So, I haven’t been doing a great job remembering to post your Question of the Day! Sorry guys! I am definitely going to have to work on that.
Hi Melea,
Do you organize your coupons by expiration date and, if so, how?
Lori
I do not organize my coupons by expiration date. This is why. Each week when you get your Sunday Coupon Inserts, you would cut and organize your coupons by expiration date. Then, the next Sunday, you would essentially have to move around all of the coupons you perfectly organized the week before.
Each week’s coupons have a huge range of expiration dates. So, it would definitely be time consuming to do it that way.
What I do is organize my coupons by category. Breads, Canned, Meat, Dairy and so forth. I fold the coupons so I can see the picture on the front of the baseball card page and the expiration date on the back. Then, at the beginning of the month, I will go through and take an extra 20 minutes and pull out all of the expired coupons.
At the end of the month, I will take a quick look and see if there are any “Trial Items” I can buy with my coupons and get them for free. If I haven’t used them at that point, they will just get thrown away. So, trying to find a trial item that works with the coupon is a great way to stock up for usually free. **However, you can only buy a trial item if the coupon does not exclude it.
Hope that helps!
(For all of you coming to the coupon conference, I will be showing this in detail)
Amy
Ok So I had to comment on this because when i started organizing my coupons, I wondered how to keep track of the expiration dates. So I decided to color code my coupons so I made a blank spreadsheet on my computer and I put each month and I have 12 different colors then I put a small dot on each coupon so i know the month they expire. So then the beginning of march i will go through and take out all the pink dots. Because pink is Feb. So I do this so i can put coupons on both sides of my baseball card inserts. If I put only 1 coupon in each pocket i surely wouldn't have enough room in my book. I hope this helps someone.
Amy
Ok So I had to comment on this because when i started organizing my coupons, I wondered how to keep track of the expiration dates. So I decided to color code my coupons so I made a blank spreadsheet on my computer and I put each month and I have 12 different colors then I put a small dot on each coupon so i know the month they expire. So then the beginning of march i will go through and take out all the pink dots. Because pink is Feb. So I do this so i can put coupons on both sides of my baseball card inserts. If I put only 1 coupon in each pocket i surely wouldn't have enough room in my book. I hope this helps someone.