13 Super Simple Tricks for Saving More Money

 

My husband Pierre and I have spent a long time fumbling our way through learning to be adults and do adult things, like saving money for a down payment and not spending it all on food. Some of the tricks for saving more money we’ve learned along the way have actually helped us quite a lot, so I thought I’d share in case you find them helpful, too!

This guide will hopefully help open your eyes to some new things you can try in order to save more money and build your savings. You can do it!!

A quick disclaimer: I shouldn’t have to say this, but I am not a financial expert and this shouldn’t be taken as financial advice. Just some ideas for how to get your shit together, like we are trying to. We’re not perfect, by any means, but I personally believe you can get valuable ideas from anyone!

This page contains affiliate links. That means that at no extra cost to you, some of your purchases through Cleverpedia’s links may help support me and my blog. That said, everything mentioned here is something my husband and I actually use and recommend. Thanks for your support!

1. Know what you are dealing with. Create a budget!

For over a year, I kept rough track of our budget in a spreadsheet. I had it open at all times, and pretty much thought I was the ultimate Excel mastermind.

Spoiler alert: This is a very stupid way to try and track your budget.

Though I didn’t keep track of every little miscellaneous expense we had here and there, I tracked the important things. The big things. The recurring expenses. Medical bills. Car repairs. Good enough, right?

Heck no! All those little meaningless expenses I was skipping? Turns out when you add all those coffees and Target runs and pizza binges up, you’ve got a pretty big problem on your hands.

So, to get a better idea of where all our money was going, I started looking into real budgeting programs. No more spreadsheet for me, please and thank you.

I tried a few things, but the one that stuck is called YNAB. “YNAB” stands for “You Need a Budget,” and yes, you most certainly do. Don’t kid yourself with some hacked together spreadsheet like I did for a year. Unless you are exceptionally gifted with money, Excel, or both, a spreadsheet you create yourself is simply not the answer.

YNAB is a lot nicer than a lot of the alternatives out there because it does so much for you. For one, you don’t need to manually enter every. single. transaction — you just connect all of your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, etc. and YNAB will track them all for you. You just need to go in a few times a month — I do this pretty much weekly — and budget any new income and categorize all your new expenses. That’s it!

YNAB’s core philosophy is that you have to give every dollar a “job” — if you don’t, you’ll lose track of them, like me with those pesky little transactions I was glossing over in my spreadsheet. With YNAB, I see my paycheck coming in and I can say okay, paycheck, your job is to pay my rent, my phone bill, my groceries, and if there’s a little left over, we can throw it towards a new set of artist markers I’ve been eyeing. But first and foremost, those dollars’ job is to pay my rent, so I can look at YNAB and know whether or not those new artist markers are in the cards for this paycheck or not.

I know it’s a little weird to stomach the idea of a budget tool you have to pay for when the whole point of the thing is that you’re trying to save money and not pay for stuff. But just trust me. The cheapskate spreadsheet method will end up costing you a heck of a lot more than the true reigning in of your expenses that you can manage with a budgeting tool.

YNAB is worth the price, which is just $50 a year. $50 that, in the tutorial for how to set up your budget, you start saving towards. Plus, if you sign up through my referral link, you get a free month to try it out and make sure it is exactly what you are looking for.

Plus, YNAB works really well with the other tool we use to stay within our budget (below). Win-win!

2. Give yourself an allowance

One of the best things Pierre and I have done to save money is to get strict about our spending money. One slight weakness of YNAB is that the mobile app isn’t the greatest — we found that it wasn’t the easiest to see a to-the-minute count of what was left in our discretionary spending budget. So we came up with a different solution, using a free tool called Simple! (Sign up through my link and get $20 for free after you make your first transaction!)

Kind of funny, my manager at work told me about Simple years ago and how impressed he was with it and how easy it was to use. Ho hum, I thought, whatever, it can’t be that good. (Why do I always have to be such a noncomformist?)

Well, the joke’s on me, because Simple is awesome!

Simple is basically a free online checking account, plain and simple (har har, I’m definitely the only person who has ever come up with this joke). You can get money direct deposited onto it, or transfer it yourself, and you get a debit card you can use for purchases. Simple has a really great mobile app (and desktop web app) that lets you see up to the minute where your account balance stands.

Simple also lets you link your account with another person and create a shared account with them, and this is the key to our budgeting method!

Pierre and I each created our own Simple account, then we connected them to create a third, shared account. Then, from within Simple we created a weekly recurring transfer from our main checking account to each card. This is our allowance.

Why three different allowances? The shared allowance is the largest and is meant for any and all shared, non-scheduled expenses (except for gas — gas pumps temporarily “reserve” a larger portion of your debit card than you spend at them, so we always use credit and track our gas as a separate category in YNAB). Groceries, Target runs for toiletries, and eating out together all go on this account. We can check the app before we do anything, or quickly transfer money from one of our accounts to the main account if needed, right on our phones. If there isn’t enough in the shared Simple, we don’t buy it. Period.

The transfers to our personal Simple cards are more flexible and much smaller, just $10 a week. We can save this up for things like artist markers, a new video game, a new pair of boots, etc. or put it towards shared expenses we really want (like eating out at our favorite Thai restaurant or new pods for our Nespresso machine).

The best part about all of this is always being able to know exactly how much we are allowing ourselves to spend — not just that thing of “there is money in my checking account, hmm, can I use it?” Plus, while it is much less granular than individually categorizing every expense, it is much quicker and simpler for us to just mark the transfers as “Simple Budget” in YNAB and leave it at that.

In the screenshot above, you can see some of our categories in YNAB. Our Shared Simple, Adrienne Simple, and Pierre Simple categories let us plan for YNAB transfers each week out of our full budget. Honestly, we could just combine them all into a single category.

We also have another category, called “Simple Overflow.” As you can imagine, this is for anytime we had an expense that should have come out of the Simple allowance, but for whatever reason did not. Tracking this separately allows us to see how much we’re going over budget and if there are spending habits we need to adjust.

Anyway, this is the budgeting system that finally clicked for us. Please, be my guest and copy it if you think it could click for you. Plus, if you (and your budgeting partner, if you’ve got one) sign up for Simple through this link, you’ll get a free $20 dropped into your account when you make your first transaction. Free money!

3. Stop throwing all your money away on food

This was where it all went downhill, my friends. Food. My husband and I enjoy trying new restaurants, we love Asian dishes that are very difficult to make at home, and we were both nervous about the prospect of having to learn to cook. Add that all up and you’ve got a recipe for a lot of eating out / takeout / fast food.

Of course we’ve told ourselves all the excuses. We don’t know how to cook. I’m too tired at the end of a long day at work. Nothing we cook will be as good as takeout. And my personal favorite (cringe): the time I save not making food and washing dishes could be reinvested in my blog and freelance work and I could earn more than we spend on that food. Ha! What lies we told ourselves.

No matter how you slice it, food becomes an embarrassingly major expense when you think this way. And we thought this way for a long time.

We’ve gone through phases, of course. We’d overspend and in a fit of frustration, eat nothing for dinner but depressing ham sandwiches for a week. But that is no way to live, and eventually one or both of us would turn up their nose at the sandwich and want something real.

We tried lots of shortcuts to avoid the expenses of takeout. We tried eating tons of frozen food, but it turns out frozen food is actually really bad for you — it’s chock full of sodium! We tried cooking steaks and porkchops on a George Foreman grill. For a while, I drank Soylent for some of my meals. All of this is compounded by the fact that our apartment’s kitchen, quite literally, has two square feet of counter space. Preparing a meal is really difficult when your kitchen is the size of a postage stamp.

Well guess what guys? We figured out a solution!! (Haaaaallelujah!)

Our solution? The almighty Instant Pot!

This magical kitchen contraption, touted by food bloggers the world over, is a pressure cooker. It is also a rice cooker, steamer, sauté-er(?), slow cooker, yogurt maker, and, uh, keep warm-er. I was charmed. This, I thought! This is the solution to our problems!

But then the intimidation hit me. I knew that the Instant Pot was supposed to be safe, that it wasn’t the kind of pressure cooker that just blows up your kitchen, but I was terrified. The thing was so intimidating to me that after we got it, I scratched my head, stuck it up on top of my cabinets high over my kitchen and didn’t even open the box for 6 months. Oops.

It was only after literal weeks of rousing by a friend at work (thanks, Jen!) that I finally pulled the thing down, dusted it off, and opened the box only to discover ours hadn’t shipped with an instruction manual.

Cue another anxiety attack.

No matter! YouTube to the rescue!

After a lot of fretting, dozens of YouTube videos, and some frantic texts to my coworker, we finally made our first meal in it.

And we were hooked. This thing is actually fun to use!

The key to saving money with our Instant Pot is picking recipes that reuse many ingredients and that are relatively cheap. We mostly cook with chicken thighs, which I discovered you can buy in a huge family pack at Wegmans for a little over $2 a pound. Interestingly, at our Wegmans the prices for chicken match Walmart’s! I’ve heard they are even cheaper at Aldi, which is where I’m going to try next.

The other thing we have tried to do in picking recipes is picking super low prep time recipes. Granted, a pressure cooker is already fast, but as much as possible we’ve tried to pick recipes that don’t involve cutting tons of ingredients. We’ve also found shortcuts. For example, did you know that they sell pre-minced garlic and ginger at the grocery store? It keeps in the refrigerator for several weeks. Lifesaver!

Here are our favorite recipes we’ve tried so far:

• Instant Pot Chicken Biryani
• Instant Pot Orange Chicken
• Instant Pot Cashew Butter Chicken

Can you tell we love us some Asian recipes?

The results are just so fast! And easy! And they have been delicious, even when I feel like a bit of a novice in the kitchen. Can’t recommend the Instant Pot enough!

4. Never forget to pay a bill: my bill tracking system in Basecamp

Now, I will preface this with the fact that I have forgotten to pay exactly one bill in my life, and that was a payment on a $50 balance on my Kohl’s credit card. I remembered one day too late. However, here’s a pro tip that I’m glad I was aware of: if you miss a payment but pay it right away, you can actually call your credit card company and ask if they would forgive the late fee/hit to your credit score. Seeing that my account was in good standing and I had literally never missed another payment, the nice lady at Kohl’s customer service was happy to fix it for me. Whew!

Of course, the ultimate in never forgetting to pay a bill is autopaying your cards off each month, but mentally and sense-of-control-over-my-finances-wise I am just not there yet. Getting closer with YNAB, but not there yet. So, this is my free solution.

I track my bill due dates (and a bunch of other random life stuff) using Basecamp Classic. This is a free to do list creation tool. Key for me is that it lets you include HTML in your to do lists. Nothing fancy, but enough to make a pretty snazzy bill tracker very easily.

My bill tracker looks something like this:

Every bill is listed with the due date and a link to sign into the account. I also list autopayments, like my car insurance, because it’s good to remember when they are going to hit my bank account.

At the end of the month (as soon as I pay my last bill for the month), I assign everything on the list to myself to show it as needing to be paid for the next month. In Basecamp, if something is assigned to you, it highlights it yellow to make it stand out. Right now, I’ve paid all my bills for March and my bills for April are due. Then, I move the orange “Payday” marker to where my next payday falls.

I know that between now and my next paycheck, I must pay off all the bills that are assigned to me before the orange bar. When I’m ready to pay a bill, I click my link to go pay it, track it as paid in YNAB, then return to Basecamp and unassign it to myself.

So if my next paycheck is on the 15th of the month and I’ve paid off all my bills before then, my tracker would look like this:

I’m not going to dig into the nitty gritty of setting this up, or HTML codes to use, in this post. If you’re interested in how this works, let me know in the comments and I can make a new post about it.

5. Stop paying interest on your credit cards, stat!

Speaking of credit cards, you have to do the responsible thing and avoid paying interest on your cards if you want to save money. You can find your interest rate (APR) on your statement. Credit cards typically have high interest rates, so you want to pay them off every month.

If you are having trouble paying down a balance and have a good credit score, you can try using a balance transfer to give yourself more time to pay. Balance transfers move the balance of one card to another, usually but not always with a small fee (smaller than you’d pay in interest!). One I’ve heard good things about is Chase Slate, which has a 0% balance transfer fee. Many credit card companies offer balance transfers with a 3% fee, which is still better than what you are probably paying interest on if you’re not paying off your balance every month.

That being said, you can’t just slack off just because you’ve bought yourself some time. Usually at the end of your promotional period, these cards go up to a higher-than-average interest rate, so you definitely want them paid off before then!

6. Out of sight, out of mind: somewhere to stash your savings

I know, I already suggested getting an additional debit account (Simple), but now I’m telling you to get a savings account.

Your checking account is not the place to let your cash accumulate if you are trying to save money. Savings accounts generally have a higher interest rate (which is a good thing this time!). They also keep your money tucked away in a spot where you’re not going to look at your checking account and see cash there to burn.

We use Marcus, which at the time of writing has a 1.5% interest rate. My only complaint is that it doesn’t play nice with YNAB’s auto-connect feature, but hey, maybe that’s just one more way for it to be out of sight and out of mind.

7. Shop around on a bank account

Speaking of opening new bank accounts, keep your eyes open for special offers, especially if you don’t like your bank. I had been complaining about my regular bank for well over a year when I got a promo letter in the mail from Pierre’s bank offering me $200 to switch. (The bonus was dependent on getting at least $500 in direct deposits by a deadline.)

Sold!

You don’t have to wait around for this to happen to you like I did — banks advertise offers like these on their website, or you can call local banks and see whose services you like best.

8. Cut the stoicism, get an HSA

I had always glazed over the annual conversation about HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) at my work. Until last year, with various medical bills piling up, I was looking for any good solution.

An HSA saves you money because it lets you pay for medical expenses with pre-tax income. You can use it to pay for copays (the amount your insurance makes you pay any time you have a medical visit), prescriptions, medical bills, and even some everyday medical items like band-aids and thermometers. If you’re married, your spouse and dependents can use your HSA too.

Source

You choose exactly how much you want to save into your HSA for the year, then that amount is divided out amongst all your paychecks. It is also available immediately. You don’t have to wait until you’ve accumulated enough to use it; January 1 it is all ready to go.

With an HSA, there is no excuse to not go to the doctor. In fact, it’s use it or lose it, so you better use it! Get with the program and set aside an HSA, even a small one, from your paychecks next year if you aren’t already using one. For us, having an HSA has really taken away our dread about unpredictable medical expenses.

9. Negotiate down your bills

It works! We successfuly lowered our bill for internet by almost $40 a month by just calling in and asking for a lower bill.

That’s almost $500 in savings for the whole year… just because we called and asked for it.

Crazy.

There are scripts online, but what has worked for us in the past is mentioning seeing specials at lower rates and asking them to match it, or threatening to cancel if we can’t lower our bill. If the first person you call doesn’t seem inclined to help, just call back a little later.

10. Reach for cheaper stuff

I have to admit, this was difficult for both of us. We’d gotten used to name brand products… Bounty, McCormick, Advil, Ziploc, Kleenex, you name it, we were buying it.

Maybe this was naiveté about the name brands being of far far superior quality. Maybe we were being hypnotized by superior packaging. Maybe this was an unconscious rebellion against my dad, who always buys the cheapest of something he can get. (To his credit, he is very good at finding good deals.) Either way, I went a long time turning my nose up at store brands.

Then we evaluated our finances and suddenly high quality paper towels and toilet paper just didn’t really feel like where we wanted to be splurging.

And you know what? The joke’s on me: Target brand paper towels are actually way higher quality than Bounty Basic. Go figure.

I draw the line at bread, though. You can take my Pepperidge Farm bread away from me over my cold, dead body.

11. Stop treating Starbucks like a necessity

I love Starbucks. I also hate Starbucks. Nowhere else can I drop so much money on tiny frivolous expenses that add up so quickly.

If you are buying Starbucks weekly, or even daily, you are absolutely freaking insane. The average cost of a Starbucks beverage is something like $5. Five days a week and you’ve dropped $25 on coffee. A month and that’s $100. You get the idea.

Is your caffeine fix really worth $100 a month to you? I know it isn’t to me.

Buy a coffee machine and make your coffee at home. Even buying the nicest cream and sugar at the grocery store, you will probably save money making coffee at home vs. buying Starbucks.

Or, get yourself to like espresso and get an espresso maker. You can do this in much cheaper ways, but Pierre and I went the easy route and got a Nespresso Pixie. Every three or so months we make a big order of Nespresso capsules from the Nespresso website, which are about 80 cents each. Every morning, I make myself one shot of espresso before work by literally pressing a button and then I’m good to go on my coffee intake for the day. (My work also provides free coffee and tea, which is awesome, but the single shot is all the caffeine I need to function these days.) No, Nespresso pods ain’t cheap. But you can’t beat the convenience, it’s healthier than sugar and cream laden coffee, and 80 cents is a heck of a big improvement on $5 a day.

We still go to Starbucks from time to time, but we treat it like what it is: a treat, which must come out of our allowance, like anything else.

12. Take advantage of store loyalty perks

I’ve never been one for couponing, to be honest. I’m too much of a procrastinator; pretty much the only time coupons ever cross my mind is when I see ladies at the grocery store pulling them out of their purse. Oops. I also don’t have immediate access to a printer, so I either need to print things at the library next door, which pretty much eats up any savings coupons would have given me, or plan when I need to print around when I visit my parents in law or go to work. And since I’m not about to start loitering around printing out pages of coupons at the office, my options are pretty limited.

We do the vast majority of our shopping at Target, and I’ve discovered a few ways of saving money using their loyalty programs that are perfect for procrastinators like me.

First of all, Target has a debit card called the REDcard (or a credit card, if you prefer, but I don’t need more credit cards in my life) that gives you 5% off of everything you buy at Target. We have our Target debit card hooked up to our shared Simple account, so Target purchases can come directly out of our weekly allowance but still let us take advantage of the 5% benefit.

But also, Target has an app. In this app there is a barcode scanner you can use to scan all of your purchases, at the time you are planning to purchase them, to see if there are any special offers on them. (You can also browse the app for special offers, but I’ll be honest, ain’t nobody got time for that) Sure, it’s annoying to stand somewhere politely out of the way and rearrange my entire cart trying to get to all the barcodes. And yes, I know I am totally feeding all of my purchase info into Target’s big data machine about what I like to buy so they can retarget me with ads and try to persuade me to spend more money at Target.

But hey, it’s totally rad when I can get 5% extra off my paper towels or a $5 gift card for stocking up on soap!

So yeah, the savings aren’t immense. But every now and then you discover a slight savings (more frequently for me now that I am buying a lot more store brand stuff), and you didn’t even have to plan ahead or get tempted by coupons for shit you don’t need. That’s a win in my book.

And hey, since I started using the Target app about a year ago, it claims I’ve saved $116.96 in redeemed offers. Not bad!

I also have a browser extension installed called Honey that saves me money whenever I shop online. Most of the time, Honey just sits unobtrusively in the background. When I shop, Honey lets me know if the same product is available cheaper elsewhere. It automatically scans coupon sites for valid coupons, so I never have to experience the frustration of trying a bunch of invalid coupon codes. You can also earn cash back through Honey that you can redeem for gift cards. Since it’s free and just politely sits in the background until you’re ready to buy something, I don’t see any reason not to use Honey.

13. Get ruthless with your subscriptions

Unused subscriptions are such a freaking waste of money. Trust me, I’m an expert: I am pained to admit I let my gym membership go something like two years unused before I cancelled it. Ouch.

Chances are, you have a few subscriptions kicking around, and you may or may not be using them. Or at least, not to their full potential. Is there more you could be getting out of them? Could you move to a cheaper tier or a cheaper annual subscription? Is there a cheaper alternative? Do you need them at all?!

Pierre and I have a number of subscriptions that we use all the time. Here are just a few:

• We both obsessively use our Amazon Prime account for the shipping benefits and the music player (I use Amazon Music online streaming all day at work). (Sign up through either one of these links and get a free month trial!)
• I already mentioned YNAB, the service we use for our budget. (Sign up through my link and get a free month trial!)
• We back up our computers using Backblaze. (Sign up through my link and get a month free!)

Is there more you could be getting out of them? I realized a while ago that Backblaze will backup a hard drive for free in addition to your computer, as long as you plug in the hard drive at least once a month. So I got a ton more value out of my account because I was able to basically back up a 1TB drive with all my video files on it for free! We’ve also gotten a ton of value out of Amazon Prime, which we use to stream all kinds of TV shows and music, and even get discounts on video games.

Could you make the subscription cheaper? Virtually any service that offers an annual subscription will be cheaper than the monthly subscription. We usually start subscriptions on the monthly tier, but at the end of the month, if we intend to keep it for a while, we switch it to annual. We’ve moved all our subscriptions to annual and save for them throughout the year using YNAB.

Is there a cheaper alternative? A year and a half or so ago, my newsletter subscribers surpassed the free limit on MailChimp, so I moved to a much cheaper service called SendInBlue. I don’t like it as much as MailChimp — I’ll be honest, I really miss MailChimp! — but right now the much cheaper service just makes more sense for me.

Do you need it at all? I am ruthless with Pierre’s and my subscriptions. Every time we sign up for something, I create a calendar reminder a few days before it is set to renew reminding us to cancel, unless we can justify the expense.

So many subscriptions are started with the best of intentions. I want to learn to code, so I’m going to sign up for a $25/month Code School membership. I want to improve my piano skills, so I’m going to sign up for this $32/month piano app. Oops, now it’s the end of the month and I haven’t even finished a single Ruby course or touched my piano. Unsubscribe we go! You can always re-subscribe later when that motivation returns.

Plus, some services are so desperate to keep you that they will sometimes give you a free month just to stick around. The last time we cancelled Hulu, they gave us a free month of membership to try and entice us to stay. Awesome, we said! Took the free month, and when my calendar reminder came up, we cancelled before it renewed. Never has anyone felt like such a boss over subscriptions as me cancelling my Hulu subscription.

Please share!

I hope you guys enjoyed these tricks for saving more money! I plan to update this post as I discover more ways to save. I’d love to hear any more ideas you might have in the comments!

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