Advice from the Winners of The Money Book
During our recent review of The Money Book, we asked for your very best money-saving tips. The huge number of comments and savvy advice we received shows that our readership definitely knows a thing or two about saving pennies!
After careful consideration, Joseph and Denise, the authors of The Money Book, helped us pick the top money-saving tips from our readers. Each winner will receive a copy of The Money Book, directly from the authors.
Check out the winning money tips after the jump!
Stacey Lane shares her technique for budgeting for the holidays:
My husband and I are always strapped for cash around Christmas time. Because of this, we have devised a personal system for Christmas shopping. Buy gift cards to stores you frequent (say Best Buy or Toys R Us, etc) and keep adding money to them throughout the year. Start on January 1st and put $10-$20 on it each week. By November 1st, you should have accumulated $450-$900. Most of these higher end retail establishments have ways that you can add money to the card over the internet so you don’t have to waste the gas millage to drive all the way to the store. I live in a pretty rural area and the closest town is about 20 miles away so this is nice for me if I’m not planning a trip into the city that week. By using gift cards you won’t be adding to your credit card debt which will save you money on interest. For example, if you have a 20% interest rate (hey, it happens more than you think), you just saved at least $200! Also, it’s heinous but do most of your Christmas shopping on Black Friday. If you can’t pick two or three stores to invest most of your cash into, or you like visiting mom & pops, try a prepaid Visa gift card instead. Just watch out for the prepaid cards that can’t be reloaded, otherwise you’ll have to carry around a bunch of them and that’s not so green. 
Melanie Richards shares her tips for avoiding debt and finding deals:
My tips:
Pay off all your debt (highest interest earning first).
Then leave that credit card hidden in a drawer.
Save! Save! Save!
Barter your services!
I’ve done web work for local companies who now give me:
- fresh veggies monthly from a local farmer.
- massages from a local massage therapists
- surfboard from custom surfboard builder
George Elias uses automatic bank services to save cash painlessly:
A good way to save money without noticing is to open a savings account at your bank and signing up for their “Debit Round-up” feature. Most banks have this feature available and doesn’t cost you anything. Basically, every time you make a purchase (groceries, gas, …) and swipe your debit card it rounds up the total to the nearest dollar. The additional few cents are then deposited into your savings account, that’s anything from a few pennies to a dollar. For example, if you average 20 transactions a month and 50 cents is deposited into your savings account; that’s about 10$ a month you saved without noticing.
Artiste advises to keep finances separate:
The best financial tip I could give other freelancers is to keep your business and personal expenses completely separate. Be diligent about this; don’t just hand all your receipts to your accountant once a year and pray! Over time I have learned the importance of making my business pay its own way. Need a new laptop? Pay for it with your business earnings. Don’t have enough in your business account? Book some more work! On a related note, a business credit card can be both useful and dangerous. Charge with caution!
Suprasanna Mishra shares free alternatives to paid services:
As a freelancing college student dealing with college debt, school workloads and working with design clients in my freetime, a simple way to save money has been to find online alternatives to typical business expenses. Ex.
Manage finances: Instead of Quicken, the free Mint.com
File Sharing: Instead of flash drives and hard to find emails: Dropbox
Phone Calls: Instead of paying for a business line, the free Google Voice
Before you buy ANYTHING: retailmenot.com. Even a 10% discount on something you were already going to buy is essentially free cash back to you.
Those are just a few things I use but the point is, spend the extra 10 seconds googling for a free alternative, you’d be surprised how much those things can add up to (For me, the standard “paid” alternatives would’ve cost me $2,435 more dollars; and that’s probably an underestimate).
It’s not that this info is groundbreakingly new, it’s the idea of actually putting them into practice that’ll save you money.
Once again, congratulations to our winners!
this contest was awesome would love to see more of these in the future! all of the above advice is really great! congrats to the winners
Those are some great tips, Contgrats to the winners
Sorry to be the devil’s advocate here, but aren’t the first few tips really just ways to trick yourself into saving, budgeting, and planning ahead? Wouldn’t the best solution be to just not be so bad with your finances?
The gift card idea is terrible. You’re basically establishing a no-interest savings account with a specific retailer, limiting yourself to shopping in the few stores that you bought those gift cards for. And what happens if you need to buy more gifts at one store over another? Do you end up with a useless balance on one card and not enough funds on another? What do you use the remaining balance for? And where do you get the cash to make up for what you were lacking at a store where the card balance wasn’t enough?
And bartering? Really? We’re talking about trading web design services for vegetables?
Sorry, I’m not buying it. With the exception of the last two tips, these tips are pretty bad, in my opinion.
Here’s an idea: Actually save money (in a bank) and plan ahead. Make a weekly deposit to an interest-bearing savings account.
I (kind of) agree with MikemcD on these, except I would say the last 3 tips are good.
I didn’t know about the “Debit Round-Up” feature. I’m going to have to check and see if my Credit Union has that.
Mike’s advice about the savings account is spot on. Essentially you have to pay yourself first. Every time I make a deposit, a certain amount of that is skimmed right off the top into my savings account. I don’t miss it because it never takes up residence in my checking account.
You’d be surprised how quickly you can build up a nice safety net.
I’m definitely going to check out this book, though.
not such impressive trick especially last one…looks like taken from fairy tale book where things are so easy
My favorite tip is use your local library for books, movies, music and games, TONS of money can be saved there, plus they ship it to your closest library if you use the online catalog.
If you can not find what you need at your library use its intra library loan program through this website:
http://www.worldcat.org/
Find what you want there and then have your library deliver it to your closest library.
Bartering services sounds fun, but is it really a sustainable way to do business?
I would barter editing services for fresh vegetables any day. Where can I sign up?
I’m a huge fan of bartering services. It’s not meant to pay your electric bill or buy your groceries, but it can be an efficient way to retain a CPA or get your lawn mowed each week.
It only works if you’re trading equal value. It’s not worth it to trade a website design and build for lawn mowing. Maybe smaller web services, some light site enhancements or maybe even a logo. But if you’re building websites in exchange for accounting services (which for me cost about $500 per year) or lawn care, I think you’re getting the short end of the stick.