29 Financial Hacks that People ACTUALLY Use

I love a good financial hack to save money, but I love a good financial hack even more when I know people are using it and loving it. So, I have 29 of those hacks in this video. Stick around. Hey, what's up guys? It's Justine with DebtFree Millennials, your host to help you achieve financial confidence, crush debt that leads to more fun and fewer payments. And I'm going to rapid fire just go through this list because there are so many juicy ones in here that you got to tell me below which one you're going to be using. Number one, use the interest earned on a savings account to fuel another goal. I.e. the interest earned on an emergency fund savings account would then go towards building a vacation fund. Number two, use cashback balance on a credit card to buy Christmas gifts. Love that one. Use it. Love that one. Number three, put a temporary pause on seasonal subscriptions such as using Hulu Live for NFL and cancelling after the Super Bowl. I love that. Number four, skip escrow and put money for property taxes and insurance into a high yield savings account. I currently do this. So, you can go to your mortgage lender and tell them that you want to cancel the escrow and that you want to start paying for property taxes and insurance directly. The purpose of this is is so that you can earn interest on that money that you would be putting into the escrow into a high yield savings account. Number five, focus on paying off one debt at a time. That's so crucial. If you want to make headway, you got to focus on one debt at a time instead of like trying to spread out extra payments across multiple cards, multiple debts is just doesn't cut it. Number six, grocery pickup. That way, you don't browse the store and buy unnecessary items. I would not have thought about that because to me pickup Oh yeah. Yeah. Pickup. You don't browse the store. Yeah. I think that's a great hack. Number seven, grocery shopping at Aldi. The first time that I read this, I snorted out loud because it's Aldi. And if you don't want have one in your location, I am so sorry, but it's the best. Number eight, set up an FSA, a flexible spending account, and then forget about it. Okay, sure. Yeah, you can set same with investments, right? Set up an investment account, put money in it, and forget about it. Number nine, not buying custom frames. Thanks. Number 10, cut back on eating out. The gut punch when we got our check took all the joy away. Yeah, I mean, focus on eating out at places that you're absolutely loving. And then cut out the clutter. Cut out the things that you're like, h, why did I run through Starbucks again? Why did I run through fast food again? Focus on the things that you really love. Number 11, auto transfers for everything. Fun money, Christmas, vacation, retirement. Boom. Love it. 12. Shop for offse clothes when they are majorly discounted. This one is hard for me because I so want to shop in season and buy it that day and wear it that day. But I actually did do this for some winter clothes from Target. I saw they had $7 long sleeve shirts and I did stock up on those. So this is a good tip. Number 13, Too Good to Go app. If you don't know about Too Good to Go, this is incredible. If it's offered where you live, this is amazing. You download the app and what it does is it syncs up to restaurants who would be throwing away food at the end of the day. Instead of throwing away perfectly good food, they will wrap it up into these two good to go bags and sell them at a deep deep discount. So, they're making a little bit of money. They're not throwing away food waste and you're getting food at an incredible discount. Highly recommend to check out. Number 14, not going to Target. Just not going. Okay, that works. That's a financial hack. Number 15, shop my pantry and freezer before grocery shopping and doing pantry and freezer cleanouts. Love that. Number 16, do free activities around your community for entertainment or invest in membership. One way that you can kind of capitalize on figuring out what the free activities are is using Instagram to search for those hashtags or a lot of times there are these mom's group that help you find activities to do for fun or simply signing up with your city or county's email list and getting on their e newswsletter. Lots of times they will just blast out different activities that they are hosting. Number 17, eat at parents house every Sunday. I mean, you do you. Mom and dad are always there to cook the barbecues on Sundays. I'm I'm game for that. I'm game for that. 18. Avoid lifestyle creep. Keep saying budget even if you get a raise or a new job. That one is tough for a lot of people because they want to use the extra funds for different things that they've been wanting to purchase. I think this could be a really useful one, especially if you're thinking about getting a raise or or transitioning into a new position. Absolutely. 19. Cancel gym membership. Buy used gym equipment off Facebook Marketplace. We did that. We don't have a gym membership. We ended up buying We got a free elliptical from a buy Nothing Facebook group. We got a discounted bench. We got discounted uh like bars, workout bars, all these types of things for our home gym. Love that. Number 20. Go back to your old college ways. What? So, we're supposed to eat ramen and easy mac. I mean, don't get me wrong, going back to old college ways of just eating very cheaply and not buying a whole lot of stuff is definitely the way to go. I think we could do better than just ramen and easy mac. That's just me though. That is This is a financial hack. Not going to lie, though. 21. Use cash envelopes. It's harder to spend and less convenient than swiping. I agree. I have to really want to buy it, and it's been fun gamifying it with saving challenges. I also feel more connected to my money throughout the month. The first way that I developed a positive relationship with money was by using cash envelopes for a lot of my tricky spending areas such as shopping or restaurants. I would physically carry those things into the store with me and then I could see physically how much I had left. This that's a really great hack, financial hack in order to create a positive relationship with your finances. 22. Pay the credit card every week. So, this person says, "Usually Friday or Sunday every time I see a balance over $100 instead of once a month when it's due. It has helped me to be honest with my budget and keep my costs low by knowing exactly where my expenses are and I catch surprises. Any weird expenses like random annual subscriptions I forgot I had." That's great. 23. Cancel Amazon Prime. Yes, this would be a hard one for me. Not being able to have things delivered next day helps me contemplate if I need the purchase, gives me time to cancel a purchase, and I can still get free shipping on most orders. I have to agree, a lot of times when you are buying outside of Amazon, many retailers now are offering free shipping. So, if you are planning on doing kind of like a a haul from old navy.com, they're going to offer free shipping anyways or a haul on maybe Old Navy is not the best example, but things that you can buy on on a retailer's site directly, like Roku, we did with our speakers and the Roku remotes. You can buy direct and also get free shipping. 24. Savings account for utilities. This one's kind of an interesting one. I put $140 a month for electric and gas each month into the savings account. Some months are higher, some months are lower, but it helps me on those higher months because I have the extra from the lower. This is how I budget for more variable costs. It's like averaging myself and I get the interest inside of the account. 25. Budget weekly spending. I just talked about this in seven fun ideas uh to track your finances using a blank notebook, but weekly budgeting is really really great because it takes a smaller chunk of your time and breaks it down so it's easier to track. And this person says, "If there's anything left over at the end of each week, I transfer it to my high yield savings account, no matter how much it is." Woo! That is discipline. Okay. 26. Pay the card immediately. Not to be confused with 22, which was to pay the credit card every week. So, this one says immediately. This person says at least once a week, sometimes more. I do lots of running around for work and have money going in and out. This also means I review every charge. I know each dollar being spent. That is that is mega discipline right there. And I wonder how your spending habits would change if you decided to pay your credit card every single time you made a transaction immediately after. how that would change your spending habits. 27. Round your checking account to the nearest 100 and move the extra to a vacation fund. It adds up to give me more fund money. So, the idea here is if your checking account balance is $2,135, you would just round to the nearest 100, which would be $2,100. And then you would take that extra 35 and put it into a vacation fund or a different syncing fund or savings account that you want to save up for. I think that's really fun because it it changes every single time when you get paid when money comes in comes out. That amount changes every single time. So it it builds up and adds up. 28. Set up automatic savings contributions from paycheck. My paychecks automatically are split and deposited into various savings accounts. So, I only feel like I can use the bit that actually hits my checking. Keeps me in line with spending if I see how much is available and less painful to have to manually move that money out. So, what you could do here is you could go back to HR or hopefully you'll be able to make payroll selections and edits online and you can go in and say, "I want out of this $2,500 paycheck. I want 100 going into this bank account, this savings account. I want 200 going into this account." And make it really easy and simple for you to save for yourself. All right. Lastly, and this one is one of my favorites cuz it's easy, but not a lot of people do it. 29. Switch cell phone carriers. I always thought the lowcost phone plans like Mint Mobile were not good. And then I tried it and it's literally the same service I had with T-Mobile for $15 a month. Obviously depends on the coverage and places you use it most, but now I encourage all my friends to use it and I would encourage you to do the same. I personally have used Mint Mobile for years and have been loving it. It taps into the T-Mobile cell phone towers. So, you're getting the same coverage. It's $30 a month for an unlimited data plan. It's so so people who are like, "Oh, I need the data. You need the data. Just go to the unlimited plan." But the cool thing about Mint Mobile is it tells you how much data you have been using and will encourage you to actually bump down to a lower tiered plan. So, you can do like the 10 gig plan for $15 a month and save yourself a lot of money. You can use the link below in my description box. I am an affiliate for them, but I personally have used them for so many years because they have been so great. I would love to know which one of these financial hacks are you using or did I miss one? Comment below and let me know. By the way, if you want to even go above and beyond with your financial hacks and really track your savings, you can do so with my super budget template. This template has advanced reporting and charts to help you stay on track with your financial goals. You can track things like credit card debt, car loans, even individual savings goals that you might have, all in one spreadsheet that has the formulas and calculations done for you. that is listed for sale on my website using the link below. So, let us know if you are financially hacking your way to financial confidence and I'll catch you in the next one. [Music]