How do you find coupons for the items you wish to buy? It’s a simple question with a variety of answers. While coupons are available in printable and electronic forms, our primary source of coupons is still the weekly newspaper. Despite embracing many digital things throughout my life — including digital coupons, I still prefer the convenience and abundance of coupons that show up in my newspaper each Sunday.
Subscribing to, or purchasing, the newspaper each week ensures that I have an ongoing supply of coupons for a variety of brands and products that my household needs. One advantage to getting coupons from the newspaper is that during weeks when the coupons are particularly attractive, you may decide to pick up an extra paper or two to increase the number of like coupons that you have to use. This allows you to stock up on larger quantities of the relevant items more quickly, as you’ll have a coupon for each one you want to buy.
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Getting the newspaper coupons is only the first task, though. How do we find the coupons inside once we’ve accumulated stacks of inserts? Fear not! You won’t be clipping and managing hundreds of little loose pieces of paper. I recommend keeping your inserts in an expandable accordion file and using one pocket for each month of the year. Label the cover of the coupon inserts with the date that they arrived in the paper. Then, you can use one of many free coupon websites or databases to help you locate the coupons you need!
I’ve got a free coupon database on my jillcataldo.com blog that you can use. Simply type the brand of the product you’re seeking coupons for, or the category, like “cereal” or “toothpaste.” The database will return a coupon reference to you, such as “1/16 SS.” This refers to the January 16th SmartSource coupon insert. Then, you can pull the 1/16 insert from your file and clip the coupons you need for this week’s trip to the store.
While paper coupons aren’t going away anytime soon, we can’t overlook our electronic coupons either. Digital coupons can be found on your store’s websites or apps, allowing you to load offers both before you go to the store and while you’re in the aisles browsing coupons on your phone. Even if I have paper coupons in hand, I still check for additional electronic coupon offers for the items I plan to buy. If my store’s site or app has offers for the same products, I load those, too, and stock up even more.
Depending on how your store utilizes electronic coupons, you either need to scan a shoppers card or enter your phone number into the keypad at checkout to apply your loaded e-coupons to the items you purchase. Pay attention to the expiration dates on your digital offers, too, as they may differ from those of your paper coupons, even if the coupon’s value and the product are the same.
There’s one other category of coupons that, while not as popular or widespread as they once were, are still worth investigating too for potential offers: Print-at-home coupons, or “printables.” You can find these both on some manufacturers’ websites and on Coupons.com, which features numerous offers each week from a variety of brands. Browse offers and then print the ones you’re interested in, clip them out, and you’re ready to head to the store! Remember, though, that each coupon print is unique — they cannot and should not be photocopied. (Would you copy a dollar bill? No — as that would be counterfeiting.)
Whether you’re using coupons found in the newspaper, electronic coupons, or printable offers — or like many shoppers, a combination of all three — maximize the number and kinds of discounts available to you by checking all three of these areas before heading to the store. Especially in our current cycle of inflation, every possible discount we can utilize helps us save even more.
Email your own couponing victories and questions to jill@ctwfeatures.com.
