37 money saving tips you can start using today

hey i hope you're having a really good day today i wanted to share with you a very long list of ways you can start saving money right now not all of these are gonna work for everyone but maybe you can find five or ten on this list that will help you and get you started on the road to debt freedom so let's go but first if you're new around here hello my name is lydia sen and i make videos on frugal and simple living we are a family of six that paid off 36 000 in high interest consumer debt in two years on one very small income and uh lightning mcqueen has come to join this video so this past weekend my husband and i went to the beach for our anniversary but we went we stayed in a beautiful hotel on the beach we had an amazing time while we were there i pulled out my makeup bag that had all of my toiletries in it and i thought man i need to run this thing through the washing machine and then i thought of how long i'd had it years six years i got it when we moved into this house and i realized that one of the ways that i save money is by keeping and holding on to what i have and not buying what i don't need so i opt for higher quality items that i don't have to replace as frequently which kind of brings me to my first tip which is to not buy into trends we live in a world with a lot of fast fashion and trends that come and go with homes i have seen people who are trying to transition their home from farmhouse to boho to keep up with trends and that's not me i like to go with a few classic well-made things i pick something i like it i use it forever and i'm not constantly buying to replace things as they go in and out of trends so i try to focus on getting the best price i can on the highest quality items and then using them forever and not replacing them unless i absolutely have to so i've had the same purse um i had the same wallet i finally replaced it recently i had gotten one at goodwill and i carry those same things over and over and over again my next tip is to try to thrift as much as you can it saves you money it is good for the environment and the thrift store that we use is a locally owned or locally operated thrift store and the proceeds go to help homeless people in our community and so they're all the time running incredible specials incredible deals you can get some amazing fines for really inexpensively and i know that it's also helping families in our community i have bought little pieces of furniture like wooden furniture i bought toys i bought clothes for myself and my kids you name it i like to check the thrift store first before i go other places you can buy it used in high quality for a third of the price do it number three meal plan i have made a ton of videos about meal planning if you are new to that i will link them below i have some easy to follow crock pot recipes i will link to but shop first in your pantry and freezer and fridge use up what you have first check the sales cycle and then make a meal plan based on what you have and what's on sale and only buy foods you know you're going to eat don't buy a bunch of stuff because you think that this ideal version of you will enjoy it buy it because your family will actually consume it number four pack yadang leftovers i got some glass pyrex dishes they have lids they have lasted us a very long time by the way pyrex will replace their lids within two years of your purchase if for some reason they crack or break my husband packs his leftovers every day if my kids and i are going to be out and about we'll pack lunch we do a community school program on fridays so i teach and my kids go to school there one day a week and i will take leftovers and we'll heat them up there and we don't waste a lot of food and we save thousands of dollars a year i actually did the math um and with my husband taking his leftovers the majority of the days so some days he still gets takeout but the majority of the days we save about two thousand dollars per year and we don't waste food for five i don't even remember what number on eat breakfast at home if you are a breakfast eater eat your breakfast at home no a five dollar latte isn't going to make or break your financial picture but when you add up all of these things together it's thousands of dollars if you add that breakfast with that lunch you bought out and then you stopped and picked something up on the drugstore on your way home and oh that looked cute at amazon prime day and you bought it the all these things add up over time and so it's not to completely deny yourself any luxuries it's to be choosy about the luxuries that you bring into your home so that you get the most value out of them and you can also enjoy your money so eat breakfast at home get you some make-ahead smoothies so put your yogurt your fruit your spinach in a mason jar pop that jar into your blender in the morning get you some eggs cook them in your instant pot or boil them on sunday night and parcel them out throughout the week prep as much as you can in advance and it'll save you a lot of time and money do two eat from the pantry challenges a year so make sure that you are consuming everything in your house using it up before you replace it it's good to have a stockpile but make sure that you don't have stuff that's just going to waste so we like to do this in the fall and then again in the spring so usually like march and april or september october and that way we're making sure that like that random bag of rice in the back of the cabinet gets used up or that bag of chicken that's been in the freezer for a few months gets used up and things aren't just getting tossed away shop for insurance deals this is something that i recommend doing every year at least we did this recently and we're going to end up saving 600 a year on our homeowners insurance that is to call and make sure that you're getting the best rate and if you're not be willing to shop around and then if you want to get a better rate from somewhere else and then go back to your current provider and ask them to beat it try that it works so if you're not doing regular insurance audits you're basically burning money on your front porch call your providers and ask for your bills to be lowered i know that sounds crazy actually work with our internet provider we didn't like how much we were paying i still think it's too much but whatever i called them and asked them what they could do to lower our rates because we were loyal customers and they gave me a few things that we could do like sign a contract instead of going month to month they gave us a loyalty discount they gave us the new customer rate they did several things to get that bill lowered by about 15 a month if you are paying credit cards and you have paid your credit cards on time you are a customer in good standing call and see if you can get your credit card interest rate lowered this worked for us when we were paying off our debt we just called we asked them what they could do and they lowered it by about two percentage points this also worked with student loans now the student loan interest rate wasn't lowered by a lot but they told us that we could lower it by point two five percent which sounds like a laughable amount consider that on average you pay five dollars a day in student loan interest alone it will add up over time so see what can happen there's nothing fancy you need to say just tell them you know i've been paying my bills on time i'm working really hard and i want to know what you can do to lower my interest rate if possible always be polite being polite goes a really long way but it says more about who you are as a person don't be polite just because you think you're gonna get something out of it but trust me it goes a long way okay so at this point we've probably all ditched cable so like saying ditch cable it's kind of a outdated tip but if you still happen to have a satellite dish like maybe consider getting rid of it but how many streaming services do you actually need because at one point we had four and there's no possible way we'll watch them all like we would have them because oh our kids like this show or oh we like this show well there's no need to pay for them all on a regular monthly basis because of one show so pare it down see where you can kite see which ones you're not using let it go get on the money saving app train so i have a whole video on my favorite money saving apps that you can watch but i like to use them strategically so for example three of my favorite money-saving apps are ibotta fetch and dosh i bought it is a grocery rebate service you buy certain things you scan your receipt you get cash back fetch is the same way you scan your receipt every single time you get points you catch those points and for gift cards or paypal money and then dash you link your debit card and you get a certain percentage back based on where you spend all of them are good apps but did you know that you can use all three of them together oh yeah you can so what you do is you go to ibotta you type in walmart grocery pickup you go through the app and place your order and it automatically gives you a dollar then when you get your grocery pick up receipt you run it through the fetch system and you get points and if you use dash you get three percent cash back on that transaction because they give usually three percent at walmart for buying groceries so all of that over time adds up and it's free money that took you about two seconds to get if you are not focusing on paying off your credit cards i highly recommend that you do that we were paying off debt we prioritized our credit cards over student loans because the interest was much higher and it's compound interest working against you on a daily basis you will literally save thousands of dollars a year if you focus on getting those credit cards paid off and so i know that's not like the sexiest easiest money-saving tip but if you can just throw an extra 20 bucks a month towards your minimum payment it will have a huge impact on you switch your cell phone provider so we had regular verizon for years and it was so expensive and then we switched to straight talk for a little while and now we're back at verizon with the verizon prepaid option it cost us 65 a month for two cell phone plans and that's like unlimited everything so and that's unlimited talk and text and i think i have like take 10 gigs of data but it's totally worth the money my phone works in every corner of my house it doesn't drop coverage it's really great and it's really really cheap so ditch your regular cell phone plan for a prepaid one and save yourself some cash that's the only advice you took from this video please just do it and shopping online find yourself a rebate site that you love it can be racketon it can be honey it can be shop tagger it can be anything find a rebate website that you absolutely love that's automatically going to give you a percentage of cash back just to it it doesn't make sense not to use your library for everything everything it's great for books it's great for movie rentals it's great for audiobooks you can get zoo tickets you can get freaking zoo tickets through the library use it love it do it save yourself some cash if you are a meat eater costco and sam's both allow you to bulk order meat at a reduced price so check it out then a service i like for produce is misfits market you can get some super cheap produce it doesn't cut they will ship it right to your door and it's produce that may have been like misshapen or slightly bruised but there's nothing wrong with it and you get it at a discounted rate also just consider going meatless a few times a week if you're not where you can go all the time because you're just not there yet that's cool but if you can decide that one two three times a week you're not going to eat meat you will save yourself a lot of money my next tip is not going to work for everyone but that is to stop using paper towels i don't like paper towels they gross me out it's not necessarily because i'm gonna save a ton of money as a mom of four we don't do go through quite a lot of dish rags in a day um but the paper towels just something about like wiping it up with a piece of paper and then i i can't explain it to you i just have some weird things that gross me out that cereal like looking at looking at pieces of cereal floating around in milk like no thank you so paper towels it just like throwing money in the trash when you could use a rag that you just throw in with your regular laundry and the question i get is but aren't you doing more laundry nope i keep a basket in the corner of my kitchen i just throw it in with my towels and i don't think it adds extra laundry but if it does it's like one load a week so if you want to keep using paper towels do it i'm not going to shame you get you some dryer balls some they make wool they make synthetic ones if you don't want to use wool i think they make some that are plastic throw them in your dryer it cuts your dryer time down i don't want to hang my clothes outside i live in a very high pollen count area i live next to a farm and my clothes always come out dirty and also i just don't want to do it i work full time i run a business i don't have time to go hang laundry out to dry but those dryer balls i'm pointing to my dryer like you can see it it cuts down your dryer time by a lot find things you can swap so i have a friend who swaps space on her land someone puts bee boxes on there and she gets honey i know friends who swap babysitting so that the other couple can go on a date night i know friends who have kids of various sizes that trade clothing books you don't have to go out and buy everything you even if it's secondhand as much as i am a proponent of buying things secondhand you're still spending money if you're in a position where you need something just short term see if you can borrow it instead of buying it our lawn mower broke recently and we're going to get it fixed but it's just one of those situations that we haven't gotten around to yet and so our neighbor has been cutting our grass out of the goodness of his heart but also because we give him eggs from our chickens there are things that you need in a short term there is no need to buy them or even rent them if you can avoid it borrow so for example i told you earlier that we had a hurricane in our area and there have been a lot of downed trees and so instead of buying a chainsaw you can go on facebook and see if your friend has one and borrow it instead of buying a stroller that your kid's only gonna need for one trip borrow it okay so before you purchase anything ask yourself four questions do i really need this would i buy it if it wasn't on sale would i buy it twice because i love it so much and am i willing to get rid of something else because i bought this item so if you are a shower i love showers get yourself a low flow shower head that doesn't mean that you're taking a shower that's drip drip drip you can buy some cute ones we have a rainwater one it is fantastic but it has greatly reduced the amount of water that we are using also if you are not maximizing the space in your toilet tank you are wasting money that's the weirdest sentence i have ever said in my life if you have a low-flow toilet that won't use a ton of water when you flush this is not gonna help your benefit you in any way but if you have an older home with toilets that were made of the 90s get yourself a water bottle fill it up put it in your toilet it'll it'll raise the water level and make itself a low-flow toilet stop talking about toilets lydia see if your power company has off-peak hours i talk about this all the time but if you're new you've never heard me talk about it off-peak hours are the hours in which fewer people are using power so i just googled it and i found that my power company offers off-peak hours after nine o'clock in the morning between like nine and two and then after nine o'clock at night so i set the timer on my dishwasher to run i'll do a load of laundry at night and then throw it in the dryer before bed just things like that where i'm going to be using my larger appliances to save myself some money so this means the kilowatt hour the price per kilowatt hour is lower because fewer people are at home using that electricity and surprisingly for my power company even though there are more people at home and working from home now those off-peak hours haven't changed so see if that's available in your area it might not be but if it is you can save yourself 20 percent off your electric bill wait 24 hours before making a big purchase whether it's a car a new appliance or something that's sitting in your amazon cart give yourself some time before you hit the purchase button you will have time to cool down the new might have worn off and it's just a grace period for yourself before you spend money that you hadn't intended to mind your thermostat this one bums me out because i'm hot all the time because i live in the devil's armpit and even though it's the middle of october and it was 75 degrees this morning i felt like we were all gonna die on the soccer field but for every degree that you lower your thermostat or raise it if it's super cold keep your ac filter clean i know it's hard to remember to do this but set yourself an alarm in your phone once a month to change your filter we actually use these super cheap filters that the man who replaced our air conditioner recommended to us and you can vacuum them out so you don't even have to buy a new filter every month and they are like really inexpensive it'll optimize your ac or furnace and you will save money because that machine isn't having to work so hard you will save money because that machine isn't having to work so hard to run effectively okay so i hope these tips help you i'm gonna make a part two with a ton more tips leave me a comment below and tell me if you're doing any of these i would love to know thank you for being here i hope you'll subscribe and i'll see you in my next video

Channel: Lydia Senn

Views: 45,051

Rating: 4.9425564 out of 5

Keywords: Lydia Senn, five4fivemeals, Frugal debt free life, frugal, save money, debt free, dave ramsey, frugal living, how to be frugal, how to save money, spend less money, how to spend less money

Id: DoPjCBYGUEk

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020