Five Steps To Save Money Today
Welcome to Saving Money with Andrew! If you’re new, you might want to check out my top 9 money-saving tips.
In times like these, it’s more important than ever to save money. Here are five things you can do today:
Check Your Upcoming Events
If you haven’t already, review upcoming travel and event tickets and track them carefully. Realistically, you will not be traveling or going to an in-person event in the next three months. Divide these into two buckets:
Fully Refundable (e.g., refundable hotel reservations) - in most cases, you should simply cancel these now. It may be wise to cancel sooner rather than later, particularly if you have been billed in advance and are concerned that the hotel may not honor your refund if it runs into financial trouble.
Partly/Nonrefundable (primarily air travel, also nonrefundable hotel reservations) - this is trickier. Here is a a useful list of airline refund policies, with some more interesting discussions on getting refunds on cancelled flights. In short, most airlines are allowing free changes, but to get a refund your flight usually needs to have been cancelled by the airline. Personally, we are waiting until closer to our flights to see if we can get a refund rather than having to reschedule. For nonrefundable hotel reservations, carefully review the refund policy for the hotel or the site on which you booked your reservation (e.g., here are the policies for Priceline). In most cases, you should be able to receive a refund without much hassle, particularly if the hotel is closed.
Review Your Recurring Subscriptions
Spend 15 minutes reviewing your latest credit card statements and review each recurring subscription. Ask yourself: do I really need this? Is this content/service truly necessary, or does it overlap with other services I already use?
For example, think about different streaming service subscriptions, or monthly subscription boxes (e.g., Stitch Fix or NatureBox), and whether you need all of them. If you use Spotify, consider whether you can save as a household by changing your individual premium membership ($9.99 per month each) to a family membership ($14.99 per month).
Review Your Expenses
Now is a good time to do an annual expense review, which I discussed in two posts earlier this year (part 1 and part 2). This may seem like a hassle, but it’s a very helpful way to control your expenses. The process is always informative, and sometimes eye-opening.
Evaluate Your Cellphone Data Plan
Check your phone’s mobile data usage (in your phone’s settings for iPhone or Android). If you’re like me, you’re almost exclusively using home wifi right now and have used very little cellular data in the past month. In our case, across a four-device family plan, we used only 2GB in the past 30 days.
If you use one of the major carriers and are paying for a large data plan or unlimited data, you may be able to downgrade to a cheaper plan. In our case, we switched to a discount MVNO and our monthly bill generally runs about $90 per month for four devices, including taxes and fees.
Review Your Auto Insurance
Many auto insurers have been providing refunds to customers because there have been far fewer cars on the road (and fewer accidents), leading to low insurance claims and high profits for the insurance companies. Check to see if you are receiving a credit on your insurance premiums, and whether there are other things you can do (like reduce coverage levels if appropriate/allowed) to save even more. I found this article on the subject helpful.
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it with a friend! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.