35 Money Saving Life Hacks
Saving money is definitely harder than spending it. It’s a great idea to save a portion of your income for long-term goals like retirement, but there are also a couple of ways you make little savings inside your home that can build up to a bigger amount.
Consider your purchasing and cleaning habits and see where you might slash some cost. Household cleaners, food, grocery items and even personal products can cost a lot commercially, but you just have to be a little creative and resourceful to make way for some extra money.
Order Groceries Online
It can be tempting to make impulse buys while you’re grocery shopping, especially if you shop while you’re hungry, but you just need to stick to your budget so you only buy what you need. One good way to do this is to order groceries online.
Online groceries offer more selection of items than a physical store does, especially on eco-friendly products. Online groceries also offer detailed information on the product and display product reviews so you know exactly what to expect when the items are delivered to you.
Shopping for groceries online makes it less likely that you’ll spend unnecessarily. Since you can shop from the comfort of your own home and at your own pace, you get to think over your purchases carefully since you’re not being rushed.
But most of all, shopping for groceries online saves you the cost of fuel as well. Whether you’re making one or two trips per week and driving to different stores each time, you can’t deny that the cost of fuel adds up to your expenses when buying groceries. Having the groceries delivered to your doorstep gives you that kind of savings, plus it lessens your carbon footprint too!
Don’t Use Shaving Cream
Did you just run out of shaving cream? Instead of running to the store to buy another bottle, consider the following options and pocket the savings.
For zero cost, shave while you’re still in the shower. You don’t need a cream for this but the results are almost the same.
Instead of shaving cream, you may also use baby oil or hair conditioner to the job. Simply lather the oil or conditioner into the area as you would with a shaving cream and shave away. Both products are slick by nature, so shaving should be just as easy. You may also want to try cheaper alternatives like extra virgin olive oil, shea butter, or soap in place of your expensive bottle of shaving cream.
Use Digital Thermostat and Set the Default Temperature
Summer and winter can get uncomfortable if you don’t set the temperature at home at the most comfortable level. Heating and cooling can get very expensive, but more so if you’re heating or cooling an empty place.
The digital thermostat is one of the best investments you make for your home because you can program it to turn off and on at certain points of the day. When the house is empty for several hours because everyone is off to work or school, the thermostat will turn itself off. You can set it to turn on 30 minutes before a family member arrives at home.
Also consider nailing the most comfortable default temperature at your home for both seasons and set it in the thermostat. For instance, if you’ve always been comfortable at 66F during winter, check if you can bring it 5 degrees lower and use thicker blankets at night to feel comfortable. After all, every degree of adjustment you make on the thermostat can save you 1% of energy, much more if you can adjust the temperature to 5-10 degrees.
Always Carry Cash
Although credit cards have become more and more popular over the years, nothing beats using cash. For one, you’re more likely to re-think your purchases when paying with cash because you actually see the money change hands, unlike when you swipe a credit card. This helps you avoid impulse purchases.
Cash can also be very convenient in different situations. It’s practical to use cash when splitting the tab or purchase with a friend. You need cash for tipping, tolls and in other forms of emergency when credit card is not accepted.
You don’t have to carry a lot of cash with you when you’re taking your credit card with you. But for convenience’s sake, having a $20 or $50 bill at all times with you will certainly come in handy in many different situations.
Electric teapot to boil water
The trick to really saving money from boiling water is to just boil the amount of water that you need. But between an electric teapot and microwave, the former provides more savings because electric teapots automatically shut off when water has reached the boiling point. Both microwave or the gas hob will require a more careful attention.
Use Dryer Sheets More Than Once
Just one use of the dryer sheet isn’t very economical. Instead of throwing away the dryer sheet on the first use, soak it up a bit in a fabric softener and you can re-use them up to three more times!
There are also other uses for dryer sheets. Stick it to the bottom of your drawer or wardrobe to give your clothes and effortless nice scent. You can also soak it up a little and place near the window or fan for a zero-cost air freshener.
Have a Garden In Your Backyard
Food can easily make up the biggest expense of your household budget. And with rising cost of food at the grocery store, it certainly makes sense to grow your own perishables instead!
Starting a backyard vegetable garden will give you an ample supply of fresh fruits and vegetables and cut your food cost significantly. You can plant tomatoes, onions, garlic, potatoes, celery, green vegetables, beans, and many other vegetables that you use in a daily basis. It’s also a great idea to have your own supply of herbs like thyme, basil, mint, parsley, and oregano.
Fresh food straight from your garden is way better and healthier than store-bought and canned ones. Plus, you only need to invest on seeds, fertilizer, and some effort on taking care of them and your garden should give you bountiful supply of fresh fruits and vegetables the whole year round.
Check Your Door & Window Seals
Are your windows or doors not closing properly? If yes, you’re wasting hundreds of dollars on electricity cost each year.
Leaky doors and windows force your heating and cooling system to work harder than necessary. The air or draft that escapes make it harder for your system to cool or heat the entire place, so it tends to work double time and consume more energy than necessary.
Consider checking around your home for drafts and leak to correct them by installing weatherstripping and caulking into your doors and windows. If your refrigerator door is not sealing correctly, have the sealer replaced. Also check the entire house, including pipes in the attic and in the basement to make sure you don’t miss any issue. This will allow your home to be heated and cooled in a more comfortable level and provide you savings from your utility bills.
Make Your Own (Natural) Cleaners
Commercial cleaners can set you back a couple of dollars each month. While you need to maintain a clean home due to health and aesthetic reasons, you also don’t have to spend as much if you can make your own natural cleaners at home.
You can make different cleaners from household products. For instance, you can mix water, white vinegar, and 70% rubbing alcohol into a spray bottle for a cheaper version of a glass cleaner. You can also mix lemon and borax to create your own heavy duty scrub. Also, you may combine water and baking soda for an all-purpose cleaner.
The thing is, you can always find household products and items that may easily double as cleaners. They’re cheaper and more environment-friendly too!
Clean Your Dryer Vent
Your dryer vent may be one of the less noticeable part of your dryer, but it’s also one of the most important when it comes to savings. Lint that’s trapped in the dryer vent and lint trap has the potential for causing fires. It can also be a cause for the dryer to weaken in performance.
You want to dry your clothes in one cycle in order to save money and minimize the cost of your power bill. Otherwise, you will be wasting more money just trying to get your clothes properly dried.
Cleaning your dryer vent doesn’t have to be chore. You simply have to check the components of your dryer regularly and remove lint to prevent build-up. You may have to call in the pros if the amount of lint has come to a dangerous level. Otherwise, simple and regular maintenance of your dryer should already save precious dollars.
Keep Your Refrigerator Coils Clean
The refrigerator is one of the most power-consuming appliance you own in your household and dirty coils will result to even more power consumption!
If you’ve ever inspected your refrigerator close enough, you’ll see coils that may located at the back or at the bottom of the refrigerator. What the coils do is to dissipate heat. However, when grease,dirt and other elements have caked up over time on these coils, your refrigerator may turn noisy. That’s one indication that you have dirty refrigerator coils.
Of course you’d want to take a closer look to see how much work those coils need. The more build-up there is, the harder the refrigerator has to work in order to cool food inside. In turn, your refrigerator will use more energy.
What you want to do is inspect the coils regularly. If they’re dirty, simply unplug the refrigerator from the wall and vacuum the coils. Better to use a hand-held attachment so you can also clean the nooks and crannies. After which, your refrigerator should run more silently and become more energy-efficient.
Keep Your Freezer / Fridge Stocked
One of the least known hacks for saving money in the kitchen is to keep your fridge stocked. That might sound ironic since you’ll need to shop more to stock your fridge, but keeping your fridge/freezer full will make it more power-efficient and consume a reasonable amount of energy.
You might not realize it but an almost empty freezer will make the appliance to work harder to keep the temperature cool. However, when there’s meat, water bottles, and other essentials stocked in your freezer, the already cold items will help dissipate the coolness to other products. Hence, your freezer will only have to work at standard rate and not consume unnecessary energy.
Put a Brick In Your Toilet Tank
Your toilet uses more water than any other water-related activity in your house except showering/bathing. You may take less time in the shower, but if you’re making numerous trips to the bathroom each day, you’ll end up eating into those savings.
One of old tricks of saving water while using the toilet is to drop a brick in the water tank. This allows water to be displaced with the same pressure, yet with less than half the normal amount. However, real bricks may cause plumbing problems later on, so a newer innovation is to drop a rubberized brick into the tank which produces the same result, but minus the potential plumbing problem in the future.
Put Cheaper Cleaner In Your Swiffer
The Swiffer is probably one of the most useful cleaning tools you can use around the home. But the disposable parts also mean you’ll have to keep buying new ones to replace the old and spent ones, a move that doesn’t make sense for your budget.
Instead of buying the proprietary disposable parts like the pads and you can opt for generic products to save money. Or, to even save more money, you can opt for microfiber cloth to replace the pads. When the cloths have become too dirty to use, simply pop it into the washer and it should be ready again for another session of cleaning.
Buy a K-Cup & Use Your Own Coffee
Keurig cups or K-cups are all the rage right now, especially among people who simply can’t toss their undying love for coffee. But getting your dose of caffeine this way can prove too heavy for your budget.
If you simply can’t give up your K-Cup, consider using coupons, buying in bulk, and during sales to maximize your savings. Also consider using a reusable K-Cup filter so you don’t have to keep buying a new cup. If you’re not so brand specific but loves the K-cup, you just need to pick a bag of coffee to use with your cup and you should be able to have a fresh cup of coffee going at a minimal cost.
Switch To LED Light Bulbs
If you’re still lighting your home with CFL, or worse, the old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs, then you’re missing big on savings!
LED light bulbs used to be expensive, but manufacturing them has now become cheaper so replacing each bulb in your home with LED bulb should now be easier on the wallet. LED light bulbs are also long-term investment because they can last for as long as 20 years and use around 80% less energy than previous generations of light bulbs.
Make Your Own Laundry Detergent
If for some reason you’re always doing the laundry in your household, it is worth looking into making your own laundry detergent than buying a commercial one.
A branded 3-liter laundry detergent can cost around $15, but if you can make a huge batch of your own laundry detergent, you will be able to see price difference between a commercial and DIY one. Of course, you need to be vigilant when shopping for ingredients so you get the best deals and get even more savings.
Make Bigger Meals And Eat Leftovers
Throwing food away is the same as throwing money away. Did you make a huge batch of stew and now you don’t know how to consume it all? Don’t throw the leftovers because you can re-invent them into new dishes that you can consume on your next meals.
Leftover meat can be great in pizzas and stir-fry. You can even make a brand new burrito or tortilla from leftovers. Just drizzle with salsa and sprinkle with cheese and you’re good to go. Even fruits can be canned, turned into jams and jellies before they go bad.
You might also want to make a huge batch of meal intentionally so you save time and money from cooking individual meals each time around. Cook a huge batch of meal, let it cool, and pack into individual serving portion before freezing. Each time you need to eat, you simply need to pull out one and re-heat the dish. You can even brown bag the meal to work and dodge the cost of expensive cafeteria food.
Air Dry Your Clothes
Your electric dryer has the enormous task of drying wet clothes that contain a lot of water that it needs to get rid of. Unfortunately, the dryer can make up 6% of your overall power use.
Take advantage of the sun and give your dryer a break by hanging your clothes on the line on a hot day. This way, your clothes will dry naturally and you wouldn’t have to consume power from using the dryer.
Save All Your Change
Saving is pretty much a habit. Saving all your change in jar or piggy bank will build up over time, so instead of using the coins in a vending machine, dump them all up into a jar. Count the coins at the end of the months and bring them to your bank. Deposit the money into your savings account and watch it grow over time.
Turn Off Your Lights When Not In Use
Whether you’re at home for just 2 hours or for the weekend, it pays to turn off the lights and some savings from your electric bill.
Walk through your home before you leave and switch the lights off as you go. While you do this, unplug appliances that are not in use. With a national average of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you can save as much as 7.2 cents if you switch off four pieces of bulbs operating with 20 watts in a 9-hour period. The more bulbs you have at home and the longer you’re going to be away, the more difference you’ll see with the savings.
Stop Going Out To Eat / Takeout
Eating out or ordering take out is fast, easy, and convenient, but it’s also super expensive. A single meal for one person in a fast food establishment can easily set you back $7-8. If you do this a couple of times a week, you will end up spending north of $200 each month. Plus, you pay for the consequences of eating unhealthy too.
While it might be difficult to give up dining out altogether, consider reducing the frequency. Instead, cook more at home, shop at the farmer’s market or community market, and cook your food from scratch. This will prove more budget-friendly and better for the health conscious.
Buy a Water Filter
If you don’t like the taste of tap water but don’t want to spend as much on bottled water, consider getting a water filter instead to get the best of both worlds. Bottled water can get expensive fast, especially if you’re such a water drinker, but you can always refill your bottle and get the same taste at a lower cost with the use of a water filter.
You can find high-grade water filters that cost around $100, the same amount that you’ll spend for 4 months of bottled water consumption. The water filter will pay for itself over time.
Refinance Your House
If you’ve built up some equity on your home, you may be eligible for a refinance. Basically, you take a new loan with lower interest and use this to refinance the mortgage of your home. Compared to your original mortgage, the refinance rate is significantly lower up to almost half.
Refinancing your home can be such an excellent move especially if you plan ahead what you want to do with that “extra” money that’s supposed to be intended for the original mortgage payment. You don’t want to think that you have free money, or else that will just defeat the purpose of the refinance. Instead, use that amount to fatten your savings or slim down your debts.
Switch To Cloth Napkins & Dish Towels
Cloth napkins and dish towels may seem a bit more expensive than paper towels upfront, but they can also serve as a better and long-term investment and provide you more savings.
Paper towels are disposable. One use and off they go to the trash bin. But you can re-use cloth napkins and dish towels over and over again. When they get soiled and dirty, simply throw them into the washer and they’d come up clean and ready to use once again. That also means you’ll have less trash to deal with.
Pay Bills Online
Whether you want to save money from the fuel cost of driving from one service provider to the other or prevent the risk of missing bill payments that would otherwise incur late fees, paying bills online could provide you a solution for both.
The rise of the internet has made it possible for you to pay your bills from the comforts of your own home. Even better if you can automate these payments and not miss a single bill in the future. The key is to have enough funds on your account so you can just deposit your payments online. With online bill payment, you’ll also be able to collate data, check history and do many other virtual transactions that’s simply not available with physical payments.
Make Coffee At Home
It’s time to ditch the habit of dropping $5 per cup of Starbucks and start reaping the benefits of home-brewed coffee. Home-brewed coffee often tastes better than store-bought ones and if you can invest around 5 minutes each morning to brew your own coffee, you can save around $2.50 each time.
Enroll In Grocery Store Rewards Programs
Loyalty cards and rewards programs are now all the rage, and that’s for good reason – they promise consumers future savings/discounts if they purchase the same brand or from the same store.
You will not enjoy the savings from enrolling in a grocery store rewards programs right away as you will have to collect points before you can redeem your prize. But if you’re making two trips to the grocery per week, getting into the program will prove to be worth it.
There are also other benefits of being enrolled in such programs. You get to know sales in advance, get discount vouchers, and many other perks. If you use them wisely, you can pocket savings at the checkout counter.
Get Rid Of Your Cable TV
According to the Federal Communications Commission, a basic cable service can cost $66 per month. While having cable is a great way to keep yourself entertained, cheaper options are now on the rise.
You can get most, if not all cable channels, at a fraction of the cost of your cable bill by subscribing to alternatives like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. If you have an excellent internet service provider, you can upgrade your subscription or bundle your package to include these features and you reap more savings.
Pack Your Lunch
You might feel that bringing your own lunch to work brings back memories of your school days, but practicality-wise, brown bagging your food will help you save thousands of dollars each year. A cup of coffee typically costs $2 or more, cafeteria food isn’t exactly cheap, and if you’re eating in a fancier place during lunch break, you’ll be prompted to spend even more.
However, you can save more money my bringing last night’s leftover to lunch and re-heating it at the microwave in your office. Instead of buying bottled beverages, just bring your own. Also, bringing your own lunch will help you control portions, choice, and quality of ingredients.
Change Your Home Air Filter Every Month
HVAC professionals suggest that you replace your air filter each season or once in each quarter. A dirty air filter will not only cause your HVAC system to work more and on the double, you also tend to compromise the quality of your indoor air.
However, replacing the air filter will result in around 15% less in power consumption. Add in the fact that heating and cooling your home comprise up to half of your total electric bill and you’ll soon begin to see the difference of a clean and dirty air filter.
Wash Clothes In Cold Water
Doing the laundry is an inevitable chore, but you can bring the cost down by using cold water instead of hot water. The cost of doing your laundry comprise mostly of using cold water which can take 90% of the total cost. If you’re doing around 3 loads of laundry each week and use hot water each time, you’ll spend somewhere between $30-$100 more than when using cold water.
Although there’s a running myth that hot water cleans better than cold water, it turns out that you get the same results regardless of the temperature of the water. Therefore, if you want to maximize your savings and reduce your carbon footprint, switch to using cold water now.
Install Solar Screens On Your Windows
A lot of people are now taking to solar screening their windows both for aesthetic and practical reasons. The main reason for installing solar screens on your windows is to reduce the heat coming from the sun. Direct heat can cause your carpet, curtains, and carpet to fade. Also, the warmth of the sun will be countered by your air-conditioner which will oftentimes have to work more in order to keep your home cool.
Solar screen windows can be a relatively pricey investment, but it will soon pay for itself with the savings you get from your power bill.
Do Your Own Nails
Getting your nails done in a salon can cost you a couple of hundred dollars each month, but doing it yourself can slash that cost in more than half. You can change your nail color more often and incur just the minimal cost. If you don’t know how to do your own nails, you can watch tutorial videos on Youtube which is also free.
Ignore The Joneses
The Joneses seem to have the prettiest and fanciest of things in the neighborhood, but they’re also probably also in a lot of debt just to keep up with their lifestyle. Ignore the Joneses and mind your own finances. Know what makes you happy and what’s valuable to you, even if that means buying a smaller house or driving a used car. The Joneses simply look like they have a lot, but they’re just doing that to keep up their appearance at the expense of their finances.
Recap
Even the smallest changes in your habits and choices could amount to something big. There are many other life hacks that can provide you some great savings, you just need to look around your home to see where you might be able to bring down the cost experience more savings.
Cary Silverman is a consummate entrepreneur having sold multiple companies during his 20 years of business experience in the financial industry, but for him, it isn’t about the money. His success is rooted in his passion to focus on doing something better today than it was done yesterday. These days, he’s the CEO of Waldo General, Inc. that oversees the operation of King of Kash.