Several weeks ago, Liz Pulliam Weston at MSN Money pulled together a list of 12 cool money tricks. Some of these have come up here before, but it never hurts to review them. Here are a few of the ideas she shared:
- The four-penny hack: always carry four pennies with you so you don’t get pennies in change. (This one only works once per shopping trip.)
- Learn to use online shopping tools like MyBargainBuddy.com and AbleShopper.
- Get companies to compete for your business: call around to find the best deal.
- Get a month-long interest-free loan by charging expensive items to a credit card on the first day of the billing cycle. (Though I don’t use credit cards, I admit I think this hack is particularly clever.)
- Prepay big bills. Christmas shopping get you down? Save up for it by making small monthly payments to a specific savings account.
Get more detail on each of these money hacks (and find seven more) in the original article.
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//Get a month-long interest-free loan by charging expensive items to a credit card on the first day of the billing cycle.//
If you have the classic AMX card that you must pay off each month – this becomes almost a 60 day free loan (minus the annual fee on the card…)
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It is very easy to screw yourself up charging to your credit card for the month-long interest-free loan. I do this, and a couple of times when I had to make more expensive purchases than usual (car repairs, furniture for a new apartment) I had an unpleasant surprise come billing day. I started to get trapped in an unpleasant cycle where I could pay off my credit card in full, but that left me so cash-strapped that I would charge up my credit card again and pay it off the following month… luckily, I’m more careful about this and my monthly rotating balance is starting to go down. But I still haven’t paid a cent in interest!
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I’ve been using MyBargainBuddy.com for years! Unlike other coupon sites, this place points out specific merchandise that is up to 90% off. I’ve saved tons by shopping clearance sales and saving my buys for holiday and birthdays.
I also like the four pennies tip. I think it was an Oprah episode that recommended saving all of your change and depositing it at the end of the month to a savings account. That could be helpful, too.
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This list skipped over one of my favorites: Price Protectr (www.priceprotectr.com). I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon.com, which has an unwritten 30-day price guarantee. In the two months that I’ve been using Price Protectr I’ve already saved over $30.
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I charge pretty much everything on a credit card, but I’m not sure it’s worth trying to get the ‘free loan for a month’.
Let’s say the big ticket item you’re buying is $1000. By making the effort to buy it at the start of the billing cycle instead of mid-billing cycle, you’re getting an extra 15 days of interest. In a high-yield account, that works out to $2.
Is that really worth the trouble? If you could get an extra $2 every day, it might be. But these are for occasional purchases. In my opinion, this one counts as a clever idea that is completely useless in the real world.
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And the best money trick of all: spend less, invest more.
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Umm, so you always carry around pennies to prevent carrying around pennies?
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Bravo “asdf”
My thought exactly.
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I’m curious as to what the benefit of carrying around pennies is?
From what I gather, people should save their change, but if you already have change to cover the difference from a purchase, this will allow you to spend more dollars.
Sounds like a “cool spending trick” if you ask me.
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I’m a little weird, I always leave the house with 99 cents. 3 quarters, 2 nickels, 1 dime, and 4 pennies. This way I have exact change at least once during the day.
I don’t know how it saves me money though.
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Personaly I never spent my change, I just let it grow in my pocket and put it in a piggy bank at the end of the day. When the bank get’s full it goes into a jar, when the jar gets full it goes to coinstar for a gift certificit, then I get something nice for myself. It usualy comes up to around $100 once a year.
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“It usualy comes up to around $100 once a year.”
And $10 for Coinstar.
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Adam, actually Coinstar does not charge any fees if you choose to put your change on a gift certificate rather than grabbing the cash. I get myself Amazon gift cards with the small amount of change I do happen to rack up over the year (minus the quarters, I need those for laundry).
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