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Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
131–140 of 195 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#132I live in a city where I don't need a car. I brew my own beer (fortunately I enjoy this activity, and I live in a place with very high alcohol taxes). I eat little meat.
I also brew my own beer, saves me lots of money. I think when I did the calculations, it cost $0.70(CA)/355ml, although I know I can get that lower.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#133Since nobody else said it. STAY SINGLE!!! If it flies, floats or f ks it's cheaper to rent than to buy. If you can't stay single at least avoid kids... I know that won't be a popular opinion but the numbers don't lie.
congratulations to the only comment in the whole comments section that mentions kids or children.
like always, there's an XKCD for that: http://xkcd.com/946/
..and like someone mentioned their 200$ food budget, try spending twice that amount on kindergarden a month that your kid is not attending for now because he's home sick and you're spending extra on treatment.
When you've exhausted your saving options, making more is still the best option for saving money:) Simple math, if you spend 3000/month of your favourite currency, then you'll have twice more money by earning 4000 vs 3500.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#134from this book the richest man in babylon, I like the simplicity of just putting aside 10 percent to start.
It build up over time, and it is dead simple to implement.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#135I just record all my discretionary purchases in a spreadsheet and recoil in horror at the end of the month. My monthly spend has been steadily dropping since I started doing this about six months ago. EDIT: I seem to have misunderstood the topic of this thread, but, as another commenter puts it, the best way to save money is to not spend money in the first place.
On that note though, while I realize there are plenty of apps that will do this sort of thing for you, I really wished there were that did it with this level of simplicity. And I don't mean create an account for Mint or Level or any of the other bountiful budgeting services out there and merely export to a Spreadsheet. I (personally) literally only want something that can connect to my accounts, see a transaction, an…
Every month i create a file (e.g. 201605.csv for May 2016) where I write date, description, amount and category, manually, using whatever editor I have at hand.
The files reside on Dropbox so I can also update these via smartphone when needed.
And I wrote (like 15 years ago?) a very simple Perl script that pointed at csv files will summarize expenses and income by category, and provide totals (along as percentages, i.e. stuff like
"BOOKS: 23.75 / 0.31% of total monthly expenses"
That's all. Being .csv it can be manually updated, ported wherever I can run Perl, imported in Excel or in any DB I may care for etc. If I want to run analysis I can paste together all the files and run R on these etc. etc. etc.
I have maybe 20 categories, so it's easy to assign to them and I don't have to agonize for hours about how to tag any non-recurring expenses.
This has proven to be enough for me. YMMV, of course.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#136Since nobody else said it. STAY SINGLE!!! If it flies, floats or f ks it's cheaper to rent than to buy. If you can't stay single at least avoid kids... I know that won't be a popular opinion but the numbers don't lie.
Why is staying single cheaper? My girlfriend and I save a lot of money by being able to share an apartment and splitting the rent, internet connection etc. Living alone would be much more expensive for each of us.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#137My method which is my least favourite but most successful was to marry a quite frugal woman. I was never the type who had any money left at the end of the month but have just put a 55k€ deposit down on a new house and have money left to furnish it (about 2 yrs of saving). I also have a young child, live in a nice area with high rent, have a car and have many hobbies which I enjoy regularly. The main savings have come from cutting back on expensive impulse purchases, the second would be cutting down to one coffee a day and bringing my own lunch to work. Next on my list is to quit smoking which should also greatly increase my savings ability.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#138My father always says : "saving money is the beginning of being poor". So I always try to save money by thinking how can I make more. These days money = time is a strong equation, so just don't loose your time and use it in a way to make money. Stop thinking about saving money and spend your thoughts on revenue stream. That's why I rarely use services like that and don't count the pennies ( I'm neither rich nor bragg…
The other one I like is, "You can always make money back, but time you can never get back." My dad said that, and he was poor for a period of time in his youth. He later was an entrepreneur (but not of the tech kind, and not of the rich kind, more the independent kind that had $0 and no job, and later a staff of around 20, in the span of a few years).
I cannot relate to the extreme savings world that isn't necessary. For example, I had a friend who made much more than me but quite enjoyed the 'optimization' or 'life hacks' mentality including reducing his electrical expenses throughout his house, living in a studio, being vegan and finding tricks to spending no money on stuff. He had a system where the farm would deliver (in NYC) organic produce based on what was available seasonally, for a subscription fee, making his food experience cheap. He would sign up to those free loans the banks would give, the ones where they'd send a check and you had no interest for 8 months, and he'd put it in a CD for exactly 8 months to pocket the interest and pay it back. etc. And he made a lot more money than me (and still does).
I can't live like that. On the other hand, I'm not the impulsive/blind spender that needs a wife/husband/'life hacks'/software to keep his spending under control. I'm also a privileged tech worker with a comfortable (but not braggable) income.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are very poor then clearly doing something to increase your income makes a lot of sense. For most people on HN I'm not so sure, most roles have a ceiling that is very difficult to get above without moving into upper management or starting your own business. The odds don't look so good then. On the other hand having some FU money will improve your quality of life significantly. Just being able to say no to that…
There's a distinction between "saving money", as in putting it in a savings account, having a nest egg. That is clearly a good thing. The other, which is what the OP is about, is "saving money", as in paying less for things. This is rarely a good investment in terms of the time/happiness/convenience/actual money saved trade-off. A somewhat extreme example is clipping coupons - the cognitive load of planning around sa…
"Hacking on a side project is one of the things you could do once you stop spending hours saving dollars."
Hacking on ever recurring side project can also be a huge time sink, especially since projects tend to have a disproportionate reward at the end.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite way to save money?
#140My father always says : "saving money is the beginning of being poor". So I always try to save money by thinking how can I make more. These days money = time is a strong equation, so just don't loose your time and use it in a way to make money. Stop thinking about saving money and spend your thoughts on revenue stream. That's why I rarely use services like that and don't count the pennies ( I'm neither rich nor bragg…
I'm sure your dad has a lot of money and all, but saving money works pretty well for most people.
Look at the interest rate. Now look at inflation (not "core" inflation, the one you pay). Saving, money in bank, is not a good investment atm. Or put differently, it's at best as good as gold bars under the bed.