5 Tips & Tricks to Save Up to $100/Month

Tori Gutierrez

October 29, 2020

5 Tips & Tricks to Save Up to $100/Month

Saving money each month doesn’t have to feel like an uphill battle.

Our assistant, Brandon, is passionate about personal finance and saving money in small ways that have a HUGE impact.

Here are 5 tips and tricks from Brandon that can help you save up to $100/month:

Utilizing Credit Card Points

I love credit cards. I’ve had them since I was 18 and have learned how to utilize them in my day to day life. One key is understanding reward points and cash back programs.

Take, for example, the Chase Freedom Flex Card. This card offers “5% cash back on up to $1,500 in combined purchase on bonus categories such as grocery stores, select streaming services and many more”¹per quarter! That means that in the first quarter of the year (January through March), you can earn 5% cash back whenever you use this card to pick up groceries.

If a family spends $500 a month at grocery stores, they can earn $25 for that month. Now multiply that by the 3 months in a quarter, and you have already earned $75. That money can be used towards your credit card statement, added to your bank savings, saved for your next vacation, or invested in the stock market.

The options are limitless.

Meal Prepping

One of my favorite things to do to help me save time and money is meal prepping.

I understand that it is difficult sometimes or maybe even impossible to find the time due to work or school. Despite this, pre-planning around 6 meals out of the week (only counting lunch and dinners on Monday through Friday) can make a large difference in your pocket.

Take into consideration that if you eat out on weekdays for lunch and dinner (10 meals), and spend around $13 per meal, you would have spent a whopping total of $130. Instead, if you meal prep 6 of those meals with an average cost of $5 per prepped meal and ate out 4 of the other meals, you would only have spent $82. The difference is $48 saved.

If you do this every week, this can have a huge impact on your savings!

Understanding Grocery Stores

One tip that I’ve found useful is to look both above and below eye-level shelves at the grocery store.

Did you know companies pay high prices to be at the eye-level shelves to make sure that you, the consumer, picks them first? Did you know that these are usually the most expensive options? The more affordable brands are typically found on higher or lower shelves. You can easily save 10 cents to a dollar per item. Think of it as a treasure hunt for the best prices.

Another tip is to check weekly advertisements.

For most grocery stores, they usually mail and/or upload weekly advertisements for people to look at. There, you get to see which things are on sale and which things aren’t. It’s great to understand what food usually costs with and without sales. Take chicken, for example. From the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US city average cost per pound of boneless chicken breast was $3.276 in August 2020². On sale, at the lowest price, I’ve seen 99 cents per pound. That is 70% off!!

Guess how much you would save if you are feeding a family of 4 for a week.

Download Honey

No, no, not the sweet liquid gold that bees produce for us. The app!

Honey is an app and browser extension that can help save you money. Serial entrepreneur, Ryan Hudson, went online to order pizza for his kids and he wished he had a coupon. He thought there must be a coupon out there for him that could save at least $1. Then, he put together the prototype browser extension that we know and love today.

Honey has been downloaded over 5 million times on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. “The extension automatically finds and applies coupons at more that 21,000 stores, and members can earn rewards at more than 3,700 of those. Honey has saved its users – 67% of whom are millennials – over $170 million from coupon code discounts [in 2017]”³.

Call your insurance companies

Call in to see if any discounts are available to you.

A great place to start would be your car insurance company. Seeing that a majority of people are now working from home due to Covid-19 and are driving significantly less than before, it would be smart to see if your insurance company can offer you a deal since you are now statistically less likely to get into an accident.

Another idea would be to try raising the deductible on your insurance. This can also work with homeowner’s insurance and health insurance. Just be sure to have enough money in savings to cover your increased out-of-pocket expenses in case you have to file a claim.

I hope these tips and tricks find you some extra cash!

Keep in touch and let us know how much money you are able to save!

In good health,

Tori