I thought I’d take a quick look back at some of the ways I saved money this month. I’m always on the lookout for ways to save, and just off the top of my head, I came up with eight things that I’ve done so far to save a buck or two here and there.
- Shopped around for humidifier filters – We have a humidifier attached to the furnace that adds moisture to the air in the dry winters. I looked around and found a re-seller on Amazon that seemed to have a pretty good price. When I went to their page, I found a free shipping offer, plus I found a coupon code on Retail Me Not that allowed me to get it at a much cheaper price. Savings: $5
- Installed Invisible Hand plugin – I do a lot of my shopping online. This Firefox plugin stays in the background and notifies you when shopping if there is a better deal out there. When buying a play kitchen for our children, we found that Walmart had a better price than Amazon. Savings: $9
- Checked our Costco coupons – We print our holiday cards from Costco, we get our baby wipes there, plus get a good deal of our snack food from there. We were able to use coupons on all of these items that we would have purchased in the next three months anyways: Savings: $14
- Drank water while eating out – Instead of soda or another drink, I ordered water. Savings: $2
- Clipped a coupon for liquor – We needed to stock up for the occasional drink I have at home as well as for some entertaining. There was a coupon for $5 if you purchased two fifths of various brands. We got rum and vodka. Savings: $5
- Ate my own bagel – Fridays are bagel day at work, where you can get a bagel for a buck. We typically buy bagged bagels at home for a fraction of the cost, and I decided to take one of these instead. Three Fridays at work this month, so I had Savings: $3
- Ran through what-if scenarios on our health insurance – It was open enrollment time. Using past history plus various what-if scenarios allowed me to pick a plan with lower annual premiums. Savings: $700
- Free milk – We get points through our community for recycling, which are redeemable at various local stores. One of the stores allows you to get up to two free gallons of milk. Savings: $5
Altogether, just by doing a few things we saved $743 this month.
Not bad!
How do you save money?