Saving money a little bit at a time sucks. Today, you will learn how to save money fast. Really fast! At least $1000/hr, usually, peaking at almost $10,000/hr!
A penny saved is a penny earned. Did your grandparents ever say that? That always left me baffled…who cares about a penny?
I wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $50/hr.
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I get the penny-saving idea but there are a lot of ways to save money and some suck:
- Your grandma won’t stop talking about how she does her own hair.
- Work friends all make their own kombucha.
- Some Financial Times article urged you to make a budget…
- I hate budgets, so instead let’s talk about something that doesn’t suck or waste your time…
How fast is FAST? Under 1 hr!
Like in our ‘how to make money fast‘ my recommendations will be less than one hour of effort and don’t require any prep.
Getting a real estate license to avoid realtor fees involves prep work. Maybe, it’s smart but you can’t do it now and therefore it’s useless. That’s not discussed here.
If you can start to see the benefits at the one-hour mark from right now, that is what we will talk about here…even if there is still a bit of paperwork to follow through on – all the best stuff always has paperwork.
Table of contents – How to save money FAST!
- One hour of research to save MANY thousands in interest
- Pay less student debt, RIGHT NOW!
- Change your car from “money pit” to “modest money pothole”
- Honorable mentions
My crusade against time-wasters
My friend “saves money” by taking three months to build his own furniture and wooden shelving. I get it, his wooden shelving is way more awesome than mine from IKEA but it’s not a money saver, it’s an act of carpentry passion. A very different thing.
Money-saving tips that waste time are my nemeses!
There are hordes of hopeless ‘money-savers, time-wasters’ out there:
- Growing vegetables
- Couponing
- Budgeting
- Yard sales
- Changing lightbulbs
- Repairing clothes
- Grocery store price comparisons
- Home-made cleaning supplies
- Homebrew beer or wine
All fun HOBBIES possibly but all definitely time-wasters.
So today, I will show you 3 methods of how to save money fast so you know what to focus on if you want to save lots of money now. No time-wasting.
Speaking of not wasting time, let’s get down to business. Here are the big three:
1 – Save money on your mortgage: $4500/hr
If you own a home, it is most certainly your biggest liability.
I own almost $2M worth of houses which has given me a lot of mortgage experience!
Know one amazing lesson I learned. It is really easy to pay less mortgage interest. Then when you factor in how expensive housing is, this becomes an amazing way to save money fast!
Yeah sure you could ‘just pay it off,’ but I don’t recommend paying your mortgage off, just pay less interest. It’s much easier and faster.
Refinance your mortgage (I did all my price shopping in 15 minutes with my guide) and you will almost always pay less interest!
Just refinanced my house! It’s grrreat!
I went through this recently and as you’ll see you can save more than I did!
The 5-year term on my mortgage just ended and my interest rate was going to rise to 3.15%. It’s a historically low number but it was more than I was used to paying so I was not happy.
Suddenly, I was motivated to go looking for a new lender to find a better rate. I found one and voila! I ended up with a 2.6% rate with no upfront costs. I was happy again.
My mortgage principal at the time was $480,000 so by going through this exercise I saved:
- $59 Bi-weekly
- $12,100 over my new 5-year term
- $31,500 by lowering my rate 0.55% over 20 years (calculator link)
- The average American would save more! (see infographic) for a nice $235/month.
It took a few more hours to fill out all the forms for sure, but only about 1 hr of effort before I saw all the rates and possible savings in front of me.
Even if I say it took me 7 hours of effort to get to the end, I would save at a rate of $4,500/hr. WOW!Sign me up!
That’s an awesome way to save loads of money but what if you don’t have a huge mortgage?
2 – Save money on Student Debt: $6000/hr
If you don’t have a huge mortgage to refinance it’s probably because you are swimming in student debt and can’t get a mortgage.
So what should you, the aspiring doctor/lawyer/beach bum, do? Refinance your student debt of course!
This is almost the exact same as refinancing your mortgage except that the interest rates are worse and the principal debt is a little bit less.
I really do mean a little bit less.
According to the AAMC medical school graduate questionnaire, the median amount of debt held by a freshly graduated doctor is about $200,000 and paid at an average rate of 6.25%.
That makes for a huge monthly expense! The standard repayment terms are 10-years so that leaves you with a $2,238 a month payment and $68,504 of interest over that 10-years.
Guess what! We can refinance this too and the results are stellar since the standard federal rates are so brutal.
Right now, it seems like you can get rates closer to 2.3%.
That saves you a whopping $372/month or $44,551 over the ten years. WOW!
Signing the papers will take extra time but if you guess it’s 7 hrs total you are still making $6364/hr in interest savings!!!
Again, if you don’t believe that you can do it so quickly I go through how to get good rates and a good lender quickly in the student debt refinancing guide linked below. It was also about 15 minutes!
3 – Save the most money on Cars! $8700/hr
So how did your car make it on this list?
Do I want you to stop driving and start scootering around? I thought we weren’t going to waste time here! Well, have you ever thought “how much car can I afford?” No? You should.
After a few car purchases, you’ve basically bought a house… And then burnt it to the ground.
So what can we do to bring down this expense within 1 hour?
Here’s the trouble: Your car game probably started with a modest used Honda Civic and over time got upgraded to an unapologetic Acura or F150.
So what can you do in 1 hr? Look up your car on Autotrader to see how much you could make by downgrading. Then drive to a dealer and negotiate!
If you are driving a somewhat new Ford F150 you can be $50,000 richer and also save a few hundred dollars a month in maintenance and fuel. Hurrah!
It will up your stealth wealth game too!
Example calculation:
- $50,000 on a 10 year 5% loan = $529 / month
- Driving 20,000 miles a year on an F150 is about $200 / month. Let’s assume your replacement car is half that for a savings of $100 a month.
- Then let’s just conservatively say insurance and maintenance is $100 a month extra.
- That makes for a cool $729/month in savings.
Amazingly this is the biggest hourly savings yet! Swapping your car at a dealership will take you 10 hrs without excessive negotiation and including all the driving around.
10 hrs ouch! But over the next 10 years, you save $87,480. That’s an impressive $8,748/hr of savings! Yah!
Honorable mention:
Eating-In
Save money on food by eating in properly using my guide. I developed a strategy to save money on food while also saving your time. It doesn’t quite break the $1000/hr barrier so it didn’t cut the mustard for today.
Skipping Daycare
Daycare is really expensive! I was retired with little kids but didn’t want to ‘just’ babysit all day. So I discovered gym child-minding. Which I abuse.
Do it all! – Save money FAST!
If you spent 3 hours and got going all these savings together you could save $15,348 after-tax dollars this year! AHHHHH!
You can do a lot with an hour. You’ve probably spent that much time floating through Reddit today. So spend an hour trying out one of these and make some money back.
So tell me. What are your quick money-saving success stories?
TL;DR – How to save money FAST!
- Saving money is good, wasting time is bad. Make sure you’re not trading one for the other
- One big return to save money is to have the lowest rate possible on your mortgage and student debt.
- An even bigger return is downgrading your vehicle.
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