My coupon book

In an effort to help save our family money, I clip coupons.  I am not an extreme couponer by any means, I just spend 10-20 min a week clipping or printing coupons that I know our family will use to save us some money.  Part of the trick, is actually USING the coupons and making sure they don't expire, or that you buy the right amount/brand/combination of items.  This is the best way for me to keep them organized, I hope that it will help you too.

I sort my coupons into these categories
Baby
Health/Beauty
Food - Fridge
Food - Frozen
Food - Pantry/other
Cleaning
Home Goods
Other

These are the categories that work the best for me, after I cut and sort them, I put them in my book.

My book is a 1/4 inch 3 ring binder with dividers and trading card holders.

This works great because I can reference it when I'm making my shopping list, and check it while I'm at the store.  It is also nice to be able to easily see expiration dates and how many products I need to by at a glance.

How do you organize your coupons?

Cheers!

Ashley

PS I love to PARTY!  Blog link party that is, check out where I party by clicking here and join the fun.  Also, if you know of another great party, please share it with me so I can join the fun there too!

Why you should clean out your room...

So for a recent challenge, I cleaned out my master bedroom.  You would not believe what I found!  One of my biggest finds was unused gift cards.  You see, when I got gift cards, I would put the ones that I knew I needed right away in my wallet, and the others I would just place in my night stand to grab when I needed them.  Well after a few years this meant that i had a ton of cards in my drawer and no clue how much money was on ANY of them.  So I used the internet and my phone to try and find the balances.


First I set them all on the couch and sorted them by type...

 Then I started looking up/calling to find the balances.  When I did, I wrote the balance on a post-it and wrapped it around the card.

Here were my highest and lowest balances remaining:

My total of UNUSED gift card money, some of which was over 3 years old was $464.30

Look at all the money we can use at these stores without dipping into our budget!  So excited (why didn't I do this before?)

Ralphs - $10

Mobil - $25

Starbucks - $45.80

Barnes and noble - $20

Walmart - $25

Target – $15.05

Visa - $10

AmEx - $75.51

Coldstone - $10.84

McDonalds - $10

Sees Candy - $5

Olive Garden $ .82

Crate and Barrel - $50

Babies R Us - $14.51

Costco – $11.66

Macy’s $126.95

Best Buy $8.16

Do you have any unused gift cards laying around?  Check them out, you may discover you have more buying power than you thought!

Cheers,

Ashley

March Goals

I would like to say that I can't believe that the month of February is already gone and March is here!  It went by SOOOO fast!    In February I shared some simple goals with you all that I was going to try and succeed in this last month, lets see how I did my goals were:
...  Cook 6 meals from scratch for my family, 2 of which will be new recipes. (spaghetti doesn't count)
... Complete one creative project
... Re-organize/de-cluter one space in my home (see this challenge)


Well I am going to be VERY honest, this month got away from me, and only one of the goals was completely successful.  I was able to completely de-clutter our master bedroom.  This was a HUGE project and I am so glad that I was successful in it!  A HUGE thanks to the Organizing Junkie for putting out a challenged that helped keep me motivated and accountable!  While none of the following are excuses, I don't want you to think that I'm a TOTAL flake for only doing one of my goals this month, so here are the things that happened.

My 15 month old got pneumonia.  We had an insane week trying to keep him out of the hospital, going to the doctor everyday, working crazy hours and trying to find child care since he had to stay out of daycare the entire week.

My extended family was in town.  We ate at my parents house at least 8-10 meals (usually it is 1-2 per month)

My husband did't work the last 2.5 weeks of the month.  We have a rule, if you aren't working, you get to cook your pregnant wife who did work all day dinner.

Most of them ended up affecting my first goal.  But this is a new month and a new start with new (or repeated) goals!

Here are my NEW(ish) goals for March!

Cook 6 meals from scratch for my family

Complete one creative project

Blog at least 18 times this month

So here is to a new month, a fresh start and new goals!

Cheers!

Ashley