One of the “hard” decision that I had to make last week was if I want to bring my coupons on vacation with us or not. I knew I would be bring my netbook but did not have plans to go shopping at all. I have gotten WAY behind on organizing my coupons. Several people at church have been taking part in our “coupon blessing”, by bring coupons in to be used. Several weeks we have gotten full inserts as well as envelopes of already cut coupons and some inserts that have one or alot of coupons already cut but even more left in the insert. The whole insert are the easiest for me because I simply file them with the ones I purchase, the others I have been placing in a bag. One of the reason I was avoiding these was because I really dislike filing in my baseball card inserts, it seems too time consuming for me. I also have fallen about 2 months behind on going thur my insert and send some to my niece in Alaska and throwing out the rest. I knew that I would most likely have the time to work on the coupons but I was still debating on what to actually do with them, so by not bringing them I could continue to ignore the issues.
I finally came up with a solution so I brought ALL of the coupons with me. So far I have spend about 3 hours on them and Matt spent almost 2 helping me last night with the first stage of organization of them. Currently, I have completed stage 2 and now am ready to go back and catch up on the sorting out of expired coupons. So what is that solution? First any whole insert that I receive or buy will remain filed by date in my organizer. Next all partially cut insert, I am going to first cut out the coupons and then file by expiration date in a second organizer. The idea being that if I am looking for a coupon I will first find it in my whole inserts, check the expiration date and then locate any or all others by locating by expiration date. So currently, I have cut all coupon, sorted by month of expiration and then resorted first by like coupons together and then by expiration date in order. So I have coupons that expire on 7/29 before the ones that expire on 7/30. I also have these coupons sorted in separate tabs by month they expire. Coupons that expire in the month of July are also listed in red on southern savers so that gives me a additional place to start. I plan to spend at least an hour each of the remaining nights of vacation pulling out expired coupons. My goal is to have all the coupons in order prior to Monday so that I can start just maintaining the inserts and new coupons that come in each week. In reality this will mean an hour or so each Sunday to keep on top of these.
Now to the real reason I am so glad I brought my coupons with me. I realized today that we are using sunscreen about double my expectation, so I need to purchase additional sunscreen today. I decided to stop by CVS, use my ECBs and purchase some sunscreen. I was able to save 50% on sunscreen tonight at CVS!! I think this is awesome especially considering that prices at that CVS here were the same or less that that I purchased at home! I did use a 10 off $50 purchase and one $1 off sunscreen!
Couponing is FUN again!