Money Tricks and Tips You Should Be Using

December 3rd, 2007 • Related • Filed Under • by Debbie Dragon

Do you have a jar of pennies at home? They do seem to multiply, and most people don’t want to cart around a jar of pennies when they’re shopping!

pennies

In order to reduce the amount of pennies you carry around with you or stash in a jar to roll later, just keep four pennies in your wallet at all times. That way, you can give the pennies when you make purchases and you’ll always get silver coins back. (Then you can roll the silver and make bigger deposits!) If your coffee and danish comes to $2.86 at the local convenient store, hand over a five dollar bill and a penny, and you’ll get $2 and instead of pennies, a nickle and a dime. At the end of the day, put all of your silver into a jar for your “rainy day” fund, and add four more pennies!

Bargain shopping online! Many people shop online- and especially during the holiday season. Don’t take the first total you get during your online checkout as the final word! Check around the net for coupon codes that will let you save shipping and/or 10% off your order. You’d be surprised how easy it is to find these codes (if you don’t do it already that is!) Using bargain shopping sites like fatwallet.com, bondrewards.com, Froogle, MyBargainbuddy.com and dealnews.com will help you stretch your online shopping dollars a little further.

Use the credit card company’s grace period. As long as you pay your credit card off in full each month, you can take advantage of the interest-free grace period and get yourself an interest free loan for a month. If your statement closes on the 22^nd of the month, you would buy your item on the 23^rd. The item won’t show up on the statement until the following month, and you usually have 10-20 days of “grace” period which means you get about 45 days of interest-free borrowing. Just be sure you know when the closing date is if you use this method.

All the non-monthly expenses need to be dealt with. Figure out how much you spend on the big, non-monthly expenses in a year’s time- things like holiday shopping, birthdays, property and school taxes, home owners insurance, auto insurance, vacation, car and home maintenance, etc. Take the total number and divide by the number of paychecks you get a year, and transfer that amount automatically (before your greedy mitts have a chance to use it!) to a high interest account, like ING Direct, with no minimums or fees. When it comes time to pay one of these non-monthly expenses, you should have the money available! If you don’t have enough money to pay your monthly expenses and these non-monthly expenses, you need to rework your budget!