I remember clipping coupons when I was a kid. It was so much fun!  These days, coupon-clipping is a necessary chore, but fun doesn’t quite enter the equation, especially when you buy multiple papers every week.  However, there’s no reason to make it take any longer than it has to.  Here’s a simple, faster way to tackle that stack of coupon inserts every week–cut many pages at once.

100_9528First, pull out all of the coupon booklets and put them in a tidy stack.  Open one up and start laying each page out separately on a large flat surface (I often do this on the floor of Evelyn’s room while she plays in her toybox. Amazingly enough, though, it’s actually easier to do this without help from a toddler… so I hear.) 

When you have each page laying by itself, pick up the next insert and lay the corresponding page on top of the one from the previous insert.    Keep layering pages until you’ve run out of inserts. 

You can do two things now.  You can either just re-stack the loose pages into one booklet again, or you can go the slightly more advanced route.  I like to staple all the coupons together.  For example, I’ll pick up all of one page, making sure to line the edges of the coupons up exactly, and then I staple all the coupons on both sides of the page. Don’t staple the barcode!  I usually staple the picture or the larger text.  When you’re done stapling, or if you decide not to staple, just cut the coupons out as usual.  The only difference is that instead of getting one coupon, you’ll get all of the like coupons cut out together.

Why staple, by the way?  Because it keeps all those loose coupons from getting lost or separated, and it makes it so much easier to cut.  You have to be very careful when cutting out a stack of loose papers because they’ll want to shift around on you.  (Speaking of which–give yourself a generous margin whenever possible. You don’t want to cut into the coupons below if your stack is off a little.)  When you have your little stack of stapled coupons, you can just pull off one at a time as needed and the rest of them stay put.  I find that the time I spend stapling is more than made up by the decreased cutting time, and then my coupons stay more organized in the box.

p.s. Those aren’t recent inserts.  I took this picture in May, preparing for this post.  I procrastinate, sometimes.