MONEY SAVING HACKS
You know that phrase “she has champagne taste on a beer budget”? Yeah, that’s me. Yet somehow, I have finagled my life to live in my own apartment in the most expensive city in the world, buy myself nice things, travel, and save money. Nothing groundbreaking, but thought I would share four of my best money saving hacks.
Ever since my first internship I have brought my lunch to work almost every single day. A habit that started out of necessity (unpaid internship in NYC) has turned into a habitual part of my weekly routine. I happily prepare delicious salads, smoothies, or veggie bowls with my own fresh ingredients knowing there is nothing icky in my meals and that I am not blowing $15+ a day on eating out. In a pinch, I try to always have the ingredients for these easy to throw together “meals” on hand: avocado mash on rice cakes, coconut chia pudding, or a jazzed up oatmeal with chia seeds, coconut flakes, and some nut butter. I am also irrationally frustrated by the food delivery process and basically never order takeout for dinner or on the weekends.
I think until I literally have my own children I will say yes to babysitting gigs. Seriously the easiest way to make money. When I quit my job to move to SF and wanted to babysit, but literally knew nobody here I used UrbanSitter to find families to babysit for. Once you have one family it is super easy to ask them to share your info with their friends etc. Currently, there is one family I babysit for a few hours roughly 2x a month and never feel like I am sacrificing my social time and am always grateful for the extra cash.
I have become obsessed with Poshmark lately. I am constantly looking to whittle down my wardrobe (um hello I live in a studio apt) and I used to wait until my closet was absolutely exploding to do a major clothing purge. I would be left with a pile of clothes, bags, and shoes that I needed to get rid of ASAP and would have the patience to post maybe 2 things on Poshmark, and end up dropping the rest off at goodwill or sending it to ThredUp which is essentially just giving your stuff away because the return is so teeny from them.
My new method is so much easier to manage and is quite simple. Instead of waiting to do a big purge if I notice something in my closet that I really like, but have a) never worn b) worn once or c) it doesn’t fit anymore, I pull it out and snap a few pics of it and instantly post it to my Poshmark. I have been posting a few new items every week and have been having so many more sales. Poshmark provides a prepaid label so I just store a few empty boxes at work and reuse them to ship off my items. Use this link to sign up and you get $10 of credit!
A no brainer, but you should obviously be contributing to your 401(k) if it is offered through work. For more short term saving goals, I use an app called Qapital. You link the app to your credit cards and checking account and then can set as many rules as you want such as: round up every purchase to the next $2, save x amount every time you reach a daily step goal, or x amount if you use uber / lyft, you can set it to automatically saves $20 every week, you get the gist. You can have as many “goals” as you want and I have used this for any big purchases I wanted to make (new camera, designer bag, my couch..) or to cover expenses for trips I wanted to take. You can withdraw the savings whenever you want, whether you reached the goal or not, and it can deposit directly into your checking or savings account. I’ve “saved” over 10K since using this app and barely notice the daily deductions from my checking account since they are usually just a few dollars. You get $5 automatically added to your own Qapital goal if you use this link to sign up!
There are a bunch of other small tips and tricks I use to save or make money, but definitely think those are the four biggest ones.
Happy saving!!
xx
Mere