13 Ways to Save Money That’ll Make You Say “I Should’ve Been Doing This the Whole Time”

I may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

Hey guys, this post adds to my previous post that gave you 15 ways to save money and invest it. These 13 ways are even easier and you can apply them to your lives instantly. If you haven’t tried some of these out yet, please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

With that being said, here are 13 more ways to save and invest more money that’ll have you saying you should’ve been doing this the whole time. If you follow these strategies, you’ll help yourself tremendously if you put extra cash into an S&P 500 index fund over 40 years even without including dividends being reinvested.

 

Related posts:

• Prevent Yourself from Overspending: Open a Savings Account Today
• Save Your Money and Quit Going to the Gym
• The One Habit Eating Your Net Worth and How to Stop it Now
• The 10 Questions You Need to Ask your Advisor ASAP
• 66% of Americans are Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars

 

And the 13 ways are:

 

Iron your own clothes instead of paying for drying cleaning

• I’ll admit, I haven’t gotten there yet, and it’s only because I’m so bad at ironing and it takes me so long to not have a crease in a random spot in my shirt or pants
• Trying to iron 4 pants in one night frustrates the hell out of me! Which is why I try to get away with using the Downy wrinkle releaser I freakin’ love this thing
• But if you’re better than me, at $1.50 a shirt dry cleaned plus $4 for a pair of pants getting dry cleaned about once a month, I’m shelling out $500 a year
• If I saved and invested every year, I’d have $114,292 extra, so I need to get better with that

 

Eat out less

• I know people who not only buy lunch every day but eat out for dinner on average 3 times a week because they’re too lazy to make their own food
• The average household spends $3,008
• My girlfriend and I rarely go out to eat and if we do it’s on average once a month
• We save a tremendous amount of money which is why I’m able to save over 30% of my income, it makes all the difference
• Even if you saved and reinvested half of the $3,008 every year for 40 years, it would turn into $342,876

 

Stop going to happy hour every week

• In NYC, even if you went once a week, you would probably be spending at least $5 a drink and let’s be real, you’re not buying only one
• If you go out every week and get 3 drinks each time, after a whole year, that adds up to $780
• You could have $178,295 extra in 40 years from an S&P 500 index fund instead!

 

Get a Crock-Pot

• I LOVE my Crock-Pot, my girlfriend always makes fun of me
• But it saves me so much time more than anything else
• You can find it on Amazon for a great price
  • It’s currently the best deal of all Amazon sellers
  • And how did I know that?  My awesome Honey plugin
• All I do is prep at the most 20 minutes on most meals and let the Crock-Pot do the remaining job the rest of the day
• And it makes the apartment smell really good!
• Use this to help you eat out less and get that $342,876 extra for your retirement fund

 

Chegg

• • I used Chegg throughout my whole college career
  • Without Chegg, I would’ve had to shell out over $1,000
  • You can save up to 90% on textbooks it’s incredible
  • Returning the books is also free as long as you remember to use their prepaid shipping label
  • The best part, in my opinion, is you can always extend a rental without any hassle
  • If I had thought to invest the $4,000, 40 years later that would’ve turned into $59,898

 

TravelPirates

• • TravelPirates offers great deals on vacations all over the world including all-inclusive vacations
  • The only catch is, the deal applies to select airports, so if it’s not an airport close to you, you’d have to take an extra flight, so if that’s the case I don’t know how worth it that would be
  • But obviously, if the airport is by you and the deal is during a month you’d like to take a vacation, I’d give it a shot even if you only use it once a year and save $100
  • You could turn that into $22,858 with an S&P 500 index fund at a 7% performance rate, not too shabby

 

Take a staycation

•  Sometimes I love these even more because I don’t have to shell out hundreds, (or one time over $1,000) for a vacation
• I take at least one staycation a year, probably saving me on average $800 or so
• And each time I make sure to invest the difference into my S&P 500 index fund or when a stock I’ve invested in is at a great price, I’ll put money into it
• That $800 put away every year can turn into $182,867 at the average market rates after 40 years

 

 Gym membership

• Get rid of it
• They’re scams, there’s no need to have a membership to a gym when you really think about it
• You pay to use all of the equipment every day and you use a fraction of it even if you do go to the gym every day
• In some cases, you could save $120 a month by doing a workout at home
• That’s $1,440 a year and $329,161 after invested for 40 years!

 

 Learn to Cook

• Same idea as eating in, but instead of having to rely on someone else to cook for you, when you’re home alone you’ll know how to whip something healthy together real quick
• It’s way better than eating Cup Noodles or mac and cheese from a box every night
• The best way I think to get started is to use the Crock-Pot above
• You only have to prep the meal and then let the Crock-Pot do the rest for the next several hours
• Once you feel comfortable from there, do your own thing!

 

Buy generic instead of brand name products

• I always see people showing brand loyalty when I go to a CVS or Walgreens
• They don’t even realize the store brand generic stuff is literally the same exact thing, just cheaper
• If you don’t believe me, look at the ingredients, they’ll be listed in the same exact order as the branded product
• Examples of this are DayQuil and NyQuil, toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, etc.
• I end up saving I’d say at least $10 every week maybe more I don’t know
• That’s $520 a year and $118,864 over 40 years invested in an S&P 500 index fund

 

Walk to work when you can

• This is huge for me
• I save money by walking the rest of the way to work instead of taking the subway both ways for 2 stops just over 13 blocks
• Because I take a separate train before the subway, I’d have to swipe my card again to get on the subway, screw that
• That’s $2.75 each time, so $5.50 each day
• If I did that consistently for 48 weeks out of the year, I’d be throwing away $264 a year
• That doesn’t even seem like much, but that compounds into $60,346 over 40 years
• And this was just ONE of my coffee habits

 

Refinance student loans

• Read my post on SoFi to see why I love it so much
• Refinancing on top of cutting the payment plan down from 10 years to around 3 and a half saved my girlfriend thousands of dollars and all of those years dealing with debt
• There are other options out there, but we had such a great experience with SoFi I highly recommend them

 

And there you have it!

What are you doing to save money that seems obvious to you, but your friends aren’t doing?