I am seeing a lot of generic advice from the other medium posts so decided to write this answer to share some of my own personal money-saving tips. The following should only be used if you are DEBT FREE. If you have debt, you must pay it off first before getting into any of these.
Disclaimer: The following text is based on my personal opinion/experience and should not be considered professional financial advice. Investing is a risky proposition, before making any financial decisions you may want to discuss the details with a licensed financial professional.
1. Learn about + get involved with the F.I.R.E movement if you haven’t already. FIRE stands for “Financial Independence Retire Early”, it’s a movement that emphasizes rigorous saving/investing to be able to retire early and live off of the interest generated by your savings/investments. Here is how much money you need to save to achieve FIRE:
2. Use Mint to track your monthly spending and to budget expenses. Mint is a free service that allows you to link all your credit cards, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, IRAs, etc to track all transactions, money spent, trends, goals, and many other things. It is a must-have if you are serious about financial management. The best part about mint is it’s all automatic, no need to keep your receipts or look at bank statements, the service does all the tracking. I log into mint about once a month to check up on all my expenses and to track my overall net-worth. It’s fun seeing that number increase each month!
3. Use a high-yield checking account for your emergency fund and to park excess cash before investing it. I typically keep around $15,000 in my high yield checking account (Lake Michigan Federal Credit Union) which earns a 3% interest rate. Any $ over the 15K goes into my brokerage account for investing purposes. The $15K is fully liquid (in cash) and not exposed to market risk. I can make deposits and withdrawals whenever I want.
4. Max out your 401K if you have a job regardless of your employer matching your contributions or not. Your savings will grow tax-free (pre-tax) which is a big deal as real wealth growth comes when you don’t have uncle sam knocking on your door.
5. Max out your HSA if your employer supports this. A health savings account (HSA) has triple tax advantages and allows you to use it as a supplemental investment account. I would generally advise against using your HSA as an “emergency fund” as the $ invested will be exposed to market risk similar to investing with a brokerage firm. I am using my HSA as a tax-free extension to my 401K and of course to pay any health-related expenses.
6. Live with roommates or parents as long as possible if you don’t mind giving up some privacy for some additional $ savings. Remember, housing is the biggest expense in every household, anything you can do to reduce that expense will get you closer to your financial goals.
7. Eliminate your car if possible or buy a low-mileage car preferably Japanese built (aka Toyota). Many people wrongly assume “gas money” is what they are spending on transportation every month, in reality, transportation is the second-largest expense after housing because the car’s value + maintenance costs need to be amortized (spread out over the time you’ve owned it) to get the real costs. For example, I bought my car for $25,000, 10 years ago. I pay about $75 for insurance and gas per month and paid a total of $1500 for maintenance/repairs so far. My monthly expense is $26500 divided by 10 divided by 12 = $220 + $75 = $295 per month. Notice, the longer you keep your car, the lower this monthly amortization amount gets so make sure to maintain it well and drive it literally until the wheels fall off (aka as long as possible) to get the best value out of it. If you live close to work or are able to eliminate driving altogether, I’d do a quick calculation on how much it would cost you to take ridesharing for things like running errands, if the monthly cost is lower than what you’d pay with owning a car, I’d consider going that route.
8. Stop eating out and cook at home. Food is the third-largest household expense. A typical meal at a restaurant: $25 per person, tax, and tips extra. If you ate out 3 meals a day, every day that equates to a whopping $27,375 per year! A typical home-cooked meal costs: About $2.50 per person (or less) or about $2,735 per year. That’s 10 times cheaper than eating out or in other words, restaurants have a 10x markup on their dishes. You can learn to cook from watching free youtube videos. There are literally thousands of youtube channels geared towards home-cooking foods. Alternatively, if you don’t like grocery shopping, you can sign up for a meal-prep-service. You won’t save as much as when you do the grocery shopping yourself but they are more convenient and less pricy than eating out.
9. If you are male, stay single or find a partner that is more financially conservative than you are. I am going to be honest fellas, dating ain’t cheap. If you are taking the lady out just once a week at $80 a pop that adds up to about $320 a month or close to $4,000 per year. That’s a lot of dough to be wasting. My advice: Find a girl that has the same life/financial goals as you (is into F.I.R.E.) and make it a life-long thing or stay single. Do not settle for liabilities nor parasites!
10. Be very, very nice to your neighbors and they might let you use their internet for free. I know this one is more of a social engineering trick than a money-saving tip but hey, do you know what’s better than having high-speed internet? FREE high-speed internet! You should also know that companies such as Comcast aka “Xfinity” allow for “internet on the go” service for their account holders from anywhere there is Xfinity wifi available. I let you decide what to do with that information ;)
Stay frosty =)
