Friday, November 20, 2009

More Wisdom for Creating that Greeting Card Binder

As it’s been mentioned in passing before, I keep a binder for my greeting cards and I find it to be very helpful.

In the front of my “Greeting Card” binder is a list of all the birthdays and holidays that require a greeting card purchase, (or kid created greeting card), by month. Behind the list I keep 12 heavy-duty clear sheet protectors that are labeled at the top right corner with the months of the year. Then there are more sheet protectors labeled by occasion, “thank you,” “blank,” “friendship,” “sympathy,” etc. Shopping for cards seems to be one of my biggest mommy challenges. My kids do not have much patience for watching me read card after card looking for the perfect witty choice for a friend. When I am hurridly searching for a funny birthday card for my father-in-law but in the process come upon the perfect card for my girlfriend, Anne, I will buy it even though her birthday isn’t for several months. When I get home the card I found for Anne gets filed under January for her birthday. So, you get the idea.

I thought I was just so nifty with my little Greeting Card binder until my friend Anne called me with some ways to perfect it. She is my go-to bargain hunting friend so she always has the ins and outs on how to get the most out of retail stores which I just tend to try to avoid but sometimes fail. American Greeting stores are having a buy 3 cards get 3 free sale right now. (An even cheaper way to go is to have your kids make your cards for you of course but sometimes you want an actual greeting card.) If you can put aside an hour or so without kids, take a list of all your greeting cards dates with you to your local American Greeting store, or any bargain card store that you prefer, and buy ALL of your greeting cards for at least an entire year and file them in your greeting card binder. While you're reading a zillion cards, be sure to poke around in the congratulations, thank you and other card categories and find some that you'd like to file away. They aren’t likely to have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day cards or other holiday-specific cards but you can have your kids make those. Also, with everyone using online bill pay it seems more likely that you are without a stamp for a greeting card. Just tuck some forever stamps in the front of your greeting card binder and you can eliminate that problem as well. These are two tips I know will definitely eliminate my forgetting a card event or scrambling around at the last minute to get one.

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