Many of you may know I’m a big fan of The Grocery Game. I love it because it helps control one of the biggest budget busters: the food category! We’ve wrestled with this budget category many times and seen it fluctuate up and down depending on the month. The Grocery Game has helped us see big savings in our monthly spending!
Here’s a brief description from the Grocery Game website:
When you play, you’ll get a weekly list (called Teri’s List) of the lowest-priced products at your supermarket matched with manufacturers’ coupons and weekly specials — advertised and unadvertised. The Grocery Game does all the hard work and research, and presents it to you in a straightforward format.
Coupons are Essential to Grocery Savings
Unfortunately, as soon as you mention coupons, people lose interest. Usually it’s because of the work and time that can sometimes be involved.
In fact, in a pretty good article this past week; Wise Bread gives you 7 ways to cut your food bill without using coupons. I liked the article and included it in my round up post. Here’s what the author said:
I’ll be honest, I like to clip coupons, but it’s not for everybody. It takes time to clip, sort, file, match, shop, then repeat week after week.
I certainly agree in that it does take time to cut coupons and sometimes more than I want to spend. But, I still think coupons, which are an essential part of The Grocery Game, create big savings!
If you’re convinced, like us, you’ve probably tried a few coupon cliipping and filing techniques trying to find what works best and will save you the most time. I think there are a few good approaches you can use. And even if cutting coupons is intimidating and you’ve avoided doing it, read below before deciding to give up all that savings!
1. The filing of coupon inserts approach to clipping and organizing coupons (this is the approach we use)
Keep in mind, our approach is in conjunction with playing the grocery game. If you don’t play, cutting coupons is a lot more work. Why? The Grocery Game does the work for you in telling you which items are on sale and in which coupon insert to look for them (by date and type of insert).
We keep all of the coupon inserts from each Sunday paper (usually anywhere from 1–4) and file them away in file folders. Each of the monthly folders has the coupon inserts organized by week.
When the weekly grocery list is produced by The Grocery Game we select the items we want to buy from the list. We then proceed to finding the appropriate coupons in our coupon file. Again, the Grocery Game list tells us which insert to look for the coupons.
Does this approach work? Yes, it does. It’s helpful because we don’t have to clip all the coupons when we first receive them in the paper and then file them by category. You choose the items you want and only clip those coupons.
But sometimes the challenging part comes with looking through the inserts to find the coupons. And even though The Grocery Game tells us which insert to look in we sometimes make multiple passes through the pages to find the right one. The more coupons we have to search for, the longer it takes, especially if we can’t find one on the initial pass.
The coupon binder is another approach I’ve found in some recent research. We’re considering trying this out too to see which approach like better.
2. The coupon binder approach to clipping and organizing coupons
I came across a video from KingdomFirstMom.com, who has done a good job in creating her coupon binder! Check out the video where she provides a tour of the binder and tells us how it’s organized. Then, meet me on the other side for some more discussion.
As you can see from the video, rather than immediately filing the inserts away in a monthly file like we do, she first clips the coupons from the inserts and then files them by category in her binder. Yes, you have to look through the inserts and clip the coupons when you receive them, but the end result is having all of your like items together neatly organized.
By following this approach, you search for the coupon by category and item first and then narrow down your search by date. I think this approach may produce a more organized end result and might allow you to take advantage of more than one coupon per product from past ads that haven’t expired. There isn’t any way we could do this with our approach because it would require us to look through every coupon insert, for example, to find the toothpaste.
Final thoughts
I suppose you have to find the approach that works best for you. Obviously, we’re looking for the one that saves the most time! Personally, the more time I can save, the more time I can spend writing articles and doing other things I enjoy!
For now, we’ll keep on clipping, filling and playing The Grocery Game because we love the savings!
So, how about you, coupon clipper? Do you have a method that works well? Let us know in the comments what saves the most time and allows you to get the biggest savings!
Photo by sgrace’s photostream.
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