Tips on saving/managing money

Cut back on your expenses.

Bread and sandwich meat. Sammiches! Really. You could make a few sandwiches for the same cost at a fast food place for one meal.

Hire someone to smack you anytime you try to buy something stupid. See if they will let you pay them in sammiches.

Or with sammiches? ....in sammiches. Whichever. You know what I mean.

 

I got into financial trouble a few years back with credit cards, after a little help from my mom and saving I got it taken care of. Since then I canceled all but 1 credit card and now if I can't afford something with the cash in my pocket I don't buy it.

Idk if that helps but it's definitely help slow my spending

 

Going off of psaurus.... the money in your pocket. You can put yourself on a daily "cash allowance"

 

Hm. Ok.

1) learn to cook - You don't need to be a gourmet chef, but you should be able to feed yourself (and be able to produce a variety of basic dishes). You can eat well for a fraction of the cost of constant fast food, and it's vastly healthier. Baking and slow cooking/crockpot cooking requires just a bit of prep and then you can go off and do other stuff until your meal is ready. Cookbooks are your friend.

2) join the cult of Consumer Reports - Before you buy something, research it to death. That means using Consumer Reports magazine, online reviews, etc. While you're at it, look for the best deal you can find, price wise. Make a rule that any non-urgent purchase must be researched for at least X amount of time and/or from at least Y number of sources before you will consider buying it. By the time you do all that, you may decide you don't need the thing anyway. Or can wait to buy it until you do.

3) If you drink Starbucks and/or soda - stop or cut back as far as you are able. A basic coffeemaker and coffee (and a ####### if you'd rather buy beans) is a lot cheaper than uber expensive designer coffee. And water is generally free and much healthier for you.

4) Assuming you're working and the job allows it - brown bag your lunch instead of buying it every day. You can make up a weeks worth of meals on the weekend and just throw them in a bag (either an insulated lunch bag or a literal brown paper sack) each morning. Or pack it the night before and just grab it out of the fridge.

5) When grocery shopping look for 2-fers (or more fers), buy one get X more free, etc. Learn when your favorite grocery store runs its sales (usually new ones start on Sunday or the like) and keep an eye out for coupons. Learn how their double-coupon program works. NOTE: only use coupons for things you need - don't buy stuff you don't need just because there's a coupon for it.

6) Buy generic whenever you can - at least try the generic or 'in store' brand of the products you use most. In many cases you can't tell the difference from name brand and you'll pay a fraction of the price.

7) Resist the impulse to be a first adopter - wait for the 2nd or third generation of a product to come out before buying it. The bugs will have been worked out, the price will have dropped, and it will probably have more features than the 1st generation one.

8) Look for stores that sell used video games, books, music, etc. if you are into that kind of thing. Look for clothes on the Clearance rack. Look to buy items during big sales or ask for something you really want for your Birthday or Xmas. Ask for gift cards to Amazon or your favorite store/website for your B-day or Xmas. It's like cash in your pocket.

9) Set aside a 'mad money' account for yourself and put a small amount of money in it each paycheck. Either avoid touching it until there is something fairly pricey you want to buy (and you can't buy it until you have enough money in the account) or allow yourself to dip into the account to treat yourself in some way on a regular schedule (making sure not to spend more than you are putting into the account).

10) Allow yourself a 'treat' on some regular schedule that lets you do something you like (of modest cost). You mention fast food - on your payday weekend perhaps allow yourself to hit your favorite fast food restaurant and get whatever you want. But only then.

11) Although it may be a bit further afield - when you get a job and if the company has a 401k program with company match - do it. Even if it's only contributing the minimum necessary to get the full match, it's basically free money the company is giving you. It's coming out of your check pre-tax and you'll not notice it.

12) When you get a full time job after college, give serious thought to getting a financial advisor. Talk to parents, relatives, friends, whomever to see if they can recommend one and then set up a meeting. They should talk to you about your goals, offer financial and investing advice (which should include what to invest in via your employers 401K with that 3%), etc. Be wary if they aren't willing to advise you on anything that doesn't involve them getting paid directly and follow your gut if you think you should go with someone else. Consider talking to several and treat it as a job interview where they are interviewing to work for you.

13) Set yourself a budget - know exactly what your expenses are and how much you are bringing in (after taxes) and make sure it all balances. Stick with the budget. The budget is your friend

Hope this helps,

Todd

 

Hire AKTodd as your accountant...

.... see if he will let you pay him in/with sammiches

 

1. Try to be a savvy shopper. If you can find generic products that work just as well for you than name brand ones, buy generic. If you drink soda or drink coffee at a chain place, try to cut back, or stop altogether. If you smoke, try cutting back on how much you smoke, or, learn about alternatives that can help you quit. Learn how to cook meals for yourself and don't be afraid to buy in bulk when you can. Often times, it can be cheaper.
2. On impulse buying, make sure never to buy anything that costs more than the amount of money you carry on hand with you. That excludes credit cards.
3. Finding an accountant that can help you manage your expenses for cheap or free, or finding an app or something that can help you manage expenses may be something worth investing in.
4. If you need some extra money to get by, don't be afraid to ask for government assistance. That's what those programs are there for, to help people when they need it.

Along with what everyone else has said, I hope I was able to help in some way.

 

I can't help you here, because I'm an impulsive buyer too. I know that I have a problem but it's so hard to control. I keep buying useless junk, or stuff that I don't really need but "Hey, look, it's so cool, lemme buy it!" and then I have to pinch my pennies towards the end of the month, so that I can afford fuel to get to and from work until pay day. And sometimes I cut back so much that I actually have money left! I bought some things yesterday, that I actually need (clothing), and now I don't have enough money left to replace my car's CV's...

How I get by each month is to set up a budget, and I stick to it - for the most part. I know exactly how much extra money I can spend each week, and if I go over that budget, I just cut back on the following week's budget. That way I always have money. And after I get my car fixed, I'll have extra money again the following month, which I want to put away each month, for emergencies, and so I don't spend it on junk.

 

Money is power. The power to control the level of your own freedom. If you have a habit of spending your money impulsively trying thinking of it as spending your freedom. That money you wasted on too many video games and burgers you'll now have to get back, and you'll have to do it by becoming a cog in the wheel of someone else's venture, unless you have some special talent or a spigot of cash at your disposal. In the same way, getting into too much burdensome debt is not much different than becoming a slave. Someone is profiting from your debt, and it isn't you, at least not for the time being.

 

Don't keep money in your wallet if you can help it. Use the envelope system. Tape/clip some envelopes together or buy a small file folder and divide into each section the necessary funds each time you get some money. Have one for spending or fun as well as your important things like rent/utilities/phone bills etc. If you spend all the funds in one envelope, don't take any out of another unless you absolutely need to.

 

Oh god I'm so bad at this xD
It's like every time I want something expensive I have an insatiable urge to blow all my money. Especially if said expensive item falls into the electronics category.

 

I've got loads of cheap bulk foods, like canned tomatoes, cream, tortillas, (frozen) bread, pasta, noodles, peanut butter, coconut fat, soy sauce, frozen spinach/other cheap vegetables, potatoes, onions, garlic, brown/kidney beans, oil. All stuff which keeps long and is cheap. Also a few herb/spice mixes for variety and extra flavour (but not too many or they'll probably spoil before you use them all), I especially like chili sauce, curry powder and italian herb mix (oregano and stuff).

This way I always fix up a cheap meal if I'm lazy, for instance:
-Pasta with cream and spinach/cream&tomatoes/tomatoes&spinach
-Noodles with peanut sauce (mix peanut butter, chili sauce, coconut fat and soy sauce and some water).
-Tortillas filled with (baked potatoes,) tomato sauce (from the canned tomatoes) and beans.

I also always check prize/kg for each product I buy. Carbs shouldn't be more than 2 euro/kg, protein preferably not above 5 euro/kg (So I see most cheese and meat as a luxury). If I use expensive ingredients because I want to have a more fancy meal I add more cheap carbs and make enough to last me for 2 days and refrigerate the second portion.

 

Cooking for yourself is a great way to save money. I can usually cook for about a weeks worth of meals for $20. Farmer's markets are a great place to find good produce for a decent price. Most people are open to a little bit of negotiation on the price.

I have also talked to my bank. They let me open an account with a withdrawal cap on it. I figured out how much I usually put in each week and then set the cap for about 60% of that.

I am a really impulsive buyer when I get bored, so I usually go to the store once with little or no money and look at what I want. Then I come home and research my choices and wait for a few days. Most of the time I have forgotten about the product by the time I go back to the store.

 

Know the difference between your monthly fixed, predictable expenses and what is left over.

For example, you know you will have to pay rent, mobile phone, electricity, car payments, gas, insurance, etc. Add it all up and what is left over is your "disposable" income (which I usually characterize as "food and laundry"). If you want to save, then add a manageable amount of saving at every paycheck to your fixed expenses (i.e. transfer a certain amount to another, usually savings, account and don't touch it!).

AKTodd gave you excellent suggestions. The one about having a separate amount set aside for "mad money" is very important, it will be there if you really need/want something, and will protect your core fixed savings.

 

^what all of them said

Also, buy bulk (like 4 pound bags of rice).

 

Open up a wealth management account. Not enough money? Try this:

Buy a large CD every month, such as $500 to $1000, or if you're living on weekly paychecks, buy a CD of between $50 and $150 out of every paycheck. Just make them as large as you can afford, within your basic living expenses and groceries and things like that. Make it your ritual. Just keep buying them.

Do this until you have slightly more money than you need in six-month CDs...just in six-month CDs...to open up a wealth management account, which is usually about $10,000. One possible company you could use is Merrill Lynch, but some credit unions have wealth management services. It doesn't matter which financial institution you prefer to use. Nearly all of them have a wealth management service associated with them.

Anyhow, the CDs are not going to become available all at once, so what you can do is channel the money into a money-market account, which is an account that you can only access a set number of times a month. Don't think of this as a place to keep your money, but it's a place for money to sit for a while. Do not spend it, no matter what you do. Saw off your own foot before spending that money.

Drop the money into a wealth-management account. Go for stocks. Other types of securities may look more stable and safer, but that fuzzy sense of security you get out of them is false. Bonds don't always pay off. There is a set risk associated with any bond. A properly diversified stock portfolio is just as safe as apparently lower-risk securities, and it grows faster. You don't know how to diversify a portfolio. Your stockbroker does. It is actually false to think that randomly buying "a little bit of this and a little bit of that" is diversifying, but you diversify using securities that, when one fails, the other actually does better; there are other methods, but that's the most basic concept of it.

An example of proper diversifying is Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. Dunkin Donuts is an "inferior good." What is an inferior good? It's not a good of lower quality. In fact, if you ask any coffee aficionado, that person will usually tell you that Dunkin Donuts is really not all that bad of a coffee. It's very drinkable coffee. The baked goods are very tasty. However, the reason it's an inferior good is that people are more likely to buy it if they don't have as much money in the bank as they want to have there. It's not that they don't like Dunkin Donuts, but there are other places they would spend their money if they had it to spend. People aren't going to pass up on their coffee and confection in the morning no matter what's going on, but they have to think within their means when deciding where they are going to have it.

If people have money to burn and they have more than what they need to live on, they usually don't spend it on Dunkin Donuts when what they would rather have is Starbucks, which is a normal good. It's not a normal good because Starbucks is somehow an ordinary or pedestrian coffee shop (at one point, they were genuinely pretty swanky), but it's a normal good because people actually prefer this if they can afford it. People buy more of it, not less of it, when they are prosperous. The normal good behaves normally, you see?

That's one type of diversification that, in a way, gives you some stability. In a bear-market, the inferior good will usually increase in value, and in a bull-market, the normal good will always increase in value. That particular pairing of stocks will therefore end up behaving very predictably.

However, there are other nuances to diversification that are not as easy to explain and tedious to go into. It's not that I'm talking down to you, which you know I like to do, but I just don't have the background or the training to give you a better explanation. The reason you want to get your money into the hands of a trustworthy stockbroker is that your stockbroker's job is to know how to create a properly diversified portfolio. Compared to how your stockbroker would set it up, any diversification strategy that you picked, no matter how hard you tried, would look like a scattergun approach, and it would not make you any richer.

To put it simply, you put your money in places where it is harder for you to get to it, and put it under someone else's control. Lock it away if you have to. Just decide how much money per week or per month you are going to put away, and just have fun with the rest of it. The money you're not investing is money you are allotting to yourself for you to have a good quality of life. It is your right to have fun with it. Just make sure that you are disciplined about knowing what is "spending money" and what is "saving money."

On simple stuff:

As far as cutting back on expenses, make your own frozen dinners. It is not hard. Just get a good soup recipe that stores well in the freezer, for instance, and make a minor bulk portion, just enough to fill up a space in your freezer. Make that what you have on Monday night every week until you have used it all up. This isn't going to be your party night. It's not going to be what you eat for fun. It is going to just be grub. That's it. Palatable. Black-eyed peas are cheap, and they have endless possibilities. If you calculated the difference between a single dinner portion of a nice, easy, boring, approachable soup and what you would otherwise buy to feed yourself, then you would be shocked. Just one night a week, you hold your nose, and eat something simple. One major expense cut.

Shop at thrift stores and estate sales. Some people might be creeped-out by estate sales because you're essentially going in like a vulture to buy up some dead fucker's stuff. Don't feel that way. I'm going through this with my partner's estate right now: that person's family is desperate to get rid of the stuff. They have taken everything that has personal significance to them, and beyond that, they need the money to either raise money for the estate that dispenses their inheritance, which is their way out of debt, or to pay off the deceased person's medical expenses, which can be huge and burdonsome. Going in to pick the bones is actually more likely to help clean up someone else's mess than to cause any kind of grief.

And thrifting is awesome.

How to curb video game addiction: stop playing the damn things. That's how I gave up cigarettes: I quit smoking the damn things. It's a wonderful realization to wake up to, one day. When you actually have the day that you quit an addiction, you get sort of giddy, and you start laughing. You really do. You cannot quit an addiction unless you go into quitting it with a sense of empowerment and taking mastery over a part of your life. Don't try to quit out of guilt. Don't quit because I said to quit. Quit because it puts you in control and makes you feel powerful.

Does that help?

 

Right now I'm saving up so I can do my masters in 3 years time, I'm investing most of it in funds with Hargreaves Lansdown, I'm sure there's something similar in the US. In the UK you can do this within your stocks and shares ISA, which lets you invest upto £15k a year without paying tax. I waste most of my money on random crap and I just have a direct debit which goes to HL every month, I find that once I have a fixed amount coming out each month I can fit my random spending round it quite easily. Though I need to up the amount I'm saving each month so I'm just looking at all my direct debits and seeing what I can cancel, the minimum amount you can invest each month in a fund is £25 so I just view each £25 I save as a another fund I can invest in and doing it in smaller chunks is easier than "fucking hell I need to save £400 a month!".

You can set yourself other little challenges too, right now I do 1000 miles a month in my car and I refuel ~170 miles at the cost of £45 (whoop whoop 20MPG!), so over summer I've told myself I'm only filling up once a week and any trips I have to save for.

Also cutting back on video games is a really easy way to save. I've only bought 3 this year, they cost £45-50 and I used to buy about 2 a month, so right away I'm saving £100 a month.

 

$100.00 USD monthly adds up to $1,200.00 annually, and you could feed a single person for a year on that...not well, really sort of crappy, but enough to "keep body and soul together," to use a country saying.

A 10 Lb. bag of flour costs about five dollars if you know where to shop, right?

Okay, you can make something like a dozen to two dozen biscuits with ONE pound of flour. Even after adding in other expenses of cooking, it's pretty much dirt cheap food. Now, if you ate three of them every morning, that would be enough of a breakfast to get you by.

Keep looking into other meals you would have in the day that would be dirt cheap and also nutritional. Look at all of the different expenses you would run up if you want to. Try calculating the energy cost if you want to.

When you get right down to it, I guarantee you could really eat fairly well, if you are frugal, on EXACTLY what you pay for in video games. Think of it that way. Think of the fact that you could actually live like a king just on the money you are throwing away ON ONE THING that leaves you almost nothing to show for it.

One way out is to try being a video game snob. Focus on buying one or two games a year that have really exceptional quality and get rave reviews. Buy "only the best," and consider wasting your time on any less to be beneath you. That's saved me tons on cheap whiskey. With the good stuff, I don't just mix it with coke and chug, but I practice a ritual. I respect the drink. I bet that, if you really approached your video games with an eye for taste and for polish, you could really end up cutting expenses for the same reason.

 

Well, just keep a mental list, in your mind, of companies you like and want to support, and try making a hobby out of buying bonds from them. Bonds are better than money, as far as saving, because they have a specific maturity date that you feel obligated to abide by.

You can buy bonds through companies like Merrill Lynch. They are more exciting and interesting than just CDs. You can pick companies that you feel really good about that support causes you agree with or sell things that you like.

And that way, you're showing your support for a company without actually making yourself poorer. What you're doing is investing your trust in that company, which is a big investment. If you really feel good about a company and like that company, then odds are a lot higher that their stuff is going to sell well. If a company has won you over to the spirit that it believes in, then odds are that whatever ad campaign and PR campaign they are using, it's working.

Actually, shopping for things is a good way you can get an idea as to how well a company is going to do. If you have an impulse to buy something, then odds are that so do other people. They're a good investment, more likely than not. Rather than tossing money out, CONGRATULATE the company for managing to tempt you by investing in that company.

Don't think of it as an investment, but look upon it as a hobby.