5 Real Life Money Saving Tips That Actually Work

Sometimes money-saving tips don't seem relative to your stage of life, and other times, like for me the last couple of weeks, they seem to be coming in handy quite often. So I went ahead and I made a list of real stories that have happened to me where I've used money-saving tips that I've talked to you guys about on my channel, and I want to share those with you today. Real-life scenarios where I, these money-saving tips have come out, come in handy, and I've used them. So let's get started. Before we get into number one though, I want to know what money-saving tip has come in handy, has been a real-life scenario experience that you've had recently. Share it with us down below in the comments. The first one is a story about a tip that I've given to call providers, whatever provider that is, if it's internet, if it's TV, if it's satellite, if you still have those, if it's insurance, whatever it is, and ask for discounts to try to get a lower bill. So I had my bill for my internet come in, and you know how they like to increase it a couple dollars here, a couple dollars here, and you may not think to call. You may go, it's a huge hassle to call. Well I reached my breaking point. The internet bill came in and they've gone all the way up to $90, and I went, $90 just for internet? You have lost your mind. I have used you for what, are we on eight years now? Are you crazy? So the first thing I did before I prepared to call them was get my mind right, because we know this takes time. Don't forget about that. Sometimes you got to negotiate. Sometimes you get a grumpy person. Sometimes, in my case, you get a very talkative person when you're just trying to get something done. Well first thing I did was I went online to see what the service that I was currently getting, what they were offering for new customers. That's important to know. Alright, so what I found was the speed that I currently have was closest to a package that they offer for first-time people at $50 per month. So I knew that going in. I wasn't going to say anything. I just went ahead and called. I got on the phone and the person said, what can I help you with? I said, I'm here to either cancel or lower my bill, and got into the conversation a little bit more, and they said, well who are you going to go with? I said, someone lower than you. I was trying to say it as nicely as I could. I ended up with a very talkative person, and somehow this happened so easily. They said, oh you have been with us for a long time. Okay, let me tell you what I can offer you. She said, first we don't offer the speed that you're currently at. I think I was at 400 megabytes per second. Not an internet person. They offered 500 and then one whatever is above that, and she gave me the prices, and she said the 500 was at 40. She could offer me $40. Well I'd known. I had just gone online and saw that that package for new people was going at $50. I said, okay let's go with that one. That was over a 50% discount. That was huge. Now this person also let me in on something. She says, now this lasts for one year. You need to call back every single year, and we will get you a lower cost. So it's going to go up in one more year, and I'm going to have to have another annoying phone call where I have to spend 40 minutes or more on the phone while they do something to whatever in my house regarding the internet to make sure I'm at the speed for the package that's there. So this is to say that don't just wait. Don't wait till you get to the amount that you're just straight up fed up with seeing that they go up these small increments throughout the year. It's ridiculous. It's also ridiculous that we have to call every single year to get a discount, go back down to a lower rate when you've been a loyal customer. But sometimes we just have to play the game, and sometimes there's a little pain that goes along with it. Number two is one where I talk about paying attention to your online purchases. Paying attention of where being wary of who you buy from and the reviews on things. This came into situation where I've never run into this before, but this one made me really mad. Okay, so I work out at home. That is one of the things I do that saves money. It also saves me time. I don't have to leave my house. I've got an eight-year-old. I can't just go whenever I want to a gym. I have weights. I use dumbbells that I do strength training with on my back porch. So one thing that I've been wanting to get is a weight rack. So it's the little three tiered rack that you can put your weights on outside. That way they're not all lined up under the bench or on the floor, wherever. I found one at a great deal on Amazon. I ordered it and it seemed to be really weird that it was kept taking a while to get to me. Then I realized that it wasn't coming from Amazon. It was coming from a third-party seller. Okay, then it said it's gonna arrive on this date. Okay, it's delayed. It's not gonna arrive till tomorrow. It's not gonna arrive that day. It's gonna be arrived the day after. Then I started looking at it and it was sitting literally in a facility. I don't know where. It was sitting there and not being delivered to me. What I determined was it had been damaged. So I went on to Amazon and it said that I could not request to cancel the order until I think it was July 23rd. If I had not received the item by July 23rd, I could then click a button and request to cancel the order. I could cancel it before then even though I knew a week before that it was clearly damaged. They weren't going to be delivered. Something had happened to it but I'd already been charged and the cost of it I think was $91. Okay, I got it at a great deal if you've ever looked at weight racks at good reviews and it was a pretty good price. So I waited until the 23rd and then I went into the Amazon thing. If you've ever gone into the Amazon thing where you can hit cancel order, that wasn't there. That was never the option after the 23rd. I could then contact the seller, the third-party seller. Okay, so I clicked that and it gave me some sort of weird messaging system. I put in, hey my package isn't here. I would like you to cancel it and refund me. No response. I send another message. No response. Okay, I'm irritated at this point. Nobody was responding to me. I call Amazon. Good luck trying to find your Amazon phone number a human being to talk to. I went online in the chat forums and found a phone number. Tried calling. All they could tell me, they said, are you calling about this? Yes, I am about the weight rack and they said, you must speak to the third-party seller. Well, I can't find this freaking third-party seller. They aren't responding to me. I'm irritated again. I've been charged over a week this $90 and I don't have anything to show for it and I can't hit cancel. There's no phone number. There's no direct email. There's just this crazy messaging system. So I was sitting there. I said, what in the world do I do? And I've never done this before. I was talking to my husband. I said, what in the world do I do? He goes, you need to dispute the charge. Okay, well I guess that's my only choice. What other choice did I have to get my money back because nobody was responding to me? Not Amazon and not this third-party seller. So I called the card, the bank, with the card that had been charged on and I disputed the charge. It wasn't even 24 hours later I got a message stating, we see that you've disputed this charge. We also see that the product is damaged in a facility and is being sent back to us. If you would like to receive a credit on your credit back, we can cancel your order. You must first cancel the dispute on the card. Hmm, I don't think so. I'm going to trust that finally you're getting back to me. So I told them this. I said, I'll cancel the dispute on the card once you credit me back for the thing. How am I going to trust that you're going to do what you said when this is the action I had to take to get you to do something about it? This whole story again points back to beware of what you're buying online, who you're buying from, and don't let these little situations slip you by. Pay attention when you bought something to make sure you get it. Make sure you get it on time. Don't forget about it. It could be something really inexpensive, not something that was $90 that you might not notice. Don't let it slip by. Number three is a story that just warms my heart because it's something that I really love helping with and that's helping others understand money, overcome debt, and that's one way that I do with this channel. But in my real life, I come in contact with people, people maybe that I've worked with, where I've shared the money stories, where they may find out that I have a YouTube channel, they may find out the story that led me here, how I've been in debt, how I got out of debt, how we've paid off our mortgage, and it may intrigue them. The thing about sharing your story, if you've got stories of overcoming, it's important. There's a stigma around talking about money because others think it's rude and it most certainly is if you're sitting there asking someone what they make, how much debt do you have, how much is that car payment, how much does that car cost, or you're bragging about something you bought and how much it costs. That isn't right. But talking about financial struggles or obstacles you've overcome is good because it's helping others open up because money is this taboo thing that we don't like, we don't think is socially right to talk about. This couple that we worked with, I was friends with one of them. I worked with them at one point and they knew about that we talked around the office and the job, they knew about what I do here on YouTube, they knew about the struggle that got me there, the journey I was paying off the mortgage at that point, and it was it was fun and what they realized was that I was a comfort place and that they could open up to and really discuss their financial situation. So they asked me to look at their finances and help them dig out where do they need to start. So I went in detail, they were very open, they gave me everything, I wrote down I knew all of their debt, all their expenses over the last few months, I knew their income, and I put a plan in place for them. And last week I got a call from them or a text message saying, guess what, we only have one more debt left. Basically they paid off a car loan, they paid off all of the student loans that they weren't even paying on before meeting with me, and they are almost on track to meet the exact same timeline that we had laid out almost a year and a half ago to be debt-free besides their mortgage. And it just warmed my heart because sometimes when you talk to people about saving money they don't always take it to heart, they don't always actually want to do anything about it, they don't want to take those steps, but this person was ready and willing and ready to do it. And that's just my point here. If you are in a situation where you've overcome financial obstacles, don't be afraid or shy to share that because you don't know when the next person you meet may need to hear that, may ask for your advice, you might be able to point them in directions to find money-saving advice, you may make a big difference in somebody's life. The next one I'm going to talk about is five Friday months. Okay, we are currently in a five Friday month when I'm filming this, that's why I thought about it because I now am at a job where I get paid weekly, so five Friday months makes a difference. Essentially, this is a great way to cheat yourself into the equivalent of saving for extra paychecks each year. So again, this only applies to those who get paid weekly, even if it's hourly that you get paid weekly or a salary that's divided by weekly. Now if you get paid twice a month or monthly, this won't add up to you. You get all your salary divided by 24 or divided by 12, but if you get it divided by 52, this matters. Essentially, what happens is if you get paid, let's say every Friday in 2025, there will be four months with five Fridays. We already had two, January and May. August has five Fridays and October has five Fridays. In 2026, there will again be four months that have five Fridays. You can just Google what those months are. So we're going to use round numbers here for ease. Let's say you get paid, your paycheck is $1,000 every single Friday, and you typically live on four paychecks a month. So your bills are paid with $4,000 four Fridays, $1,000 each Friday. Then those months with five paychecks, you're actually bringing in $5,000. Okay, you've got an extra $1,000. So rather than spending that, what you could do is take that $1,000 and put it towards your money goals or your savings accounts. If you did this in 2025 so far, you would have an entire month's wages by the end of October. So if your month's wages are typically $4,000 and you've saved that extra paycheck from January, May, August, and October, that's an extra $4,000 that you can put away in an emergency fund. What a great way to save. So think about these extra Friday months, these extra payday months, and how you can take that money and be very diligent about putting it towards your financial goals. The last one that I want to talk about is a story where it came back up where I thought about the tips of the people that you surround yourself with. You're usually like, most like, the people that you surround yourself with. And also, not all people want the best for you. You may decide to go along this path of getting out of debt, paying off your mortgage early, saving money, and people think it's weird. Why do people think it's weird? Because if you look at statistics, most people don't do this stuff. So this happened, this reminded me of this story about this person who was like this for me in my life. It really, well, I will always remember it. I recently ran into someone, I said, you look so familiar. And it was well over 12, 13 years ago. And then we put two and two together, and they were friends, a friend of mine. We had seen each other interacting. I was like, oh my gosh, it's so good to see you. But this is one that I've talked about. This this friend was, this person was a friend of the friend that I had, where all we did was, all we had in common really, was going shopping and going out to lunch. And on Saturdays, me and this friend would go have lunch, you know, before I had a child obviously, and go shopping, walk around the mall, just buy things unintentionally, not spend money getting maybe manicures, pedicures, that kind of thing. And it was not, they're not good habits. And what happened was, and there's certain people who are placed in your life for certain parts of time, okay. And what happened was, I started going, this is not good for me. Not the friend, but these habits. These habits of shopping, these habits of getting my nails done, these habits of going out to eat. People come in and out of your life, and that's just something to realize. And sometimes you have to think about the habits you have with your friends. Maybe it's, you guys go out every Friday and Saturday night. You go out for drinks when it's not great for you anyway, and it's super expensive. But that's the way you socialize. You might have to rethink the way you socialize. You might have to rethink your friend group. And it may not be that you throw, don't throw away the friends. They might naturally fall away, as did this situation. But you just have to say, this is the priority for me. If you, the other thing is, if you try to do better, maybe it's saving money. Maybe it's getting healthier. Sometimes people don't like that. Sometimes it highlights that habit that they also don't like in themselves, and they don't want you to do better at it. There could be many reasons that that happens, but you have to be okay with letting people go if they aren't for you, or against you even, when you're trying to do something that is bettering yourself. And again, that's not to throw them away. All people are precious. All people are made in the image of God, and you, but you have to remember your focus and not just fall for the peer pressure, or fall for the pressure of, you know, why can't you go out to eat with all your co-workers? Well, I've got other things that I have that are bigger priorities. Well, she never goes out to eat. She always brings her lunch. Let's all go. Hehe, they all walk out the door during your lunch break. You have to be okay with that. You have to be okay with being different. I hope you enjoyed story time with Jennifer regarding money-saving tips. That's kind of what this felt like. Again, don't forget, let me know in the comments down below what's the real-life situation where a money tip has come up recently. Let me know if you enjoyed this video. Click on that thumbs up button down below. It really does help out my channel. It also helps out my channel if you hit the subscribe button if you are not subscribed at all, so please do that. That way you can see that I have new videos that I post, and I would love for you to come back for those videos. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead.