Obvious ways to save small amounts
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Anonymous
| What's the point of mentioning you clipped them "even though you didn't need to?" |
Anonymous
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Boutique Consignment stores for your clothes and ThredUP for kids clothes. You can both buy and sell. This alone has been wonderful for my family.
Ebates is actually a great resource, I use that as well. |
Anonymous
This! We cut cable and use a Roku HD box and an HD antenna for local channels - you can watch almost any cable TV show or movie on the Amazon channel (it has a netflix channel too) - and with an Amazon Prime annual membership ($80/year), you get free shipping on everything you order plus tons of free movies and shows on the Roku. Also, we never eat out. And we almost never buy expensive meat - we usually eat chicken leg quarters or thighs with rice, or pasta, or beans and rice. Lots of rice here. Also, we order bulk items on Amazon's subscribe and save feature. It gets delivered once a month to our house - like paper towels, toilet paper, and diapers. K-cups too (Green Mountain - 50 for $28). |
Anonymous
| I think the best thing to do is to keep track of all of your expenses using a software package or web-based system like Mint.com. You can see exactly where your money is going. There will be a lot of chaff there, things that you don't really realize your are spending your money on, or things that could be cheaper. Just look at it for patterns and then try to get your standing bills down as low as possible. Then make other choices -- libraries vs. buying books, pack your lunch, give up cable, don't buy a new car, etc. Over time these things add up. I think I've saved about $20,000 over the years by not eating lunch out and packing my own. |
Anonymous
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I have been you. What I did was spend a couple weeks tracking every single purchase I made. I used to spend a lot of money almost without realizing it. Drinking the free office coffee and bringing lunch from home (leftovers) for me and DH = $15-20/day/person not spent = $150-200/week = $600-800/month. Obviously, there are slight food increases at the grocery store, but for me, it really was a matter of planning meals and sticking to them. And not going to CVS and buying random crap. And not spending a zillion dollars a month on Kindle books.
In much the same way that keeping a food journal, even if you show it to no one, will make you very conscious of your eating habits, tracking your expenses will make you realize how much money you're probably blowing on things you do not need. For me, it was cutting the little daily expenses like coffee and lunch out that added up, much more so than getting rid of cable or gym memberships. |
Anonymous
Or just drink out of the tap! |
Anonymous
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-Shop your car insurance, home insurance, and anything else. Make sure deductables, etc are right for your situation. Any employer discounts, etc you are eligible for? We saved a boatload just by shopping car insurance last year, I was shocked.
-Avoid Target (and Ikea). It's just so easy to suddenly "need" something. I watch CVS ads and coupons. You can get just about anything (not clothes) at CVS, you can do manuf coup + cvs coup + sale and get stuff really freaking cheap. I'm talking barilla pasta, shaving cream, stuff you were going to buy anyway. Also, ours is 24/7, so I do our CVS'ing for the week at 5am 
Minimize eating out. It's amazing how it can add up. Do not buy bottled water! Seriously. Invest in a couple resuable water bottles and you are good to go. |
Anonymous
I already do all this!  (Well, I never drank coffee to begin with.)
Question for those who stopped paying for cable: What do you do for home internet? In our case, having TV and DVR is only about $25-30 in addition to what we pay for the internet provision. |
Anonymous
I know what you mean, PP! I always read these threads to see if anyone has a tip I haven't already seen or thought of and they never do. I already do all of these things plus some. For internet, we pay $70/mo for internet plus phone. It is more than I would like but unless we went back to Comcast's economy option we can't get it any lower. Even when we had that we paid $45/mo just for internet. They really try to sell you on the TV part because they know people are jumping ship on that for online services. I just say no. We cut out cable as much because we didn't want the kids to have access to it as for monetary reasons. Re coffee, the cheapest K-cups I have found are San Francisco Bay Coffee cups on Amazon. If you sign up for Subscribe & Save it's 29 cents per cup. Not bad and definitely a huge improvement over Starbucks prices. |
Anonymous
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Get a water bottle, no need to buy water.
Learn how to fix clothes, sow on a button and darn Give up expensive friends who demand gifts, etc Cook from scratch, nothing prepackaged or prepared No more entertaining Bath together to save on water |
Anonymous
I dont buy it. Who do you have? No way is it $20 more for TV. |
Anonymous
We have had phone and FIOS internet and no TV for two years. Our initial discount period has ended so we're paying $79/month with all the taxes. They'll add TV for two years at no cost. Verizon will not tell me how much it will cost after two years. I'm thinking of dumping the whole package and just stealing my nieghbors' wifi. |
Anonymous
I think it's a grandfathered deal with Comcast. One of the reasons that we're hesitant to dump the TV is that we know we couldn't add it back on for the same as we're paying now. And I do like having the DVR. It remembers stuff for me. |
Anonymous
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OP here -- I had posted this a few weeks ago. I will say it hasn't been that hard to give up Starbucks -- now instead of going 6 days a week, I go 2-3 times a week max (mostly when someone at the office wants to do a coffee run) and drink coffee/tea provided for free in the office the rest of the time. I am making an effort to make dinner at home at least a few nights a week and it's nice to know that scrambled eggs or pasta marinara can be had at home for less than $1/person rather than a $10/dinner for takeout. I'm noticing a decent amount of money spent on bottled water and drinks like Snapple; I think I'm going to get online delivery for those as Snapple at the store costs about $1.75 (few cents less at a proper grocery store than at CVS or a lunch place) and if you buy it by the case it's about 50 cents or less.
I had already undertaken many of the measures listed above -- cutting magazines/gym memberships, streamlining commuting costs (I walk to work about 80% of the time), maxing out the 401k etc. One thing I've done over the years is to get a rewards credit card and make sure to use that one for most/all expenses. The rewards have been pretty sizeable and in the last 1-2 yrs I have ended the year with $200 clothing store gift cards, small ($10-15) Starbucks cards, $25-50 iTunes etc. Since I'm not big on shopping or buying "stuff," those have been perfect for me to replenish the wardrobe a bit and buy a few fun things that I otherwise would not want to spend on. |
Anonymous
| OP again -- if anyone has any other suggestions, it would be great to hear them. |