5 Money-Saving Tips

I don’t know if you’ve ever caught yourself online sort of scrolling through different articles and everything and trying to find, okay, what’s something interesting to read? And a lot of times there’s different, numbers of things, that you can, that you can dive into where you see like a specific number, like old number three or 5 or 7 different ideas.

Well, today we’ve got five money saving tips. We’re going to keep it pretty high level. Pretty simple to start with. But these could be really valuable when you plan for your retirement. So starting right off number one is high yield savings. We’ve had a number of folks coming in the office lately. And they’re talking about, well, I’ve got some money that I’ve built up in my savings at the bank or credit union.

And, and it’s, it’s painful, I would say, Art, to, to hear what interest or lack thereof that people are earning right now. So there are different alternatives out there where you can actually still get some pretty reasonable yield or interest on your savings. So that’s one of those opportunities to be making money with your money. No, that’s a great point.

And the next piece is that the money saving thing is, think about automating the process with everything out there. Right. If it just happens and you don’t got to if you don’t have to be involved in it many more times, there’s a chance of being more successful. Think of like a workplace plan, like a 401(k). Most of the time those are automated, right?

It comes right out prior to you even seeing the money. And so 3% or 6% or whatever your amount going in, you can do those same things with your own IRA, your own Roth or like a after tax brokerage account where you have like automatic deposits set up, whether that be a monthly or weekly basis or rate, you know, kind of coordinated with when you’re getting paid.

So those funds are going directly into those accounts and accumulated being invested. And so that way it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind. Right. And then you don’t have to worry about, okay, I’m going to get to that. Or when I get extra that way, it just comes in and then it’s going in there. And then it takes that guesswork or that thinking piece out of it.

And we see people have great success with that. And then you can adjust those dollar amounts over time. If you were to get a raise or you to get something, we can slowly start increasing those. Or like with IRA Roth contributions, those maximums change every year, right. We can put a little bit more in. So consider doing that.

And again it kind of takes that guesswork out of it. So you can continue to grow that account over time. Yeah. Number three of our money saving tips comes to being intentional with financial windfall. So a simple example of this is let’s say you get a bonus at work. And it’s one you’re excited. Oh, I got a little bit extra this month and whatnot.

Not as exciting as, let’s maybe focus on paying down some debt. I know that’s not what you probably want to be doing with with any additional income, but again, focus on that debt as you get closer to retirement and into retirement. Ideally, you’ve got a lot of those debts paid for. So that cleans up. Then your your monthly cash flow and makes life a little bit easier if you can avoid having debt.

It makes me think when you talk about windfalls or cleaning debt up, maybe some folks out there right now are going to be getting some tax returns back, right? You know, this year, because of some tax law changes, folks may be getting a little bit bigger than normal tax return. That’s a great thing to be putting that in. And like Jon said,

it’s not as funny right. You see a lot of ads this time of year about the car sales or the big screen TV, but boy, what a great way, maybe if you’re getting a tax refund back to look at paying down that debt. But and then thinking about the other one in here with one of these five saving tips is monitor your subscriptions.

And no, we’re not talking about magazine subscriptions anymore. That’s what popped in my mind. Well, I bet, but like, you know, your streaming services, your apps, all this sort of stuff. If you have kids using various things, what have they signed up for over the times? But boy, that stuff can nickel and dime you. And it really can add up.

Three bucks here, five bucks there, all these different things adding up over time and just monitoring it. There’s some different services. You can sign up to help with that. But look at your credit card statement. You know, Jon talked about that was like budgets and stuff like that. But look at that credit card statement and see what what charges are coming out.