How to Keep Track of All Your Daily Deals So You Don't Waste Them [Saving Money]

If you use services like Groupon or LivingSocial to find deals in your neighborhood, you might have a backlog of unused coupons piling up you're forgetting about, but there are ways to better manage your inbox to keep track of them.

A study recently revealed that nearly 30 percent of all Groupon deals are never redeemed, which means you're wasting your money by forgetting about them. It doesn't have to be that way though, a few tricks, tweaks, and webapps makes it harder for the deals to get lost in the shuffle.

Aggregate The Deal Sites All in One Place

To start, you can aggregate your deals into one site so you can quickly search for deals without pouring over all the emails. There are a lot of different sites that do this, but Yipit seems to have the most sources right now, with Bing Deals and Coupo.st, and plenty others offering similar services. Yipit has a clean and intuitive interface and lets you search by specific categories, making your shopping experience as simple as possible. You will need to be careful with your spending with all the deals in your face at once. Remember our guide to the stupid things you do when you're shopping to keep you from making silly purchases.

Once you get those deals, tracking them is a bit more complicated. You have a few different options to handle them.

Track, Manage and Setup Reminders for Your Deals

Manilla: The previously mentioned Manilla is an all-purpose site for filtering your shopping and account information, but the integration with deals sites makes handling your purchases a breeze. The initial setup takes a little while, as you'll need to sign in to each individual deal site separately, but once you do, it provides a full featured tracking system. You can see all the deals you've purchased, but more importantly, you can set up notifications for expiring deals ranging from one to thirty days. You'll get these notification through either email or SMS. This can help make sure you don't forget to use any deals you've purchased.

Slice: If you prefer something a little simpler, the previously featured Slice also has social deal site integration. This is more automated, instead of entering in your account information, it combs your email address for purchases you've made. You don't get the notification features of Manilla, but you don't have to do any work to set it up.

Gmail Filters: If you'd prefer not to go through an outside site, you can always set up Gmail filters to capture the deals and allocate them into one, easy to find folder. First, click the Create a filter link near the top of the page. If you want to apply a filter to many sender, in the From field, type, with parenthesis, (groupon.com OR livingsocial.com OR etc). You can adjust any other factors you like from there, but this will help keep you inbox clean and organized.

Specific Site Apps: Most of the deal sites have their own apps and they'll send you a notification if your deal is about to expire. It's not especially useful if you're using multiple services, but if you're only using one or two, it's a great reminder that requires little effort on your part.

Do you find yourself inundated with so many deals you forget to use them? What services or tricks do you use?

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/nh7CHuSpb9E/how-to-keep-track-of-all-your-daily-deals-so-you-dont-waste-them

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