Hasta La Ideas

Businesses are working diligently to get consumers to spend money during the downturn in the economy, and are trying to lure them in with coupons and deals. As a result, clipping coupons has definitely become worth the time and effort.

Instead of using a traditional coupon organizer that requires you to pull out all of your coupons to see them, I’ve started using brag books (small photo albums) to manage my coupon collection. In addition to giving me a better view of my stash, brag books also let you have two to three times more categories than a regular organizers.

If you’re interested in creating a coupon organizer out of a brag book, follow these suggestions:

1. Track your coupon use for a few weeks without an organizer to see what types of categories you might want to create in your brag book.
2. When you make categories, label them with printed sticky labels or handwritten on masking tape. As you use your book, you may decide to move pages or rename categories — and removable labels will make this a simple task.
3. When you enter coupons into the pages, put the oldest at the front and the newest in the back. This way you won’t have to worry about coupons expiring.

The following are suggestions for ways in which you might set up your shopping categories:

• Review a map of your grocery store, and set up categories based on the layout of your market.
• Create large categories based on meal types (breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts, snacks, parties, beverages, and condiments) and then subcategories within those types.
• Set up categories according to where you store items in your kitchen: pantry, refrigerator, deep freezer, etc.
• Use the good ol’ alphabetical system.

One coupon book might not fit all your needs, especially if you’re diligent about cutting coupons for non-food items. A second brag book is great for hardware, pharmacy, and other miscellaneous items.

How do you organize your coupons? Please tell us about your methods in the comments.