I’d be lying if I said I was a big saver. I save — I have an emergency fund, and I have retirement accounts, and all of the things one is supposed to have as they move through their young adulthood and want even a bit of stability and security. But I don’t think I’ll ever have the personality type that drives me to save as some kind of a fun activity. I know a lot of people (particularly through the personal finance community) who get fucking hype about saving money, and come up with a truly staggering amount of ways to save even more. It’s usually some combination of “earning more money” and “lightly tricking your own brain into being happy with less,” but the possible formulations of this are basically never-ending. And while I am definitely much more of a saver (and investor!) now than I ever was before, I have a hard time believing this will ever truly become an activity that I genuinely love.
All of that said, I am a huge fan about finding creative ways to do things more intelligently, and that includes the ways I save (or spend less) money. For me, that has become changing the way I shop and being much more methodical about what I buy. I’ve started shopping like a grandmother, so to speak, buying few things of the highest quality I can afford, and frequenting stores which prioritize loyalty and great customer service. I’ve found that it’s saved me a ton of money in the long-term, while making me much happier with what I have.
But that kind of change in shopping costs money as a rule, so I wanted to talk about creative savings with someone who is very good at the nitty-gritty of wringing more pennies out of your dollar, even when you don’t have that many dollars to work with (or are already wringing a lot of goddamn pennies). Erin of Broke Millennial, a great friend and very smart money person, joined me in this week’s TFD video to talk about the creative ways you can save more money, starting today.
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