My Coupon Binder
I am often asked “How do you organize all of your coupons?”, well I am going to show you. Ask and Ye Shall Receive! Many of you have heard about my new and improved binder and have wanted to see it. HERE YOU GO!!! A few of the pictures are the same because I just took everything from my other binder and transferred it to this one. A little about this binder. It is a dual-binder made by “CaseIt”. What that means is it has a 3″ binder on one side and a 1 1/2″ binder on the other. It expands to 5″ (well as you will see I have surpassed the 5″ by a little :}) and has a shoulder strap. I have increased the weight from 11 lbs to 12.6 hence its “Fourth Child” nickname. Ok, OK, Ok enough talk, you want to see pictures and here they are… This is it! You can see the zipper in the middle that is a pocket that runs the full length of the front flap. When you lift that flap (which has a velcro closure) there are lots of other pockets.
This shows you the zipper pocket on the front.
This is what you find behind the front flap. There is a hook for keys, several card slots, a few pockets for pens and such, as well as a few misc. pockets behind a velcro flap.
With the flap opened and the binder turned on its side you can see the pull-tabs that allows you to expand it to the full 5″ binder. The yellow circles show you those pull-tabs.
You can see here I went just a tad over the 5″. OOPS! This is what it looks like when opened and lying flat. On the left is the 3″ binder and on the right is the 1 1/2″ binder. What I have done is put all of my “Grocery” coupons on the left and all of my “Misc” coupons on the right. So on the left you will find my dairy, meats, snacks, ect. On the right you will find my HBA, paper products, cleaning products, pet, and misc. coupons. This makes it much easier when navigating through the grocery store.
I found these great binder pockets at Target. I purchased 3. One is for my rainchecks, one is for my printed store coupon policies and the other is for the coupons I am using while shopping.
On the inside of the front cover are two pockets for pages. I use them for full page coupons and my sales flyers. With my other binder I had a pencil pouch that I purchased seperately but this one came with not one but two pencil pouches. Here is what they look like: Pencil Pouch # 1
If you can see the little tab on the middle of the pouch that runs from the right to the left. This tab is a velcro closure that is attached to the inside of the back cover. This keeps my pouches from being loose so that I can open the binder without anything falling out. GREAT!!!
Here you can see what the first pouch has on the front side. A zippered pocket as well as a velcro pocket.
Here is what you find on the back side of it. A velcro pouch with 3 compartments. Pencil Pouch # 2
I apologize for the poor quality of this picture. I am not sure what happened to the camera. This is the front side of the other pencil pouch. As you can see it has even more to offer than the first. There is a zipper pocket, a velcro pocket, a few pockets for cards, a couple of pockets for something like lipstick or an MP3 player, a spot for an ID card and another key hook.
This shows the velcro pouch with the flap open.
This is the back side of the second pencil pouch. This has several slots for markers or pens as well as a zippered mesh pocket. Here are the different coupon pages I have to keep my coupons organized:
Not only do I have the baseball card pages but I use a variety of pages to suit my needs. This is an example of that. I found these at Office Depot. They are pages for the large floppy discs or CD’s. I use these for my larger coupons that will not fit in the other pages. This is another example of the different types of pages I use. I also found these at Office Depot. This is a full page protector with two pockets on the front that would fit a 3.5″ floppy disc. I just use these for my full page store coupons and the front pockets are used for the smaller coupons that I cut off those full pages.
Here are the baseball or trading card organizer pages that I, and most others with binders, use. I purchased these at Walmart. In fact, the last set I purchased were on clearance for $1 a pack. Each pack contains 10 pages. In my store, these are located by the magazines. If your store is set up the same way as mine I can explain this better. Our magazine sections is in a U shape. On the outside of that U shape between the magazines and the register there is a section with trading cards, trading card binders and these trading card pages. Each page has nine pockets on the front. If you really wanted to take advange of them and cut down on the number of pages you use as well as the cost you could cut a piece of poster board and slide it into each pocket. This will allow you to take advantage of the front and back of the pocket. I choose not to do that because I have so many coupons that I could not fit two different kinds into just one pocket.
This is the final example of the different types of pages I keep in my binder. I found these at Walmart as well. These were located with the picture albums. This is the picture album refills. It contains 3 pages that would hold the photos and a small pocket where you would put a piece of paper with the description. This is useful for the larger coupons.
I use colorful tabs to separate each section. It makes it easier to find the category I am looking for. I can remember which category is what color. So if I am in the snack section of the store and I want to see if I have a coupon for something I know that the yellow tab is my snack section. I am able to go right to it.
No you have met my fourth child. I have often been asked to help people create one for themselves. I may start selling them but I need to find the best way to cut down on the cost so that they are not too expensive. As you can imagine I have a small fortune in this binder but I have saved so much more than I could ever imagine spending on it because it keeps me organized. When I first began to use coupons I used the accordion file but since I began “COUPONING” I use the binder.
Ashley
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