The following is a guest post brought to you by Lina Zussino of GroceryAlerts.ca!  Enjoy and happy coupon clipping!

My husband and I love to use coupons to save money on purchases. We use coupons when we go golfing together, going grocery shopping, and dining at nice restaurants. The availability of many coupon websites and great blogs has given many Canadians the ability to save a little extra money using coupons. Some people think that couponing is a waste of time and too much effort but we enjoy it and see it as a way to save our after-tax income to take an extended holiday to Hawaii this summer to making extra payments on our mortgage. I wanted to show how we track and store coupons. It really can become a fun challenge with your spouse to see how much you can each save.

Acquiring and Storing

It is important to acquire as many coupons as possible to make it easy in the future to use them or to give them to friends. What we do is if we see a new printable coupon from the Internet we print it off as soon as possible. Additionally, we also clip coupons that are stored at the aisle level and in magazines.

Whenever we see coupons, we clip them right away and put them in the folder just in case we need them. Our rule for clipping is to clip if the product is something we would use like toothpaste. If the item is something like dog food (we have no dogs) we will not clip any coupon for that item.

Getting Organized

Envelope system

This is fairly popular system for some people. They write the category on the front of the coupon (i.e. “Pets”, “Dairy”, “Laundry”), and stuff each envelope with the coupons that belong to that category. It is a fairly inexpensive system. One of the problems with this is finding the coupons later could be a hassle. Additionally, many coupons are printable (like the ones from Grocery Alerts) that are fairly large and when you fold them up it is difficult to find at the store. Thumbing through a stack of coupons is a waste of effort and reduces the benefit of coupon clipping.

Couponizer system

My husband and I recently received this in the mail as a giveaway product. It was great. Inside are small slots clearly labelled that keeps you organized.

The Couponizer system contains a wire-bound booklet, a guide to smart savings, a sorting mat for all your clippings, a shopping list, a monthly savings record, scissors and a carrying bag. It is available at TheCouponizer.com. We have only used it for a week but like most of the tools included.

Coupon Binder

I have seen many bloggers swear by this method. It is just a photo album with clear pockets (for storing baseball cards) and a binder that allows you to move pages around as you wish. For me, it would take too much time to organize with this method. It depends on how many coupons you would use.

My advice, is to start with the envelope system first and if it doesn’t work try the other two.

Thumbing through reams of coupons is a giant waste of time and drastically reduces the benefits of a coupon clipping time investment. Couponing is clearly worth it in our case. The relatively small time investment it adds to our shopping is well worth the real cash savings we realize from our system.

Do you have any coupon storing strategies or tips to share?

  The author is Lina Zussino, Co-founder of Grocery Alerts Canada, home of grocery deals and money saving coupons. She is becoming a mortgage broker and enjoys teaching group fitness and saving money in beautiful Victoria, BC with her husband Steven.