10 Ways to Save Money Now
Show notes:
In this episode, Sam lists and explains ten ways to save money.
Just like Sam, you might need to decrease your spending. Sam's list includes some big ways to save money that you might have heard before but need a KICK IN THE PANTS to do. The list also includes some unique ideas that you may not have thought about before. Consider implementing one to ALL of these ideas in order to have more money in the bank.
Decrease your spending so you can save money and achieve your goals.
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Transcript (autogenerated):
Hello hello, good day to you. Let's save some money. So this year 2021 I was in a little bit of a pickle because I owed a lot of school bills and so I had to find some creative ways to save money or decrease my spending so I could pay my school bills. And. Now I'm going to share them with you. We're going to start with some that are pretty obvious and then work towards the more obscure ones. The more unique ideas, and I hope they help you. Here's my disclaimer, so no one is bothered by this video. These are 10 ways to decrease spending or save money. If you don't need to do that, then these ideas are not going to apply to you. So if you're like, oh, she's saying that I can't do this thing. That's not true. You can do whatever you want, but these are great tips that helped me save money and I'm still doing them to help me save money for probably the rest of the year or as long as I need to. And I know that they work for people who are in similar situations, number one. Limit your groceries. So I follow Jordan Page and she has a lot of tips on saving money and making your meals stretch and using what you have in your pantry. And she says that it's normal to budget. $100 person per month, but starting at $300.00 for two people. So let's say there's a couple they get to have $300.00 for the month of groceries and then if they have any other dependents after that, add $100. So if you're single person, you could say 150 when you limit your groceries, think about where you're buying your food around here. I live in New England, we have Shaz as a grocery store and Shaz is expensive and people know that. But it's one of the only stores around here. It's the only grocery store in my town and a town over. But if I go twords a different direction, go towards New York State, then there are other grocery stores there. Still in Vermont, but near the New York border. There is Hannaford Price Chopper and ALDI. Now
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those are all going to generally be cheaper than Shaws, but ALDI is a German owned grocery store that has been brought to the United States and it's been around awhile and people may be used to think it was weird 'cause you had to pay a quarter to get your card out. You get the quarterback people you can call him down, and ALDI is way cheaper. I have started buying my food there for the last two months. I don't know what took me so long. If you have a grocery store that's cheaper, like maybe as you go South, I'm going to guess Food Lion is cheaper than some other grocery store. Why don't you go there? I am so glad that I went there because I think right now I can spend $120.00 instead of let's say
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$170. Also be careful of what you buy at the grocery store. You know you can buy vegetables, but the organic ones which are better for you are more money. So just pick and choose. I'm not going to tell you not to buy fresh vegetables and only buy frozen or only buy even cheaper canned vegetables. Do what you're comfortable with and what you think is healthy or important for your diet. But think about. Where you buy the items. In the section of the store, because you could buy the same thing broccoli. Frozen might be cheaper than fresh, and it's really not going to hurt you to have the frozen one. Instead, #2 is rent, so sometimes we want to have a certain lifestyles or we imagine certain lifestyles for ourselves. And. You might have to wait. You might have to be patient if you can still live with someone else or at home with your parents. You need to do that. You should definitely take advantage of that time in your life where you could live with someone else rent free. When I went back to school to become a teacher, I lived with someone for free, and I mean that was a huge blessing and I will be forever grateful for them and I didn't know them very well, but. There was trust, and they offered once I told them my dilemma and I lived with that person and I am so thankful I would not have been able to afford going back to school for the careers that I have now and. Having a job to pay for my apartment at the same time, so if you have those chances, definitely take them. If you need to have roommates to save money, just do it. Suck it up. I mean you can vet people and find the right person, but having roommates will save you money in the long run rather than saying no, I need to live alone now. You can do that later. #3 cut out extra memberships. Some people have memberships to the gym,
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but since. Everything that's happened in the world in 2020. People couldn't go to the gym anyways, and people who thought they couldn't workout at home totally can. That was one of. That was one of me. I meant to say I was one of those people I learned how to exercise at home when I thought I could never do it because I would talk myself out of it or I would have no space or whatever. You can make it work. Another membership that you might be buying is streaming services so. I just heard yesterday that maybe Netflix will start cracking down on people who are sharing passwords, but. If you can share with someone your roommate or your sibling, then I would do that. #4 about that four letter word. Debt. There's a b in there. Stop buying things with credit. Unless you have the actual money in your account to pay it off in full. There are people who know that if you buy a car, you should have the cash for the car. If that's not possible, I understand that sometimes it's not possible. If you your car breaks down, you need a new car. You have to buy. With some borrowing I get that, but if you have a car and you're going to get another one. You could save the money and make sure you buy your car in cash, and that brings me to cell phones. Cell phones are less than cars. There a lot cheaper than cars and people are still buying their iPhones on credit. Don't do that. You can save up the cash and buy the phone outright. These are silly things. What's that new thing called klarna? It's like a service you can attach to a website so people can pay for what they want and break it down
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into a certain number of payments. It's a payment plan, but for buying clothes like you want to buy $40 shoes and right underneath the price before you add the shoes to your cart it says or for easy payments of It's like, what if you need to have a payment plan $40 shoes? Don't buy the shoes, man. The other side of debt is paying it off, so if you have the cash to pay off some debt, let's say it's like a small loan, maybe there's $5000 left and you have What are you waiting for? It's not a house you know. Pay off the because the money that you owe other people is not your own money. It is owned by someone else because you owe them. So pay off that debt. And then use the payments that you would normally put towards the debt towards something else. Once you pay it off, take that money and give it towards something good, something you're saving or investing or I don't know. Paying for something that you couldn't afford before and now you can. OK so I would say those are the obvious ways of decreasing spending or saving money, and this fifth one is going to start getting creative, so I want to say sell stuff. There are things that I got for free from people. Maybe I used it a couple times or I got it when I went to college or something. I've had it for so long that I don't use those anymore. Just sell them. I sold a ski jacket on poshmark and somebody was they just needed a jacket because they lived in the South and they were going on on a ski trip. Ann is like have fun. Thanks for the Sean. I also sold a bread machine bulls a cooler. People will buy random stuff off Facebook marketplace.
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You just have to be pretty patient. One benefit of selling your things is also decluttering your home. At the same time, which I'm also really into. And because I sold some of those things I mentioned in the past, I have become an experimenter with furniture flipping, which is going to be a whole another video. You can look forward to in a couple of weeks because I have been flipping some furniture to pay my rent. We'll see if it worked out. is to flat out limit your spending. This usually talking about fun activities, so if you normally do a certain thing with a friend or you regularly meet up with your friend group. If that's even possible right now, then you know suggest something that's free. Spend some time outside, or if they're going to get coffee at a cafe and like take a walk, bring your own coffee and go for the walk. You can miss out on buying whatever they're buying and still hang out with them. Same thing goes for limiting clothing or anything that's just fun. Like if you normally buy. Games or shoes or jewelry or whatever. Just stop doing that. Tell yourself I'm cutoff right now. I'm on a spending freeze and you will be shocked how much money you save because normally when we buy these things were not paying attention to how much it actually is per month. I had that issue I mentioned at the beginning where I had to pay my school bills and the school bills were late. Not I'm not talking about borrowed money like I don't have loans on these school bills right now and I just owed immediately 'cause I'm paying it as I go through the classes and I cut out my spending of random stuff that I wanted on Amazon or clones that I was buying on line and all of a sudden I had the money just boom like. A
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month and a half later this huge problem was gone because I had no idea how much money I was randomly spending when I just bought whatever I felt like buying #7 is don't be a sucker. AKA stretch what you have. So I was talking about patience before. This is similar. If you have something that you really enjoy that brings brings joy to your life. Some people really like candles, it relaxes them or certainties, or books or something like that. That really makes you happy and is good for your well being. You probably already own several of those things. Let's take candles or essential oils as the example. You probably have more than one of those things, and once you run out of candle like it burns away 'cause you used it, which is great. You enjoyed it, don't buy another one. Try using up what you already have, so maybe they're not your favorite sense, but you still have other candles. Maybe you can get the same ambience or relaxing effect with the candle or the essential oil that you already have. #8 don’t be lazy. There are extra payments put on to things like delivery services that you are not. You're not even thinking about spending. If you're getting pizza or takeout, or of any kind, don't pay for delivery. Don't get Ubereats if you're not like a super busy parent, then you do not need to pay for delivery. You're being lazy. Go pick it up. Second to last #9 subscriptions, So what subscriptions are good and what subscriptions are bad? OK, I have paid for subscription boxes before. I know what this is like so the bad ones. I'm
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talking about things that you don't need where you're just like this is so fun. It's like I got presents for myself every month so I have had fab fit fun. I did it for one. One season last summer, there was like the sign up sale that you can get your first time is way cheaper and then I immediately cancelled so. You don't need to spend money on stuff like that similar to Stitch Fix. I know that they pick out clothes for you, which I have paid for that too. Like five years ago and most of the stuff that they pick you don't want anyways. Same with Fab fit, fun or cause box or whatever. It's like their. These treats are like fashion things or spa things or whatever, but if you're receiving skin care products that you can try there. Nice but. They're not usually the ones that you would buy anyways, or you already have a routine of what you want to use on your skin, or you already have a style and then they send you a bag or sunglasses or something like that and you're like, wow, I don't love it, but I paid for it, so I guess I'll keep it. That's a waste, right? You could pick out exactly what you want and buy it yourself. If you're waiting for what you're looking for. You will find exactly what you want and then you will own it. You won't have this extra stuff that you got in your subscription box that you feel like you have to pay for and then keep. The pros to subscriptions are if you get products that you need, like hygienic products like deodorant or skin care products or even feminine care products. Those come in subscription boxes an if you buy the subscription or sign up for the subscription. It's cheaper so it'll tell you right there. Like if you subscribe to the service you need deodorant, you need tampons or whatever you want to use an then it's cheaper. If you sign up for the subscription.
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So that's OK. Those are things that you need and you need to eat, but you do not need to sign up for HelloFresh. It's great. I've also had that before in the past, about four years ago and HelloFresh is convenient and the food was good, but I could save way more money. And packaging in the environment by not signing up for HelloFresh, I don't need that, it's a. It's a subscription service that is not as cheap as just doing it myself. And the last one, number 10 people are going to get mad about this, but it's change your phone plan immediately. Immediately there are numerous phone plans that you could sign up for that are like 30 to a month for the same thing that other people pay for, like 60 to a month. There are tons of phone plans and they have good coverage now. You can always bring your number. That's like a given at this point. You can bring your own phone. You can buy their phones out right there, unlocked phones there like month to month contracts. Sometimes you don't have to lock yourself in. You can get this same service, the same unlimited stuff and save at least $30 a month. Think about how much that saves you, so don't be clinging to your phone company just because you've always been with them or you like the name you think it's like the best. Why don't you give these other ones a shot? They tell you everything in advance. They show you the coverage map. If it's viable, what are you waiting for? Some of the phone companies you could use are Boost Mobile Republic Wireless, Virgin Mobile, Google Fi. Those are off the top of my head. I know that those are cheaper and so if you're sticking with like the cool one, just get rid of it. Switch right over what are you waiting for? OK, so I'm right here with you. If you are trying to save money and decrease your
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spending, that is what I am in the middle of doing right now. It is mid March so I've been doing it for 2 1/2 months and I am paying off those school bills. Things are important and after I pay off my school bills as I'm going through my classes, I'm probably going to keep doing this because I will be able to save money for things that I thought I could never have or I'm going to get not a head start but I'm going to catch up on some of my other. Savings accounts like ones that I put towards house down payments and. Vacations or whatever, whatever is up to you. I will be coming at you with a Part 2 to how to save money or decrease your spending and so look for Part 2. Much love Sam.
