-hole punched
• 30 dividers
• Zippered pencil pouch with holes to fit in three-ring binder
• Scissors
• Pens
• Small note pad
• Small calculator
• Permanent marker

1. Put your dividers in the three-ring binder.

2. Label the divider tabs with the categories you will use to sort your coupons. There are two main ways to organize a coupon binder: alphabetically and by category. If you are organizing alphabetically, label the first divider with "#" for products that start with a number and the other dividers with the letters of the alphabet. If you are organizing by category, label dividers with general categories of products. Ideas include dairy, condiments, meat, refrigerated, frozen, canned, pasta, breakfast, beverages, miscellaneous foods, cleaning, hair, body, shaving, laundry, makeup, oral hygiene, medicine and miscellaneous household.

3. Put two baseball card organizer pages behind each divider.

4. Clip your coupons and put each coupon in a separate slot in the baseball card organizer page in the correct section. If you have two or more identical coupons, put those on top of each other in the same slot. If a coupon is too large to fit in a slot, fold it so you can see the product name.

5. Put the scissors, pens, small note pads and calculator in the zippered pencil pouch. Put this in the front of the binder so all of the items you need are always at hand. Use the pen, note pad and calculator to calculate prices of items and make your grocery list while you are looking at a store's ad.

6. Write your name and phone number on the inside cover of the binder with permanent marker. That way, if you lose it, someone will know who to call to return it.

7. Go through your coupon binder every week or two and pull out all of the expired coupons.

Tips & Warnings

• Use a binder with a zippered fabric cover to make it easier to carry and decrease the chances of losing any coupons if you drop it.

• If you don't like to fold coupons, you can get some plastic pages with larger pockets for photos and put a baseball card page and a photo page behind each divider. Any coupons that won't fit into the baseball card page can go into the photo page in the same section.

References

• Hot Coupon World; How to Organize Your Coupons: The Coupon Binder Method; April 2011