6 Ways to Turbocharge Your Savings

Morning!

Here are a handful of things I do/did that’s really impacted our finances over the years…

Check ’em out and see if any of them are worth testing out!

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Rounding up debt payments! — Whatever your monthly payment is, just roundup to the nearest $10th and kill off a little extra debt without even noticing it! This works sooo good for your credit cards, car loans, or even mortgages. Or if you really want to step up your game – round up to the nearest $100th! We’ve probably shaved off at least a year or two of payments doing this, and makes it a bit easier to budget too if you prefer using whole numbers vs exacts.

Rounding up investments — Similar to the above, if you get into the habit of rounding up your monthly investments they’ll only compound that much faster. And if you really want to speed things up, use apps like Acorns which will *automatically* round up ALL YOUR TRANSACTIONS to the nearest $1.00 and drop the difference right into investments for you. So every time you swipe your card for coffee or groceries or even your 100th Amazon purchase of the week (hah), y0u’ll feel a tad less guilty knowing that you’re at least investing at the same time 😉 I banked $600.22 when I first tried Acorns without even even noticing it – it was great.

Actually SAVING your savings! — You know when people say they’ve “saved” money by using a coupon or getting something 10% off or buying one and getting another one for free? Well, you might not have paid full price for the item, but you’re still very much *spending* money vs *saving* since nothing actually went INTO your savings account!

With this spending/savings hack (dubbed “Spavings“) you’re actually doing just that: putting the money you’ve “saved” from discounts right into savings. So that 10% off becomes and extra $4.00 dropped into your account, and that coupon for buy one get one free becomes an extra $10.50 banked that you didn’t have to spend. You literally save every time you spend! And let me tell you – it adds up. When I experimented with this for 10 months back in 2018 I amassed $4,040.50 – almost enough to fully fund a Roth IRA!* Try it out for a month and see how it goes!

Asking for fees to be waved — Probably the easiest of all tricks. The next time you get a fee or penalty or any other of the sort, just pick up the phone, or email, and ask (politely) if it can be erased! I’d say over 50% of the time it works, especially if you’re a loyal customer and it’s the first time you’ve been hit. And often if you ask for a supervisor after getting rejected you’ll win a number of those battles as well.

I just did this with the $19.31 late fees I stupidly acquired on our water bill last month, and within minutes it was waived! 3 minutes and 4 seconds to be exact as I timed it 😉 (Shout out to ZJ for reminding me to do this!!)

Doing a “no spend” month — This was one of the first challenges I tackled as a nubile 20-something starting out my financial journey, and every month since I’ve “saved” at least $200 a month from being in more control.

The idea is to spend *only* on the necessities of life for a month (food, shelter, etc), and then resist from spending money on the “wants” (Starbucks, new clothes, new books, etc). Not only do you save a hefty amount for the month, but more importantly it forces you to STOP and face your embedded behaviors over the years! Where you learn quickly what triggers your desire to spend and how to curb it since you’re not allowed to for the month. And if you’re really smart about it, you’ll put in some barriers over this time so that when the month runs out you don’t go back to your freewheeling ways and erase all progress! Just be sure to *tell everyone* you’re on this mission so all your friends/family don’t hate you every time you have to say “no” to something 😉

Waking up an hour+ earlier — Not a finance trick specifically, but slowing down your life and spending more quality time on yourself will definitely affect your money and mood (and confidence!) for the better. And certainly if you use this hour entirely on improving your finances every morning there’s no way for your wealth not to grow! Imagine spending a whole hour every single day on it?! For me these days though, I choose to use it for my *mental* health and guard this time pretty intensely. All other hours are dedicated to my kids or family or life/projects/yada yada but these 1-2 hours every morning are solely for ME where I sip my coffee, feed my brain (i.e. read), eat my porridge, and basically just reflect on life as the sun creeps up and brings about the new day. One of the best habits I’ve ever set up for myself, and I owe it entirely to Benjamin Franklin!

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I’ll have to dig through my brain for more, but these are just some of the smaller things we’ve done over time to really help grow our wealth… Which may not look that impressive on their own, but combined can really pack a punch! Try one or two out over the week and see how you do!

Any tricks you do yourself that’s worked out well too?

*I included other “free” money in this account too, like birthday checks or found money on the ground, or any savings from cutting down bills over time, etc… That’s the real game changer right there – doing one-time work for monthly passive savings!

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