Are you building up your emergency fund? Want to have extra cash to buy holiday gifts? Saving for a down payment on a house? Paying off debt?
Boosting your savings will get you to your goals faster.
This weekend I’m challenging you to find a new method to save more money. Think you can’t possibly save any more? Think again, dear readers!
I’m sharing 13 different methods you can use to start saving more today. Saving small amounts is relatively painless, but can add up to big savings over time.
Go ahead, choose one way (or two, or three) and get saving!
Make Saving Automatic
If you’re anything like me, you have all good intentions of putting what’s left over at the end of the month into savings. Then the end of the month rolls around and there’s nothing left! Where did it go? Well, it did pay the bills, but the rest just nickeled and dimed itself right out of my checking account! Automation has been my solution to this problem and it works like a dream!
Digit
I signed up for Digit 3 months ago and now have $600+ saved in my Digit savings account. When I signed up, I wasn’t sure how Digit would work; I truly thought I was already saving all I could save. Oh, how Digit proved me wrong! I’m saving more and don’t even notice a difference in cash flow.
How does it work? Digit links to your checking account and uses algorithms to predict your spending, bills, and income (based on past transactions). Digit then withdraws small amounts from your checking account into a savings account. (Want to know more? Read my review here.)
Acorns
Acorns is similar to Digit, but instead of depositing the money into a savings account, the money is invested. Just link your checking account and Acorns rounds each transaction up to the next whole dollar amount and deposits that amount into an investment account. Acorns takes about five minutes to set up and you get to choose your level of risk.
Automatic transfers to a designated savings account
Automatic, recurring transfers from checking to a savings account can help you save more. I set up an automatic transfer to my savings account at the beginning of each month when the paycheck hits. This savings is treated like another bill that needs to be paid. The beauty of it is I don’t have to actually make the transfer or think about it since it happens automatically. And the money doesn’t get spent. Win-win.
Take a Savings Challenge
Taking on a savings challenge may be just what you need to save more. Find a group of friends or family, join an online group or just challenge yourself to gamify your savings. Here are some challenges to check out:
The $20 Savings Challenge from Making Sense of Cents (with free printable!)
Hacking the 52 Week Money Challenge from The Simple Dollar
The Power of $3 A Day from Passionate Penny Pincher
The 26 Bi-Weekly Money Challenge from SavingAdvice.com
12-Week Money Saving Challenge from HowDoesShe
Have No-Spend Weekend each month or go all in and try a No-Spend Month Challenge (estimate how much you would have spent and bank the savings!)
Save Spare Dollars and Change
Save all your $5 bills. Every. Single. One.
This can add up to super savings! Check out this post on Len Penzo dot com about how Marie saved $36,000 by doing this one simple thing! Don’t want to sacrifice those $5s? Try $1 bills and see how much you can save.
Start a coin jar.
I rarely, if ever, spend my change and I don’t think I’m really that unusual (or maybe I am?!). I put all my coins into a quart mason jar, but there are fancier vessels available (for a price!). Every year we cash in our coins and typically have $75-$100 saved up. Every little bit helps!
More ways to save money
Bank your savings on purchases and bills
That money you saved by lowering your cable bill this month? Put the difference into savings every month. And what about the $50 discount you received on those new tires? Yes, bank that too! You are basically “pretending” to pay full price for your bills and purchases. Most of the time we end up spending what we save, but just think about the savings possibilities!
Increase your 401k, IRA or HSA contribution
If you don’t already automatically contribute to these accounts, start with just 1% of your paycheck (you won’t even know the difference, especially if it’s automatically taken out of your paycheck). If you have these accounts already set up, just bump up your contribution a percent or two!
Share which method you are going to use to save more. Have additional savings ideas? Please share your thoughts, comments and suggestions.
Here are some tools that I use myself that you may find helpful:
Want to painlessly save more each month (without even lifting a finger!)? Try out Digit. I really thought I was saving all I possibly could. Digit proved me wrong. See my review and updates on how much I’ve saved here.
Personal Capital tracks your expenses for you for free! Have all your accounts in one place and utilize their free expense tracking tool! I use their free net worth and expense tracking tools. Sign up for a FREE Personal Capital
account.
This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, at no additional cost to you, I’ll receive a commission if you buy products through these links. See the full disclosure here.
Are you ready to take action on your monthly expenses? Take the challenge!
Very good tips! I like the idea of no spend weekends but that might get tricky for us since that’s when we do our grocery shopping, buy gas, etc. Maybe we could make it a no frills spend weekends to cut back on extra shopping or dining out. Thanks for the ideas!
Thanks, G.S.! I know many people do their errands on the weekend, making a no-spend weekend difficult to pull off. But you could flip it and do a no-spend week Monday-Friday!
These are all good tips Amanda. One of the most powerful behavioral principles involved in many of the most effective tips is simply this, you can’t spend it if it’s not there. And, once your account balance starts getting low, people slow their spending.
So paying yourself first, transferring money into a savings account or using the new services like Acorns or Digit all work great! The easiest one for me is ratcheting up the 401k savings amount by 1% from time to time and seeing what happens!
Thanks, Jon! Yes, if the money isn’t there in the first place, it doesn’t get spent. I think many people (myself included) think they just can’t find the wiggle room in the monthly cash flow to possibly save more, but it’s surprising what automation can do for that mindset! Take Digit – I was worried at first about the extra coming out of my checking account, but it’s never had an impact on monthly cash flow and I have an extra $700 I wouldn’t have had otherwise!
Great tips! Automatic withdrawals are the way to go. After maxing out the 401k we did automatic transfers to Vanguard every paycheck.
Thanks Mr. Crazy Kicks! Agreed on the automatic withdrawls. I should set up the auto transfers to Vanguard too. I try to front-load it when we get our tax return, but then leave it the rest of the year. On my “to do” list!
Great tips! You know I’m on board with automated saving and investing 🙂
I also have a coin jar success story! I used to pay cash for anything under $20, and all of the coins I got as change would go in a coin jar. I’d roll the coins whenever I got enough for a roll and then deposit them in a sub-account of my savings account when I had enough rolls to be worth a trip to the bank. I ended up paying for a long weekend vacation for my wife and me entirely from that spare change!
I love the idea of paying cash for small purchases and saving the change! You must have really rocked the change to be able to take a weekend getaway. That’s great! And a mini vacation is great incentive to save more.
I’m impressed that you came up with 13 ways to creatively save money! A lot of money saving seems to be mindset – whichever method tricks your mind into spending less is a good one!
We manually transfer a set amount of savings over on the 1st of every month, its a nice way to still be in control of the savings and feel like we are actively saving whilst still being “automatic” in a sense.
Jasmin
Thanks, Jasmin! You’re so right, it’s all about mindset. I use several methods to “trick” myself into saving more. I keep my checking balance low and love savings automation. Sounds like you guys have a great system for paying yourselves first each month!
Great tips on maximizing saving efforts! You always come through.
Digit will be my next experiment. I never heard of it before but it seems to fit well with our (my wife and I) personality.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Francis! I really like Digit – the automation and small withdrawls from checking make it easier to save more.
We believe in automation too. The Automatic Millionaire really drove home the “pay yourself first” principle to us….We have two knee high plastic coin bottles. I should post a photo. Every two years or so we cash them in before a vacation. Next time I want to do it without CoinStar getting its cut. Great idea about saving the $5 bills – thanks!
Thanks for stopping by, Mrs. Groovy! Wow! Your coin bottles sound impressive – you should definitely post a photo! My mason jar can’t compare to those. I like the $5 bill idea too – those 5’s add up pretty quickly!
Love, love, love this post! Thank you Amanda for thirteen great saving tips. I was going to jump on the coin jar tip but Mrs. Groovy beat me to it. Damn! Blogging with a spouse is hard.
Hey Mr. Groovy! Thanks! Mrs. Groovy was way ahead of you on that one 😉 I can’t convince my spouse to blog with me (though he does serve as editor, so any typos can be blamed on him!).
We’ve got to just sign up for Digit already! We’re in good shape on automated savings, and never even see most of our money in our checking account — it gets split out into savings accounts and investments right with our payroll checks. But I bet we could still sneak out more money using Digit — thanks for the nudge!
Yes! I mean, why not, right!? I thought we were maxed on the savings too, but apparently I was wrong. Not sure of my balance right now, but last I checked, it was around $850 and we just signed up in June. Not too shabby!
Came across your article while searching for some more money saving tips to add to my daily routine. Great ideas – thanks! I’m a big fan of the coin jar method. It’s such an easy way to save. I save my change all year and use the money as extra spending money on vacation every year. One thing I also love doing is using Ebates when shopping online. You make money on things you already plan to buy! To save even more I stack my online purchases with coupons and discounted gift cards from Gift Card Karma. Those are some helpful ways to save that I’ve found!
Thanks for stopping by, Carrie! I have a coin jar too – though I’ve been “borrowing” from it lately to put quarters in the carts at Aldi for my random acts of kindness. 🙂 This year, I’m also saving all $1 bills that come my way. I’ve heard Ebates is great if you’re already shopping online – and stacking can save even more money. Thanks for sharing your tips. And, thanks for stopping by!