De-Clutter Your Home: Week Five (Coupons)

Do you use coupons? If so, you are probably aware of how fast they can really start to pile up. One day you have 20 coupons, the next day you have 100 and the next you have 200!

If you let those wonderful pieces of paper sit around for too long, they will become a huge cluttered mess. The clutter will be an annoyance but perhaps the biggest annoyance of all will be the fact that you may miss out some really great deals because you can’t find the coupons that you need.

Although I really do love using coupons, I admit they are a huge pain most of the time. The finding, the clipping, the sorting, the purging – it’s a lot of work.

In order to make things run smoothly in regards to my coupon collection, I need to continuously keep up with the huge amount of coupons that I seem to collect in any given week.

So – that brings me to this week’s De-Clutter Your Home challenge.

It’s time to de-clutter your coupons!

Decide if your current coupon organization system is working for you.
If your system isn’t working, it’s time to try a new one. I always recommend organizing your coupons in a coupon binder, since that’s the fastest way to flip through your coupons, but if you don’t feel comfortable with something quite so large, there are many other ways to organize your coupons.

If your current coupon organization system is still working well for you, then all you need to do is a bit of cleaning up.

Get rid of coupons that are useless to you.
This is something that I just started doing and believe me when I say that it is so much easier to stay on top of my coupons when I allow myself to get rid of the coupons I see no use for.

I keep a lot of coupons that I find – even coupons for products that my family doesn’t use – but only if they are high-value coupons that I think will yield me free products when a great sale comes along.

I suggest getting rid of coupons that, even if there is a phenomenal sale, the item would still likely cost money (items being ones that you do not use).

For example, just yesterday I was going through my coupons that I’d received in the mail the day before and I saw a coupon for $0.75 off any Depends product. I’m pretty sure that these items cost around $15 per package in store, and I have seen them as low as $5.00 on clearance. There is absolutely no way I could ever find a package of Depends for $0.75, which would mean I would never get them for free. Since no one in my family uses Depends, paying any amount of money for them just doesn’t make much sense.

So, I threw out the coupons, and guess what – the world didn’t end!

It’s okay to get rid of coupons that you have no use for and it is something I recommend to anyone who may be overwhelmed with their coupon collection.

Keep track of coupons that are about to expire.
There’s nothing more frustrating than finding an expired coupon in your organizer when you are at the store and about to buy something.

Make sure that you are keeping track of the expiration dates printed on your coupons.

Go through all of the coupons in your collection and get rid of the expired ones. If you have coupons that are set to expire in a week or less, keep them in the front of your coupon binder or envelope. When the expiration date comes and goes, you can easily find all of your expired coupons and throw them out.

There are a few ways you can stay on top of your coupon expiration dates:
- Write the expiration date on small stickers (usually used to price items at a yard sale) and affix them to the slot that the coupon is located in your coupon binder.
- Keep all coupons that are set to expire within the month in the front or back of your coupon organization system.
- Create a spreadsheet that lists all of your coupons and when they expire. Go through that list once a month to see which coupons have expired and that you need to remove from your collection.

Organize new coupons as you receive them.
If you really want to stay on top of your coupon collection, it’s best to put them away as soon as you receive them.

When you are really into coupons like I am, they can start to build up quickly and by the time you get around to organizing them all, you have hundreds, and it will end up taking you hours to get them put away in an organized fashion.

I highly recommend putting your coupons where they belong as soon as you receive them, but if you simply do not have the time to do so, at least go through your new coupons once per week and get them organized.

Next week I am going to show everyone how I did with de-cluttering my collection of coupons, and will post the final de-cluttering challenge.

If you de-clutter your coupons this week, please post in the comments and let everyone know how and what you did.

More from this series:
- De-Clutter Your Toys (Challenge Complete)
- De-Clutter Your Books (Challenge Complete)
- De-Clutter Your Recipes (Challenge Complete)
- De-Clutter A Cabinet (Challenge Complete)
- De-Clutter Your Coupons (Challenge Complete)
- De-Clutter Your Email