Was your spending high last year? Do you love finding new ways to save? Either way you are about to benefit from 7 easy ways to save money in 2018! Also, make sure to check out my standalone post on Paribus, the money saving app that everyone who shops online should have.
1. Shop For Non-Immediate Needs On Amazon
Amazon truly is a gift to the consumer. They are a free market place where everyone has to compete for your business! This helps you save money!
Think about it: goods sold online save retailers the cost of having to own a store. Every store has rent, electricity, employees and many other costs that are completely bypassed if you purchase goods online. This is why you will almost always pay less for an item on Amazon than you will for the same item in store.
If you haven’t already shifted your shopping to Amazon, this could be an easy way for you to save money in 2018.
2. Ditch The K-Cups
Caffeine can be a love hate relationship when money is involved. Coffee costs can easily creep up on you due to the fact that each individual coffee purchase doesn’t seem so large. The costs seem even smaller when you can pick up a 24-pack of Starbucks K-cups on Amazon for $15.99 (please, use Amazon and avoid high retail costs.)
Ditching the K-Cups and switching to grounds can save you big time. A 1.25 lb bag of that same Starbucks coffee on Amazon will run you $10.99 and is estimated to make 45 8-ounce cups of coffee instead of 24! That’s less than $0.25 a cup! The K-Cup cost is about $0.67 a cup.
By itself the 42 cent difference may seem small, however, a quick Google search reveals that among Americans who drink coffee the average consumption is 3.2 cups per day.
I’ll save you the math: switching to grounds will save $548.96 over the course of one year for the average coffee drinker. Not to mention you will have better tasting coffee (in my humble opinion, grounds offer a much better flavor.)
All you need to get started are your favorite grounds and the special Keurig re-fillable K-cup for grounds. All easily available through Amazon.
Let 2018 be the year that you save money by going back to grounds.
3. Invest With Robinhood
If you haven’t downloaded Robinhood already then this should be one of the first items on your to-do list. Robinhood has a simple and easy to use interface that allows you to buy or sell stocks from your phone COMMISSION FREE and with no minimum account balance.
That’s right. All of those advertisements you see on TV for $4.95 trades don’t sound so great compared to $0 trades. They also let you make trade amounts as low as 1 share, so you don’t need much to start.
Right now they are running a promotion where they will give you a FREE stock like Apple, Ford, or Sprint when you sign up through a referral link and add funds to your account. Of course, I’ve got the hook-up. Just Click Here to complete their easy sign up process, get your free stock, and start investing!
4. Use Internet Coupons Or Coupon Codes
Anytime you see the words “enter promo code here” or “do you have a promo code?” you should rejoice. Plenty of people might just make the purchase without a promo code but usually a quick Google search will allow you to find one!
When buying hosting for this blog I was just about to pay $60 for one year of web hosting. Before I clicked purchase I took a minute to search Google for “GoDaddy web hosting coupon” and found one that got me the same year of hosting for $12. That means choosing to spend about two minutes of extra time saved me $48!
Internet coupon sites like Coupons.com or Couponsurfer.com are the easy way to save money nowadays. Not only do they have coupon codes for online shopping, they also have tons of coupons you can print for in store! It is easy to make your grocery list and then find plenty of coupons in 5 minutes or less to help you save big!
5. Cut The Cord
Save money in 2018 by getting rid of that pesky, overpriced cable bill.
With Netflix and other streaming services dominating the entertainment markets and offering low prices there really is no good reason to pay for cable television in 2018. Amazon has even started offering a service called Amazon Video for free with their prime membership.
If you really don’t want to give up live TV completely there are several cheaper alternatives out there. A couple examples of these alternatives would be Sling TV and Roku. Plans for Sling TV start as low as $20 a month.
6. Use Cash Back Credit Cards
More and more companies are coming out with great cash back credit cards! Using myself as an example I mainly use 2 different credit cards: the Bank of America Cash Rewards card and the Uber Visa Card.
The Bank of America Cash Rewards card gives me 3% back for gas purchases (as well as on items purchased inside the gas station), 2% back on grocery stores and wholesale clubs, and 1% back on everything else. They also offer a 10% customer bonus for redeeming the cash rewards into a Bank of America account, effectively making the rewards 3.3%, 2.2% and 1.1% respectively.
Where this card really starts putting cash back in your pocket is when you become a preferred rewards client. The different levels of preferred rewards can boost your customer bonus up to 75%! That means your effective rewards would be 5.25% on gas, 3.5% on grocers and wholesale clubs, and 1.75% on everything else!
The Uber Visa card augmented my cash back portfolio even further with 4% back on restaurants and bars (yep, sold), 3% back on hotels and airfare, 2% back on Uber and online purchases and 1% back on everything else. They’ll also give you other special perks like streaming credits and phone insurance if you meet a few simple conditions.
Really the only other card I would consider adding now is the Amazon credit card. Saving 5% on all of my Amazon purchases just makes too much sense.
In this day and age you don’t ever need to pay 100% of your money. Build up your cash back credit card portfolio to save money big time.
7. Hide Your Money From Yourself
One tactic for saving money 100% of the time is not spending it at all.
The best way to make sure that you spend less money is locking a portion of your money away each time you get a paycheck. This is called “paying yourself first.” By saving or investing money at the start of the month you don’t see the money in your checking account and are less likely to spend it. If you’re interested in learning more, check out my post on paying yourself first.
Right now I am also giving away my “Budgeting Made Easy” checklist to all of my new subscribers, so you’ll want to pick that up.
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Cash back credit cards are sweet. The two I personally use are the Bank of America cash rewards card you referred to, and the Amazon card. 5% on literally every thing I buy adds up quick! However, this is also bad because any reward amount I receive means I spent 20 times that on what could easily be junk. The old mantra of “the best way to double your money is to fold it up and put it back in your pocket” is much harder to follow when you don’t even have to take your card out of your wallet to “swipe!”
Very true. It is easy to get caught up in the “rewards cycle” and buy things just because they give good rewards.
Using Amazon as an example, even if you buy something and get 5% off with their card, you still spent 95% of it.
I love the mantra. I’d recommend a Roth IRA over your back pocket, but I think that would be taking the meaning a bit too literally.