Sneaky Ways to Save Money

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Looking for ways to save money? You can always go the traditional cut-your-expenses route. Little things like using a Brita Filtered Water Pitcher instead of buying bottled water can literally save you thousands of dollars every year.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Today we’re doing a deep-dive on some sneaky ways to save money. Ways the average American doesn’t usually think about. These are the strategic money management hacks the financially savvy group uses to save money. And now you can use them too!

Here is our list of sneaky ways to save money.

Purposely Fall Behind the Jones’s

Let’s ease into our list of ways to save money with a simple one: purposely fall behind the Jones’s.

You don’t have to keep up with your friends and neighbors as they buy bigger houses and fancier cars and the newest iPhone. In fact, by falling behind them, you’ll come out well ahead in the long run.

It’s a simple concept, but can be difficult in practice. In fact, we often don’t even realize we’re trying to keep up with the Jones’s! It’s usually disguised as “growing up” or “progressing”.

Here’s what I mean: your best friend trades her Honda Civic in for an Audi Something (I don’t know cars). Suddenly your Toyota Camry seems like a starter car, something you only drive while you’re an entry-level adult. But you’re a professional adult at this point. So it’s probably time to progress to a next-level vehicle, right?

See, it’s not necessarily about proving to your social circle that you have as much money as they do. It’s often about showing that you’re leveling up in life at the same pace they are. And some of that is justifiable because you need to project a certain image to be taken seriously as a human. The hoopty you drove in high school is not an appropriate mode of transportation to client meetings.

So you have to find the balance between appropriate-for-a-responsible-adult and the Jones’s.

Obviously, if your friends are buying luxury cars, and you decide to stick with standard or even premium brands, you’ll save tens of thousands of dollars. Houses, clothes, make-up, furniture, tech…try to consciously stay a step (or two or three) behind your friends.

This simple tip will save you tens of thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands!) over your lifetime.

Build a Great Credit Score

In our experience, most millennials only know the negative side of credit scores. With bad credit, you could be denied a home or business loan in the future. Bad credit can even prevent you from being able to rent an apartment.

Just like bad credit has serious penalties, great credit has serious benefits! The main benefit is that the better your credit score, the better your interest rates.  Sound like not-a-big-deal?  Well, it is a big deal!  It’s a huge, exciting deal!  Here’s why: it can save you a crap-ton of money!

How great credit saves you money

Let’s say you’re buying a $20,000 car and need a 4-year auto loan. According to myFICO.com, if you have a meh credit score (620-659), you can probably get a 10.3% interest rate. Your monthly payments would be $510, and you’ll end up paying $4,487 in interest.

But if you have a great credit score (over 720), you can get a 4.056% interest rate. This would make your monthly payments just $452, and you’d end up paying just $1,700 in interest. Bam! You just saved $58/month and $2,787 in interest. Think of the more important things you can do with that money!

What if you decide to buy a house? Say you decide on a $250,000 house with a 30-year fixed-interest-rate mortgage. Scenario 1: You have meh credit (side note: you need at least meh credit to even get a home loan!). Your interest rate would be around 5.565%, your monthly mortgage payment would be $1,430, and you’d end up paying $264,687 in interest. Yikes!  Scenario 2: You have excellent credit (over 760). Your interest rate would be around 3.976%, your monthly mortgage payment would be just $1,190, and you’d end up paying only $178,429 in interest. You just saved $240/month and $86,258 in interest.

On your car and your house, you’ve saved $89,045 just by having great credit!!!

You can’t not be excited about that! So start building great credit today!

Take Advantage of Credit Card Rewards

Ok, if you can’t trust yourself with credit cards, cut them up. Plain and simple. The best way to fool-proof any goals is to take away the options that tempt you to back-slide. So if you’re in danger of overspending because you have access to credit cards, cut off your access!

But if you’re a natural saver and don’t use credit cards to spend more than you need to, you can take advantage of your cards to sneakily save money.

First, use store cards to save big money when you must shop. By using an Amazon.com Store Card, for example, anyone can save 3% on every Amazon purchase, and Prime Members can save 5%!

Second, you can seriously benefit from credit card rewards programs. Over the last four years, I personally averaged $918 per year in rewards. That’s almost an extra thousand bucks a year by just changing my method of payment for the things I already buy!

I put everything I can on cards: groceries, clothes, toiletries, travel, gas…at one point my electric company accepted credit cards as payment, so I even used it for that!

But my favorite thing to charge to my credit card is work expenses. I put company lunches, association dues for the entire staff, and work travel expenses on my credit card. Then my company reimburses me at the end of the month so I can pay off the full balance, and I get to keep all my rewards points! It’s a beautiful thing!

Take advantage of these rewards programs if you can! NerdWallet has an awesome rewards card comparison tool that uses your spending habits and credit score to recommend the most beneficial card for your situation!

Transfer Your Credit Card Debt to a 0% APR Card

Speaking of smart ways to use credit cards, let’s talk about using a 0% APR card to save you tons of money.

Are you swimming in credit card debt? What is the APR (annual percentage rate) on your card(s)? The APR is basically the amount of interest you’re charged for having debt. The average APR is currently 15.07% according to creditcards.com. This means if you carry just $1,000 in credit card debt this year, it will cost you $150.70 in interest. But most of us with credit card debt have more like $16,061 in debt, so at 15.07%, we’re paying $2,420.39 in interest each year!

What if you could transfer some of your existing credit card debt with the high APR to a new credit card with 0% APR? You still make your monthly payments, but you’re not charged any interest for the introductory period (usually 12-24 months). Brilliant, right?! You could potentially save hundreds or thousands in interest!

There are some caveats, though. Check out our credit card hacks post for the details.

Pay Down High-Interest Debt the Smart Way

This is one of our favorite ways to save money! And for good reason; just a little planning can save you tens of thousands of dollars.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to pay off debt. We call the right way “The Champagne Waterfall” (you might have heard it called the “Snowball Method”).

In a post dedicated to paying off debt with the Champagne Waterfall, we saw how $93,638 of debt (student loans, a car loan, and credit cards) can actually end up costing you $157,480 and can take 20 years and 10 months to pay off. Gross!

Then we worked our champagne magic. Instead of only paying the minimum amount due on each debt, we decided to add $200 every month to pay down our debt faster. But we didn’t split up that $200 between all the debts; we put the full $200 toward the debt with the highest interest rate.

Then we kept doing that until the debt with the highest interest was totally paid off. The next month, we took the amount we usually spent on that first debt and put it all toward the next highest-interest debt in line. And on and on until all debts were paid off.

So we had to spend an extra $200/month on debt. That’s the sucky part.

But here’s the great part: instead of costing $157,480 and can take 20 years and 10 months to pay off, our debt now only cost us $118,895 total and took just 7 years and 7 months to pay off.

That’s a savings of $38,585 and over 13 years of your life!

Seriously, go check out that Champagne Waterfall post for the details and a chance to get our totally free Champagne Waterfall Calculator to see how much you can save!

Oh, and if you’re wondering where the eff an extra $200 is going to come from, we have resources to help with that too. Our favorite way is to make more money (because you can only cut your expenses so far, right?). Browse our posts on ways to make money.

Use Your Tax Write-Offs and Deductions

Ok, the US income tax system is jacked up! So jacked up that the average American can’t even figure out how to calculate the amount of tax they have to pay each year.

I did a little experiment one year: I had my taxes calculated three separate times. Once by Turbo Tax (the most common software used to file your own taxes), once by H&R Block, and once by a private accountant. Turbo Tax said I was entitled to a $150 refund. H&R Block said I owed $280. And the accountant said I was entitled to a $560 refund.  What the heck?!

The difference is that the accountant found a bunch of legitimate tax write-offs and deductions we could use to lower our taxes. See, Jarrod is in video game design, and because his games, game systems, and graphic novels are all required for industry-related research, they are all legitimate business expenses! So they are legit deductions. Any money we spend on that stuff is money we don’t have to pay income tax on. Who knew?! It’s not like they teach you how to file your taxes in school (and why not?!).

Of course there are a bunch of asinine rules about applying these write-offs, so we leave the tax prep to a professional. Feel free to check out the details of my experiment and my conclusion on when you should file your own tax return.

Have a Goal

Goals are powerful! Goals give you a reason to take action.

Which is more compelling to you:

• I’m going to save money this year; OR
• I’m going to save $8,000 this year so I can take my dream trip to Paris next spring

No contest, right?

It might sound stupid, but just giving yourself a goal is a sneaky way to save money. It gives you a reason to save when you might otherwise blow that money on little daily things that don’t mean nearly as much to you as the thing worth saving for.

And as we know, that which gets measured gets improved. If you’re tracking your progress toward a goal, you’re more likely to reach it, partly because it’s sort of always in the back of your mind, so you’re always taking little steps to reach it. It’s like the classic Napoleon Hill book, “Think and Grow Rich”.

Do yourself a favor and write down your savings goal. Preferably somewhere you can see it every day.

Check for Unclaimed Funds

Have you ever checked your state treasurer’s office to see if you have unclaimed funds (also called “unclaimed money” or “unclaimed property”)? It’s a lot more common than you would think. You might have overpaid taxes or have escrow payments waiting to be refunded to you, and if you don’t claim it within a certain time frame, your state is entitled to it.

Los Angeles Times reported in 2015 that California gains $400,000,000 per year in unclaimed property. Yeah, $400 MILLION per year just in California.

The good news is it’s pretty simple to claim your money once you know what to look for and how to do it. Just google your state treasurer’s unclaimed property (like “California Treasurer unclaimed property”), and you’ll be able to find their website.

Smaller states might just have quarterly PDF reports listing names and amounts, but most states have a database search, so you can type in your name and some basic personal info to see if they have anything for you. If they do, there will be a link to a form you can complete to claim your money. You might also need to provide a copy of your ID to prove it’s you making the claim.

You probably won’t have any big money sitting there, but it just takes a few minutes to check once each year when you do your financial check-up. Time well spent!

Refinance Your Student Loans

Your monthly student loan payments are probably one of your biggest expenses, right after housing and transportation. Refinancing for a better interest rate lowers the total amount you’ll pay over the course of the loan, potentially saving tens of thousands. And it lowers your monthly payment, so you save money each month for the next 10 or 15 years!

There are a few things to understand before you refinance your student loans. So we have a full post devoted just to student loan refi’s.

Make Your Debt Payments Bi-Weekly

One last item on today’s list of sneaky ways to save money: make your debt payments bi-weekly instead of monthly.

If you make monthly payments, you’re making 12 payments per year, right? But if you pay half your monthly payment every 2 weeks instead, you’ll make 26 half-payments, which is the equivalent of 13 monthly payments each year. And you probably won’t even miss that money!

How much can this little change possibly save?

Let’s say you have a $60,000 student loan with a 6% interest rate. Over 15 years, your monthly payment is $506.31. Making this monthly payment, you’ll end up paying $31,136.54 in total interest.

But if you pay $253.16 every two weeks instead, you’ll end up paying just $26,954.04 in total interest.

So you save $4,182.50 with this one sneaky tweak!

Good luck with your savings. Hope you enjoyed our sneaky ways to save. If you’re wonderding what to do with your savings (like, should it sit in a savings account? or a CD? or what?), check out our post on the 3 accounts every woman needs to grow her savings. It’ll tell you exactly what to save where 🙂

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Thoughts on our list? Do you have any other tips for sneaky ways to save money?