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Thrifty Clip Art

© Donna Dunn

Just by using coupons for some of the products I regularly buy, I can shave a few dollars off my household budget every month. To be perfectly honest, I don't even use every coupon that comes my way. I've gotten quite picky about the products I'm willing to try, so there are some perfectly good coupons that I'll never use. But I also don't just use coupons at the grocery store either. Restaurants, movie theaters, coffee shops, florists - if somebody has something to sell, there's a good chance there's a coupon out there somewhere. The real art to couponing, then, is first finding the coupon, and then actually using it.

Coupons are everywhere, once you train yourself to actually see them. For many of us, I suspect, the sheer volume of coupons we're exposed to has had a mind-numbing effect. As a result, our brains may not even register a coupon for 25 cents when we see it. For certain we would see an actual quarter if it were stuck inside the magazine we were reading, but a coupon may float by, unnoticed.

So if you haven't used coupons recently, or if you don't use them regularly, you might want to spend a few days coupon spotting. Make a point of noticing coupons wherever you come across them: newspapers and inserts, magazines, on store shelves, in coupon swap bins, store displays, online. And if a coupon stirs you, just cut it out and keep it.

Couponing can be as complicated, or as simple, as you'd like to make it. Some thrifty types use recipe boxes to hold and organize their coupons; some people use a series of envelopes; some people just stuff the coupons into their wallets as soon as they collect them; I use a plastic sandwich bag for my coupons.

If you're an organized type, you might even want to sort your coupons into specific categories. If you're a coupon newbie, you may want to start with just a few categories: Food, Household, Personal, Entertainment. Food is self-explanatory, and can also include things like vitamins. Household can include coupons for general cleaning supplies, dry-cleaning, and car or transportation, and Personal can be things like clothes, grooming, haircuts etc. Entertainment can include movies, restaurants, vacation and travel coupons.

Those categories are just suggestions; you can create a few of your own coupon categories that make sense to you. And believe me, this whole exercise can easily become much more complicated, with more than a dozen categories. I even found a website that will, if I understood it correctly, sell you your own personal scanner, so you can scan your coupons, enter them into your computer, upload them to the website. The website will then alert you that you have a coupon if the item appears on your weekly shopping list. Which you also upload to the website. Whew! (For me, one little baggie seems to do the trick, thanks anyway.)

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