Latest Update: Added a second hack from J Wynia – Impulse Tax.

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A page on being smarter with your money, to save you from having to spend all that precious creativity time working.

Tips

The saying is that if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves. Well, it is here, anyway – no idea if other countries have a similar version with their currencies, but you get the idea. Look after all the little bits of money, and it will all add up. Save 5p on twenty things, and you’ve saved £1 (cents, dollars, euros, etc).

The only problem with that is that saving £1 once may well be less difficult than saving 5p twenty times. Look for the bigger savings first, and keep in mind what your lifestyle is. If you are paying £500 a month in rent, saving £5 by giving up something you really enjoyed actually doesn’t help much at all. It’s unlikely to make the difference between making the rent payment or not. Buying the cheapest brand ketchup (catsup?) won’t do the job. Switching most of your weekly shopping to the cheapest own-brand stuff will make a big difference – then see what you miss. You might be surprised how good some of the cheap stuff is, and be happy to stick with it. If not, you didn’t waste much, because the stuff was so cheap, and you know it’s worth the extra bit to get your favourite brand of cereals.

If you usually never drink tap water, give it a go. Depending on where you live, it might not be good, but it might be fine. We’re lucky – ours tastes better than most bottled water, so we just fill bottles from the tap, stick ‘em in the fridge, and have cold water available to grab any time. If you do this, decide which end of the shelf to put the bottles into, and take them from the other end – they’ll always have had time to chill a little then, and we all like time to chill.

A look through a bank statement can be a quick easy way to get an idea of where the money is going. Cash is hidden, so if you do a lot of cash transactions, it might not help much. It can tell you where to look, though – are you spending most of your money in cash, or doing big spends at the supermarket too often? Once you know that, you can start looking in more detail at the places that eat your money. If it’s cash, you need to get a system to track where you’re spending it. If it’s all going to the supermarket (that was our downfall), grab some old receipts, and categorise things to see what you’re spending on. We were spending a lot on soft drinks, so first we switched to the cheap own brands, cutting the cost to a fraction of what it was. Then we started refilling water bottles with tap water, and cut our costs to almost nothing (we still have to buy more bottled water every now and then to get fresh bottles – they only last for so many refills).

Want to win the lottery? Well, there’s a way to make a profit on any lottery in any country. It won’t bag you the big money, but will get you some. Take the money you would normally spend on your lottery tickets and instead of handing them over to your friendly newsagent, put it in a jar. Do this every week for a year. If you only do £1 for Wednesdays and Saturdays for the UK National Lottery, that’ll add up to over £100.

Not Buying Things

• A couple of commenters in Lifehacker’s Time to Budget post make suggestions for putting off purchases… ** Muddle-headed Wombat (er?) suggests the 24-hour rule – let yourself buy whatever you want, but if you don’t actually need it, you have to wait 24 hours. If you still care enough to go get it after 24 hours, go for it. If your budget is tighter, just increase the time you make yourself wait. I can definitely see this one working. ** Eugene uses a similar idea, but based on space and purpose. Nothing can be bought until there is a space for it to go in, and a defined purpose it will fill. Sounds like it would squish all those wonderful toy purchases, but would certainly be a good idea when money is tight.
• J Wynia has a couple of great hacks. Ask yourself “Would you want it if you couldn’t tell anyone?” – how many things do we buy more for the impression they’ll make on others than for our own use? Or you can impose an impulse tax on yourself – making yourself put a percentage of any purchase price into savings if you buy it immediately, but reducing the amount with time. If you wait four weeks, the tax goes away – but how many things will still seem so appealing after four weeks?
• Merlin has a great idea: a list of things you’re not buying. When he wants to buy something, he adds it to a list, and looks back on it later to see the stupid things he would have bought, if he’d let himself act on the impulse. Our house acts as this list, full of things we should never have bought. We’re much better at not adding to the ‘list’ now.

Buying Cheap Own Brands

• Works for some things, but not for everything. You might need to spend a bit of time and money experimenting to find a good source for things. Ketchup for example – most is pretty poor, but usually one of the supermarkets is doing a good one. Try a few, then stock up on the good one – probably costs less than a quarter of the big name ones. Toilet paper can be a false economy – cheap stuff is much cheaper, but if you end up using twice as much, it’s not much help. Not enough to make up for the unpleasantness when it turns out not to be strong enough. Ugh.

Buying Online

You can usually save a bit by buying stuff online. Not everything is cheaper, but most things are. Here in the UK, next day delivery is fairly common, but a wait is common in some countries – the size of the USA gives them some advantages, but it can push delivery times up.

• Watch out for delivery costs – check how much delivery is going to be if you can, whilst still comparing prices. It can make a big difference. I was on the point of buying a pocket torch recently, marked down from £30 to £5. Unfortunately, the cheapest delivery option was also £5, doubling the price of the item. Be careful you don’t then get pulled into ordering more things that you didn’t want in the first place, just to make the delivery charge feel more worthwhile
• Many checkout systems have a space for a coupon code, but what if you don’t have a coupon? Lifehacker posted about a site for sharing these codes, and their readers linked to more of them in the comments, so there’s a few places you can look. One person had recently saved $400 on a laptop by checking one of these sites for a coupon code before submitting their order.

Keeping Track of your Shopping

It’s so easily done, one trip around the supermarket, the stuff goes in the fridge and then you forget it’s there and nip out for a chinese takeaway instead. So why not…

• Stick your shopping receipt to the fridge? Yes, it’s one of those embarrassingly simple tricks that could easily save us from bad cheese and forgotten cold cuts.

Of course, if it is difficult keeping track of those mad dashes around the food hall, you could always try our next tip:

Eating Expired Food

• Be careful – don’t get food poisoning. Tinned food usually lasts way longer than the date says, though – a man has recently eaten a tin of chicken that was 50 years old without coming to any harm.
• You can usually tell with vegetables, and if they’re stored well, they can last well past the date on the pack. Open plastic bags as soon as you get home, to let them breathe.
• In the UK at least, bottled water isn’t exempt from having a best before date on it. It actually shouldn’t ever go off, though. If you refill the bottles as mentioned above, remember that you didn’t fill them in sterile conditions, so the same may not apply. I’m not sure – it might be fine, but why worry for the price of a litre or two of tap water?
• Cheese – keep it well wrapped, or it will go hard.
• General rule – if it’s green and furry, you probably shouldn’t eat it. If it smells bad, it’s probably bad.

Make Your Own

• Homemade Laundry Detergent – via Craftzine

Cooking

• Lifehacker have covered loads of this stuff: Cooking at Home for Non-Chefs, Healthy Eating on a Small Budget, Cooking for Two Without Waste
• Use leftover lemons and limes to make ‘ice cubes’.
• Find recipes to use what you’ve got – Allrecipes Ingredient Search will let you search for any recipes using what you have to hand (Via Lifehacker). Alternatively, just be inventive yourself. Or just chuck everything you have in a wok and hope for the best.

Preparing in Advance

• Feed the Freezer! – a guide to doing all of your cooking for a month in a single day (plus part of a day for planning and shopping). Sounds way too organised for me, but a cut down version of it should be more achievable. (Found via Lifehacker.)

Cheap Recipes

• No-Fail Curry – a fairly generic curry recipe, just using curry powder, but should do a pretty decent job, and leaves you plenty of room for changing bits around as needed.

Washing

• You can use less washing powder than the manufacturers want you to think. Just try putting less in, and check the results are no worse. If you’re using tablets of powder, you can normally use one rather than two – and for small loads you might be able to get away with half a tablet. Watch out, though, some of them crumble badly when you try to snap them in half.

Washing Up

• You don’t need to use much washing up liquid – if the things you’re cleaning aren’t greasy, you may not need any. Almost all washing up liquid now is concentrated, so you can also water it down a bit to make it easier to use less.

Pets

• Cat Toys: notice how your cats aren’t that fussy about what they play with, and if it was intended to be a cat toy? Use it to your advantage. The plastic straps you get around packages can be great fun for ‘cat fishing’, but you have to be a bit more careful with them, and make sure there’s no sharp corners. Drink wine? Corks make good toys too. Don’t drink wine? I noticed recently that one of our local supermarkets sells corks at £2.19 for 50. That’s some cheap cat toys. The same aisle had drinking straws with fancy tinsel ends on them for cocktails – I’m sure an excellent cat toy could be made from one of them. Oh, and every cat owner knows that cats love cardboard boxes.

Paper and Pens

If you get through enough paper and pens to worry about the costs, there’s plenty you can do to cut costs a bit without losing quality.

• You can buy some very cheap notebooks, but they’re not always the best quality. Unless you get through a lot of paper, though, the price of a Moleskine a month is unlikely to break the bank, and they do last well. Also see our paper and notebooks page.
• If you’re in it for the long run, a nice binder and punching your own paper will work out cheaper than buying Moleskine notebooks. If it’s cheapness you’re after, though, beware of binders where you will need to buy special paper. You can cut sheets down to the right size yourself, and punch the holes yourself, but it can be a lot of effort.
• Another long term saving is to buy a nice fountain pen. It will be more enjoyable to use than a disposable gel pen, and if you get a converter to use bottled ink, it will work out much cheaper than disposable pens. Our bottle of Noodler’s Ink cost us £8, but we’ll get over 100 refills out of that, making it around 8p a filling. My Cross Ion was costing me almost £3 each refill. The refills lasted a bit longer, but not that much longer! Even counting in the £13 my Lamy Safari fountain pen cost, I should be well ahead before I get through the first bottle of ink.

Electronics

• Use Rechargeable Batteries: It doesn’t make sense for everything – things like remotes tend to use so little power that a couple of cheap alkaline batteries will last for years. If you’ve used rechargeables before, but given up on them, it might be worth trying again – they’ve improved a lot in the last few years. The power capacity has roughly doubled, especially if you shop around for good ones – look for the mAh figure – milliamp hours – that’s the amount of power the batteries will store. Also, the old ‘memory effect’ that plagued NiCad batteries doesn’t happen with modern NiMH and LiIon batteries, so you can just charge ‘em, use ‘em, then top-up charge ‘em again when you get home.
• Buy stuff a bit behind the cutting edge – you get much better value that way. This can be a problem with stuff you really care about, though – if your requirements are a bit ahead of the cutting edge, you don’t really want to stay behind. I’m generally happy with using a computer that’s a bit behind. I don’t play games much, so the fastest processor and graphics card don’t really matter to me. With digital cameras, though, even the cutting edge is a fair way behind what I want, so it’s worth it to keep as current as I can afford to.

Budgeting

Making a real budget, and controlling every last bit you spend might be the only way if you really need to cut back. When we needed to cut the spending back as far as we possibly could, we started by putting together a list of categories, and estimating how much we might need to spend on each one for a month. Then, we started writing down everything we spent. No forgetting. The very act of making ourselves write it all down and match it up to categories made us much more thoughtful about what we were doing, and made a big difference on its own. It’s surprising how far out some of the estimates were, but that doesn’t really matter. The first month you do this, they can only be estimates.

If you want a simpler way of keeping track of this sort of thing, have a look at the Stackbacks Budget – look for the link to the .pdf file at near the top of the page. It uses a system of two bank accounts to make all of this sort of management easy.

Debt

The best thing to do is avoid it, but if it’s too late for that, there’s the usual selection of good advice in this Lifehacker ask the readers post.

Resources

• 43 Folders is a great site for getting organised, but a few people have been asking Merlin for the ‘43 Folders of money management’ – so he opens up the question for his readers – lots of suggestions in the comments for the best sites to help you with your financial woes.
• Hack Attack – Time to Budget – from Lifehacker. As usual with Lifehacker, there’s as much good stuff in the comments as in the article.
• Saving Money with your Computer – (via Lifehacker.)
• Frugal For Life – some good practical tips on this blog, which is regularly updated. (Via ReadyMade Blog)

Know of any good money saving sites? Let us know by leaving a comment.