Buying brand name products

Store and generic brands have to be one of the most underused ways to save money across a range of products. From food, to skincare, to over the counter medicine, chances are your local grocery or drug store has a store brand for them or sells a generic version. Check the labels; in most cases, the ingredients are pretty much identical, but you don’t have to spend money on the big brand names.

Also, if you have prescriptions, you can sometimes ask your pharmacist for the generic version of your medications. They work just the same as the brand name, and can save you quite a bit of cash if your co-pay is high.

Paying Someone Else for Simple Car Repairs

Basic car maintenance is something fewer and fewer of us learn, perhaps due to our increasingly busy lives and the preference for someone else to do maintenance work. But, assuming you own a car, money is flying out your wallet if you take your car to a shop for every little complication. Several of the simpler car problems don’t take a professional mechanic to fix, and even routine maintenance tasks can be performed at home. The great thing about the Internet age for car-owners is that there are all sorts of easy and helpful instruction videos out there.

Now, this doesn’t mean you can just start whacking at your engine with a socket wrench, but you definitely have more ability to tune up your car for cheap than you think you do.

Grocery Shopping when you are Hungry

Or when you have all the time in the world. Avoid these two scenarios when taking a trip to the grocery store at all costs. If you shop for groceries when you’re hungry, even just kind of hungry, you’re more susceptible to buying extra stuff you don’t need or that you’ll waste later. Same goes for a leisurely grocery trip. If you make your trip when you have other errands to do and only a certain amount of time to do them, you’re less likely to spend time exploring all the isles and picking up more food than you originally planned on buying.

Buying Snacks every now and then

The quotation marks are there because “every now and then” usually means you just don’t keep track of all the little snack purchases you make on the go. All those bottles of soda and chip bags you pick up when you’re filling up the tank or making a stop at the drug store add up. Make a rule that you have to track all of those little snack purchases and you only get a small allowance of them per month. Get in the habit of bringing plenty of fluids and a snack or two with you whenever you go do errands or anything else that might bring you near convenient snack-filled temptations.

Only using Credit/Debit Cards

If you almost exclusively use your card to pay for things, it’s a lot easier to spend more than you intend to because you aren’t seeing the money. You just press some buttons and boom, purchase made. You might not be so liberal with your funds if you had to watch the cash leave your wallet. If you use mobile banking or money management apps to keep on top of your finances while still using your card, and it’s working, keep doing your thing. For the rest of you, you might want to consider weekly or bi-weekly trips to your bank or ATM and withdrawing a fixed amount of cash for your spending.

Your Bank in General

Banks and everything to do with them are just money-vacuums in general. Take a look at your accounts and card fees and see if there are any better options than what you currently have. Try your darnedest to use ATMs for your bank only, as using another branch’s machines typically racks up unpleasant fees.

A Drafty-Living Space

If you pay heating and cooling bills, you might be paying more than you need to due to inadequate insulation. If you can afford it, you can install more airtight windows and maybe a door or two as well. But effective insulation can be achieved without entirely replacing your windows in most cases.

Skimping on Health and Hygiene Habits

You think it won’t happen to you, but it will. Your dentist isn’t just having a power trip, you really do need to maintain your teeth’s health or you’ll be paying for dental work in the not too distant future, and that can get painfully expensive. Not washing your hands, alcohol and junk food habits, and just not taking proper care of yourself in general will all come back to bite you, no matter how invincible you think you are. Weigh the potential medical bills against the temporary inconvenience of adjusting to new habits and make the smart choice.

Pricey Personal Products

We think we’re savvier consumers now, yet many of us continue to buy a bunch of chemical-filled crap to slather on our faces and bodies in the hopes that it will fix wrinkles (excuse me, “fine lines”), firm our skin, or brighten our complexions. I know it doesn’t work, you know it doesn’t work, so stop buying into it. Do you even know what you’re rubbing on yourself anyway? Take a look at the ingredients lists on your personal grooming products. I bet you can recognize maybe four or five if them without using a search engine. Opt for products with less ingredients that you can actually pronounce — and own up to the fact that some of your own habits are contributing to your skin/hair/body odor issues.

Unnecessary Laundry Junk

Dryer sheets? Toss them. Fabric softener? Throw it out. You need neither; in fact, you might not even need that toxic goop you put in your washing machine either. Plenty of cheap and easy homemade laundry detergent recipes can be found online, as well as replacements for dryer sheets such as reusable dryer balls. Or better yet, skip the dryer as much as possible, line-drying works just fine.

Energy Drinks

If you have an energy drink habit, it’s time to kick it if you want to save money. Those things aren’t cheap, and chances are you eventually have to start drinking more than one a day to keep the buzz once you begin to tolerate them. If this habit is due to poor sleep, think of the money your sleep habits are costing you as an extra motivator to change them.

If you get a normal amount of sleep but still feel exhausted enough the next day to require energy drinks, make an appointment with your doctor. There are a number of health issues that could be causing you to feel drained, and one trip to the doc will be worth it if you can find out how to fix it.

Disposable Razors

Disposable razors lose their sharpness pretty quickly (or get too clogged up with deodorant and other product residue), so you end up buying them pretty frequently. However, there are non-disposable razors that don’t cost a ton and once you’ve purchased it you only need to replace the blade itself, which you can usually buy in bulk online for super cheap but excellent quality. They are a little bit sharper than disposable razors because they’re designed to last more than five days, but don’t worry, these aren’t the long single blades you see in old-timey barbershops in films and TV, they’re the same shape you know just minus the whole disposable part.

And ladies, these razors are labeled and marketed for men, but they’re not gender exclusive. The companies are just marketing them as an old-fashioned manly-man thing rather than a save-money-and-the-environment thing. Don’t be fooled, you can totally use them.

Not taking Advantage of qualifying discounts

This is especially good money-saving advice if you’re a student. Student and college discounts abound, they just might be hidden. Just because a company or establishment doesn’t explicitly advertise student discounts doesn’t mean they don’t have any; ask an employee, or, if you’re making a purchase online, use a search engine to see if there are any student discounts or programs you weren’t aware of. This goes for other person-specific discounts, such as military or senior discounts.

Disorganization

Being disorganized has cost you money at some point. Losing chargers and cables, misplacing expensive jewelry, forgetting where you left your keys and having to pay a locksmith to get into your house or car. If the mess itself hasn’t motivated you to declutter and get organized, link back on all the times you lost or misplaced something and ended up spending money in some way because of it. Then think of how many of those times you ended up finding the missing item later and realizing you spent that money for nothing. Yeah, I thought that might get your attention.