As I mentioned earlier this week, one thing my wife and I have been doing is using coupons on groceries (and other things). My wife was gone the past couple weeks on a trip to Colombia, so I was stuck with coupon duty. It’s not the only time I’ve couponed; I did it once before when my wife was gone to California for a week. I’m not sure that week counts, though, as she had the entire list ready to go with all the coupons in a stack :P
Anyway so this week I went to Target twice and Cub once, and essentially made the list myself. One thing I realized is how hard it is to sift through a bunch of coupons, even if they are broken out by category (Home, Food, Pet, etc.). If there is something specific you are looking for, say hot dogs, you have to look through the whole stack to see if you have one. This simply is too inefficient for my liking!
I will admit that if you cut out and sorted all the coupons in the first place I’m sure it’s a lot easier than if you are looking through someone else’s collection and trying to find coupons for specific things. But this made me think about Extreme Couponing and how some people have thousands and thousands of coupons. How do they track it all?
The most difficult part of couponing for me was at the store. It was hard for me to keep track and make sure what I was buying matched what I had a coupon for. Also, sometimes they don’t have the right product or size so you can’t use a coupon, in which case you have to remove it from the stack. This may be inevitable, since you can’t predict what the store will or will not have (unless you set up a master schedule of everything they carried…). So what I want to focus on is cutting down time and maximizing savings BEFORE I get to the store.
So I have this idea of a coupon database that would look something like this:
Essentially when you cut out a coupon, you would enter all the information in the database and then file it away in a designated folder (maybe by month or week the coupon expires). When you need more of something, or see something on sale at a store, you could see if you have a coupon that matches by simply filtering on any of the categories. Also, by filing by expiration date it would be easy to mass dump the coupons you don’t use. Below I filter on just cereal.
What do you think? Should I try out this idea and see how it works for us or have I taken couponing too far?
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That will definitely tell you what you have as far as coupons but then you’ll need to have a way to find that coupon among all of your coupons… if you can solve that problem then you’ll be golden.
@Money Life and More Okay best idea I’ve had so far is having envelopes for each week a coupon expires i.e. coupons that expire 7/21 – 7/28 go in one envelope and so on….may have to limit it even more than that (maybe every 5 days or so). But I’m definitely considering pulling the trigger on this project. You get motivated to do things like this when you pay $1k in student loans a month ; )