Healthy spending and saving habits are the antacid to our budget indigestion. When gas prices rise, so do our anxiety levels. Let’s grab some Pepcid and be on our way more comfortably, because even if it’s attitude reflux, the stuff to follow can still work.
While I’m no financial guru, I’ve had some pennies to play with (and pinch) occasionally and have learned a few things along the way. Spending, saving, and especially giving are the best ways to handle money. Time is finite, and cash is a close second. When the proverbial poo hits the fan, I’d like to think I’m inflation immune.
Budgeting is an ideal way, in my humble opinion, to categorize the most finite things we have: time and money. We set a schedule and settle into the almighty calendar crunch. Yet we don’t always feel the same about money. What makes it different? Perhaps we should budget our money like we do our time, or vice versa.
Managing time is a topic to tackle another day, so let’s dive into the world of wonder, also known as some small ways that have helped me feel inflation-resistant. These are the things I personally do or use and experience success with. While there are no guarantees, I hope you’ll experience some wins using them too!
Small Tasks: Some Reward
Small habits can create surprising returns. None of these will fund a private island or erase a Target run gone rogue, but they can soften the blow of everyday spending and stretch the budget a just little bit further.
Digitized Receipts.
Paper receipts lying around induce my anxiety, so unless they’re 100% necessary, I make them disappear. I’ve found that receipts containing a barcode are easily readable digitally, thanks to modern tech. I’ve been scanning receipts for at least a decade now.
CoinOut & Receipt Hog offer the best options for this process, in my opinion. I can scan my physical receipts into these apps, and this weekly task has earned me an extra $20 here and there.
The two-birds-one-stone approach is fabulous. Cash rewards (once I’ve reached applicable in-app milestones) are sent through PayPal, which—unlike some rewards systems I’ve used that “cash out” only in gift cards—translates to income. Payouts go back into the budget for groceries.
My weekly receipt-scanning ritual takes less than 15 minutes. With Receipt Hog, I linked my Amazon account, which auto-loads digital receipts for additional points. Cha-ching! With how much time and treasure I spend on Amazon, it’s a win-win.
Snail Mail Stamps.
My 9-year-old daughter loves getting mail. She doesn’t have email, but somehow she’s got pen pals. (It’s how I grew up, too, so I respect it.) We also mail over a hundred Christmas cards each year, which could get expensive at $0.78 a pop. I never buy stamps at full price; I buy Forever stamps at a discount.
The website looks questionable, and all email communications may land in spam, but I’ve purchased many times using this method with zero issues. The trick is to order ahead, be patient with shipping timelines, and check the spam folder. This is the place (USPS Stamps Outlet). Sure, it feels slightly sketchy. But yes, it’s legit.
Grocery Pick-Up & Delivery (availability may vary).
A year and a half ago, I uncovered a glorious trifecta: Kroger pickup, Boost program, Instacart delivery. When someone else picks grocery items for me through this process, I can return items for a refund with no questions asked and no returns needed. (These items can’t be returned to the store, likely due to standard policy…and health codes.) Huge win.
What I save through returned (free) products more than covers what I spend on Instacart tips. I don’t encourage excessive returns, but the policy is there for things that aren’t what I would choose. If something is substituted for a product I wouldn’t normally select, I consider it an experiment, an invitation to branch out a bit.
If I just plain don’t like the product I received, I can request a refund and keep the product. Someone in my household is bound to like it.
Cell Phone Bill.
I used to pay $150 per month for unlimited everything, which didn’t include monthly payments toward my husband’s and my brand-new iPhones. These phones were not-so-new by the time they were paid off. That reality always stung.
We’d sell our old iPhones to help pay for the next upgrade, which was impossible before they were fully paid for, and it was even harder when the phones were tethered to a specific cell phone carrier. This dilemma disappeared when we found US Mobile.
We currently pay $33 per month for unlimited calls/texts and the precise amount of monthly data we need for our household: 12 GB. When we travel (and thus, need more data), another $10-$20 “tops off” the plan with an additional 5-10 GB, which, if unused, transfers to the next month’s data allowance.
Time Trades
Not every reward comes from spending less. Sometimes the better deal comes from trading time, effort, creativity, or patience in exchange for opportunities, products, or long-term savings. A strange little modern barter system, if you will.
User Testing.
The UserTesting platform provides an option to exchange time for income through surveys, recorded tests, and live conversations. I’ve done each, and my favorite opportunities are the live conversations!
Amazon Vine (invite-only).
Once upon a time, I discovered Amazon…and never looked back. (Who’s with me? 🙋🏽♀️) When I review purchased products, I like to provide tons of details, complete with photos and videos whenever possible.
Apparently, someone noticed when I was invited to join the Amazon Vine program almost two years ago. Once I received enough “helpful” (heart) votes on my reviews, I hit Amazon’s radar, and they reached out with an invitation. Vine is an opportunity to trade my time for free products, which I can keep, discard, give away, or sell.
Most of what I receive gets donated, so it’s a cool way to flex my writing muscle and try out free products. Tell the world what I think about something? Yes, please! Blessing local ministries through donations of new items is a great byproduct as well.
Beware of Amazon sellers outside Vine who offer to exchange free products for reviews! It’s against Amazon’s policy and a great way to get your ability to review products revoked.
Bigger Buys
The larger the purchase, the larger the margin for regret…or wisdom. These are the areas where patience, research, and resisting impulse can save hundreds or even thousands over time. Painful lessons from adulthood, generously passed down free of charge. You’re welcome.
Homeschooling Curriculum.
We started homeschooling our daughter when she first started school over five years ago. Her curriculum cost felt reasonable at that time, at a few hundred dollars a year. The younger the child and the lower the grade level, the less expensive it was.
Enter inflation, price increases, and grade advancements, and the cost is now in the thousands annually. When additional savings are available, we prefer to pay bigger bills in full. Her curriculum always goes on sale in the spring, too, which helps.
She typically starts school sometime between July and September, so I always purchase the upcoming grade’s curriculum between February and April to take advantage of the annual sale. To date, this process has saved me over $1,000!
Technology Purchases.
After graduating from high school, I used my graduation gifts of cash to buy my first computer, a Gateway laptop, for $500. (Gateway was acquired by Acer back in 2007, which is why we never hear about or see those cow-covered computers anymore.)
I know what you’re probably thinking… For a laptop 20+ years ago, that’s outrageously expensive! You are correct. And it wasn’t even new; it was a rebuild. The good ol’ Gateway chugged along for just shy of four years, almost my entire college career.
One delightful afternoon, while it sat on my lap, I experienced a sneeze—the kind you can’t hold back or you’ll self-implode. Out came the sneeze, and up went the laptop. When it landed back in my lap, it had turned off. And it never turned on again.
Perfect timing. I had the opportunity to start my multi-page, thousands-of-words, hours-of-research term paper over. Ouch.
That experience left me bitter toward anything rebuilt, refurbished, or repurposed. Even those words were a trigger for years to follow. Fortunately, repurposed technology has come a long way since then.
Earlier this year I decided to take the plunge again, this time in the form of an Amazon-renewed iPhone 15 Pro. After tons of research, I learned of the heightened requirements for redone and resellable tech products. That put my mind at ease.
If you’re curious, for my iPhone purchase specifically: the remaining battery life must meet or exceed 80%, there can only be minor (almost unnoticeable) wear on the body, and everything else has to be just as if I purchased it new.
So I did it. I purchased a renewed iPhone 15 Pro from Amazon just over six months ago, for over $1,000 less than the cost of a new iPhone 17 Pro.
Fun Fact: Most renewed Amazon purchases qualify for a 90-day return instead of their standard 30-day return window.
Once I was confident in the iPhone 15 Pro’s abilities, I sold my iPhone 13 for over half the cost of my “new-to-me” iPhone. That put my total out-of-pocket cost around $200.
Compared to the iPhone 13, the iPhone 15 feels like a massive upgrade in both hardware and software.
Spoiler Alert: I rinse and repeat this process with vehicle purchases too.
I won’t upgrade iPhones again for at least two years. If I follow this same formula, I’d buy an iPhone 17 at that time, giving me a couple of years to see how it functions for other folks and decide if I want that model.
Having an iPhone costs me ~$100/year compared to buying a new iPhone annually at 10x the cost! 🤯
Insurance.
Insurance is riveting, isn’t it? I’ll try to keep things fun in this area too. For purposes of this section, I’m only referring to auto, home, and umbrella insurance. They say the only guarantees in life are death and taxes. May we please add insurance to that list?
Had our family not had the right insurance coverage in place, we would have shelled out $15,000 for a new roof a couple of years ago, and another chunk of change for the cost of a newish vehicle when my sedan was totaled over a decade ago.
Insurance is an annoying expense, primarily because we don’t see the benefits if/until something goes wrong. But not having it (or the right amount of it) is the kicker. My insurance tricks to help soften the blow—once we reached that point in our budget—are as follows:
Tip 1: Have an Emergency Fund (i.e., a savings account filled with gobs of money) that could cover at least three months’ worth of expenses, including the cost of your auto and home deductibles (as applicable).
If your auto deductible is $500 per incident, make sure you have that $500 in savings.
If your home deductible is $1,000 per incident, have that amount set aside in savings.
If you’re like us and have a separate hail/wind-damage deductible ($5,000 for us), have that amount in savings too.
Add it all together, and you should have at least $6,500 in your savings account based on the numbers above.
If we’re getting nitpicky, you could probably get away with $5,500 in your Emergency Fund since home deductibles don’t stack. (Translation: You’d either pay $1,000 or $5,000 for a home insurance claim.)
Tip 2: If you’re stocked up in the savings department above, and if it makes sense to do so, increase your insurance deductibles.
The standard deductibles for both auto and home are $500-$1,000. Could you increase your auto to $1,000 and home to $2,500 or $5,000? Yes, if it makes sense.
Tip 3: Pay annually and in full. Insurance carriers typically offer a discount for doing so.
Tip 4: Ask for discounts and additional savings opportunities.
Are your policies bundled (as in, all your insurances are with the same carrier/company)?
Are you a safe driver? (What is considered safe? 🤔)
Does your vehicle have extra safety bells and whistles?
Do you have a home security system?
Reach out to your insurance agent to see if any of these features translate to savings.
Vehicles.
A decade ago, my husband got the “itch,” the one that says, “I’m a dude. I need a truck.” So we sold his sedan and went shopping. We settled on a small, green-colored GMC, a sorry excuse for a truck. But it had a bed, and it ran.
The seller—a dude—had a bad dye job and haircut, and we should have asked so many more questions. In that moment, we learned that it’s fair to judge the seller just as much as the vehicle. Had I gone with my gut, we would’ve avoided that rod-knock truck altogether.
The engine blew a few months later.
My husband and I have owned over two dozen vehicles thus far between the two of us. We’re well-versed in vehicle recalls. But never had we experienced the recall of an entire vehicle.
Another financial face-plant came in the form of the Volkswagen Jetta. I’ll spare you the saga, but VW got lazy and installed a “test” part into thousands of production vehicles, which included our TDI (Turbocharged Direct Injection) Jetta.
We also used a loan to purchase our Jetta, so the impact went multiple layers deep. VW bought the Jetta back from us, a nice gesture, but we lost significant money between the loan and the severely discounted buyback amount. We’ve never taken out a vehicle loan since.
A couple of years ago, we bought an SUV from an interesting couple. They were kind, but I could sense the sketchiness. I could feel the concerns piling up, even as I messaged the point of contact on Messenger from Facebook Marketplace.
Based on my spidey-senses, I knew there would be things wrong with the SUV. We were prepared to low-ball the price—and we did, and they accepted the offer. This scenario wasn’t as risky as the junky truck because we’d set aside extra funds and budgeted $3,000 to fix it.
The vehicle is still worth more than we paid all-in. As a rule, $1,000/year in vehicle purchase cost is what we like to spend.
The Payoff (or Payout)
After experimenting with weird systems, practical shortcuts, and anti-inflammatory spending habits, I’ve noticed a few patterns: they have less to do with math and more to do with behavior, patience, and learning how to live slightly outside default settings.
So what did we learn?
Convenience can cost more than we notice, so we have to calculate the trade-off (delivery fees and tips vs. an in-person grocery run).
Patience can be financially profitable (i.e., taking the time to digitize receipts).
Bulk and pay-in-full purchases can bring additional benefits.
Using time as a resource is next level.
Pride can make us overspend, so words like “used” or “preowned” or even the words “borrow” or “rent” can be a trigger. These aren’t things to be ashamed of.
Budgeting isn’t a restriction; it’s freedom to be flexible and to spend funds on the things we name.
Spend money and resources on the things that matter.
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