Saving Money While Saving Money

It's Tip-sy Tuesday!

I print a lot of coupons, mostly because I hate clipping, and there are usually not enough natural/organic products in the papers for it to be worth the time.  So, to save trees and money, I have a couple of little tricks:

When you're only printing one or two coupons, turn the paper around and reload it in the printer the next time you have a coupon to print.  Always make sure that you have it inserted in the printer so that the new coupon will print on the back, because sometimes they'll print as full-page coupons with ads and it'll ruin your original prints.

Change your printer's default settings to a lower print quality.  It'll be different in different printers, but on mine it's called a "fast" print.  This will use less ink and will speed up the print time.  If you're printing something that needs a better print quality, you can manually change it for individual prints.  Because most printed coupons use programs that automatically print to the default printer with the default settings, you aren't able to reduce the print quality just for coupons.

You can also set your printer's default to black and white to save your more expensive color ink.

When you cut the coupons, save the long strips that are left at the bottom of the page for writing lists, notes, or for the kiddos to color on.  I'm a perpetual list maker, so these strips come in handy and save me from having to constantly buy little note pads.

How do you save money when you print coupons?  I'd love to grow my list!