Hello, and welcome to my financial journey. If you haven’t seen my previous posts, my husband and I are finally cracking down on our finances.
Our goals are to pay off all of our consumer debt, save a ton on money, invest a ton of money, and live with a lot more freedom!
Our first goal is 1. No Debt.
We already padded our account with a small savings, that way if we end up with an emergency of some sort that requires cash we aren’t racking up our credit cards that we’re trying to pay off. Been there, done that, definitely learned our lesson.
Building up a savings was a lot quicker and easier than I thought once I put all of these into action, and I wanted to share our little tips and tricks so we can help you get that savings padded as well!
It’s the little things..
The best way to save money is trick yourself into not even realizing it. There is just something that holds me back about transferring large amounts out of our checking over to our savings, but I am a QUEEN at being totally okay with a ton of little purchases. But when you have so many different things here and there, all of those little transactions add up.
I’m sure you know this in the most negative way. You look at your account and you’re like “where did all my money go??” and then as you scroll through you notice it’s all those little charges here and there that add up to a few hundred dollars.
Now, imagine if that few hundred dollars was tucked away safely to where you can’t spend it out of your checking!
That is what we’re going to be doing by implementing these tricks.
How to Trick Yourself Into Saving
1.Acorns
My number one, absolute favorite thing I have come across is acorns investments. Acorns makes it easy to save and invest. Join me and you’ll get a free $5 investment! As a perk of referring users, I can get a reward too. Learn more and see terms here.
I have my account set up to “round up”, which means every time I make a purchase, it rounds it up to the nearest dollar and transfers that change into my acorns account.
So for example, if I spend $13.45, acorns will transfer $.55 into my account.
BUT acorns is also partnered with a ton of different stores, so when you shop there, a certain dollar amount or percentage (depending on the store) will be deposited into your account on behalf of acorns.
These investments are put into a portfolio of stocks and bonds for you, which you get to choose your “risk” with – I went with the moderate one.
I feel like it is also a great way to get your feet wet with investing, which is going to be step 3 of our financial journey.
You can also set up reoccurring investments, but so far we have just left it at roundups for a fun little savings. We are already at $535 for our account, and that’s just all change! Again, if you use this link you can get a free $5 investment. Get your $5 here!
2. Rounding & Clearing
While were on the topic of rounding up, another fun one is rounding and clearing. What you’re going to do is you round and clear your paycheck either the day of, or the day before you get paid.
If your check is $1,856.44 then you are going to automatically transfer $56.44 to your savings.
If you stick to doing this every paycheck you’re going to be so happy once you see that little extra add up!
3. Cut an Expense -> Add it to Savings
This one I suggest when you’re in the “savings” step. If you decide to cut an expense, whether that’s:
- a subscription of some sort,
- a cable bill
- you pay of your phone with verizon so you’re getting $33.33 off your future bills
- etc.
Instead of just saying “woohoo! I have an extra $xx to spend every month” – no, nope – you already know you can somewhat survive with that bill, so now instead of having that bill on autopay every month, set up an automatic payment to your savings instead!
Again, I suggest this if you’re in the savings stage, but if you’re in the no debt stage, then this is a great thing to add into the snowball method!
4. Open a HYS at a Different Bank
HYS – High Yield Savings. This is so important! We never knew/cared/looked at one of these before. We would pull money out in cash, or just transfer our money into our savings account that was just added on when we opened up our checking.
Now, we make sure to move all of our money into our High Yield Savings account that is at a completely different bank than our main account.
For one, this makes it a lot harder to transfer money back to our checking, it normally takes 3-5 days. This helps so much with impulse purchases. When you have your money in the savings account that is attached to your checking its extremely easy to move money back and forth. For two, 99% of the time there is no interest being gained in that savings account, and if there is its normally not much.
Right now, after a quick google search, it looks like Capital One and Discover Bank have the highest rates. Discover compounds monthly though, so that’s better than yearly! This rate just means that your money will be growing while its there, free money is never a bad idea!
5. Tipping the Chef
This one is a fun one! Obviously we all know its a lot cheaper and most of the time healthier, to eat at home. Put a “tip jar” in your kitchen, and every time you make the choice to eat in instead of go out, tip the chef! Leave whatever you would have tipped the waiter at the restaurant. Then at the end of the month see how much you saved in JUST tips!
6. White Out Days
These are a fun game to play! White out days are your no spend days. I would try to shoot for 2 a week, but see what is capable for you. On these days you aren’t spending a DIME. (minus bills – pay those on time for sure). But no swiping your card(s), no paying cash, no online purchases.
Having these every so often will also help you build the habit of being present and not spend spend spending. It will also help you be more creative when you run into something that you would normally figure money could easily fix!
7. Grocery Pickups
I will never go into a store if I don’t have to. I simply cannot trust myself. I am a sucker for marketing. I will overspend what I plan 100% of the time.
With doing online pickups though, I can add to cart over and over and then see my total BEFORE checking out and think “ehhh maybe I don’t need all of that” and recalibrate.
It’s so much easier to stick to a budget and shop around for the best deal.
8. Fetch Rewards
I know there’s so many different rewards, cash back, etc etc options out there. I’ve tried quite the handful but most of them I just could not keep up with. I really stink at saving receipts, let alone taking the time to sit down and scan them.
Insert Fetch – It’s the app I use to turn my shopping receipts into free gift cards. It also gives me personalized offers for my favorite brands, stores and restaurants. Very easy, super fun.
There are monthly point challenges with friends, exciting sweepstakes and free points up for grabs every day.
Sign up for free with my referral code (JEYG55) and we’ll each earn points when you snap your first receipt.
With Fetch Rewards they make it too easy, it’s seriously the easiest rewards system I’ve tried so far. At least once a month I can just open the app and click the button to scan e receipts and Fetch will go through my email, my Walmart account and my Amazon account and scan everything for points. They also have a button where you can manually scan in your paper receipts (but to be honest I think I’ve only done that twice).
Again, you can sign up for free here using the referral code JEYG55, hook up your accounts and get to scanning!
9. Drink More Water
No really, hear me out on this one. We used to buy sodas, capri suns, juices and Starbucks, regularly.
Now I know people gets so irritated when others suggest to “stop getting your Starbucks every morning and make it at home”. (Me, I was people). BUT they had a point!
We stopped buying all of that (except for an occasional Starbucks I will admit, but not nearly what I was doing before), because when you have kids and you have all of that around, they will refuse to drink water. It literally made it 10x harder.
Now lets add that up for a minute –
- 2 12 packs of sodas $14.96
- capri sun $9.43
- 2 64oz Ocean Spray juices $6.72
- 4 Starbucks coffees (that’s being gracious, it was definitely more) $33
TOTAL = $64.11
So not only is drinking water healthier for you, but its also cheaper! If I put that $64 into savings every two weeks instead, I would be saving an extra $128 a month!
10. Unfollow Influencers
This one was really hard for me, because I am definitely a sucker for cute aesthetics and curated feeds. But I stopped following a ton of influencers and boy has it saved me so much money!
I’ll admit now that I wouldn’t admit to the difference at first, but then I started following a few of my past favorites again and found myself buying the most random things. Things I survived without fine enough before. So, I clicked the unfollow button again.
This has also helped me so much with growing more genuine connections with other people I actually know and follow online.
11. Start Your Own Side Business
This is not the easiest, but I do think it’s one of the greatest ones to note! I’ve heard before, if you feel like you’re out of money learn to make more instead of trying to find ways to cut back. I also think it’s so smart to have money coming from different avenues as well.
We actually started an inflatable bounce house business, which was a lot of money upfront, and a lot of hard, laboring work as well, but it does bring in good money.
I also started this blog, which probably won’t turn around and bring me in almost $1k this weekend, but I do have faith in it to grow. And it cost me about next to nothing to start! Not only that but it’s fun.
I think starting your own business is great just to have something that is yours. Something you create. Something that you can bet on yourself with, and something that will teach you thinks a normal w-2 job can’t.
The options are also endless. You could start a blog, detail cars, clean homes, make t-shirts, cups and/or hats, landscape, do dumps runs or junk removal.
Whatever it is, I just hope it sparks a bit of joy in you. I’m not saying it’ll be rainbows and sunshine, but it’ll be something you love even when you think you hate it.
There are my favorite ways to trick yourself into saving more money! I hope at least one of them is something you want to start implementing, if not all of them! I have had so much fun on this financial journey so far – even though I’m only in step 1 lol. I think I just really look forward to where I’m going and see that I’m actually making progress to getting there.
If you have any money savings tips you use, I would love to hear them.
I also made a Money Tracker Excel spreadsheet that I use every month and every week to track what’s coming in, going out, and to see what’s leftover to delegate. Wednesday mornings are my money dates, I suggest checking in and going over everything at least once, preferably twice a week.
Good luck on your savings ♡
– S
