52 Weeks of Organizing--Week 34 --Coupon Binder Re-Do

I have lost track as to what week this would be for me.  I found orgjunkie into her challenge and haven't kept up with getting something done each week.

From the start I went around my house taking photos of all the places and things that I wanted to get organized.  One of those things was to get my coupon binder going again.

Recently I bought 60 coupon binder pages from momsaves.com.  Along with my order I received a bonus of 22 Sunday coupon inserts from past weeks.  I paid $34.85 for my order with shipping.  The first thing I did was to go through the free inserts and pull out all coupons I knew I would use right away.  I came up with a total of $31, which made me feel better about what I spent.  I didn't end up using all of those coupons before they expired, but  since then I have cut out the rest of the coupons and have used a few more.

Putting together a coupon binder is no easy task.  It takes a lot of time to just cut the coupons, then there is the process of putting them in to the binder.  I did my old binder by ABC type order.  This time I chose to use categories.  I printed the coupon category pages courtesy of Rebecca from Extreme Couponing.

I am not done putting in all of my coupons.  I still have some of the abc letters to get out of my file box and in to the binder.  One problem I have run in to is that some of my sections are full and I have no more pages.   I will continue to put in all that I can however.  I still wanted to share.

I took this before photo showing my abc file box, a stack of coupons to be cut out and my "old" binder.  Also the tab divider pages I rescued from our garage sale items to use for myself.  My old binder pages were much more frugal as I made them myself with old page protectors I had already around the house.   I also used gallon size ziploc bags.  I sewed (by hand) across different ways and cut openings.  Now that I'm thinking about it, probably not all that frugal as I know that I had to buy the ziploc bags.  I've not used my binder for so long that the coupons that were left inside of it expired in 2009.

Here is what I have now.  I can't wait for my first chance to go shopping and carry my notebook with me.  I would like to have a zippered binder, but in pricing them I didn't see anything that I could, or wanted to afford.  I'm hoping to find one cheap at a yard sale before the season is over.  I will be taking the binder in the car with me every time I leave the house because you never know when a bargain will come along that you didn't expect.

I am linking this post up at orgjunkie.com