​4 ways to hack expenses to help you save for your next investment

4 ways to hack expenses to help you save for your next investment

Living in New York City is expensive and it’s very easy to live paycheck to paycheck because everyone else does it. Luckily for me, I was introduced to financial freedom when I was 27 years old. With the help of Bigger Pockets and Choose FI, I was able to begin saving for my first investment, pay off my debt, and begin to invest for early retirement. I did this by optimizing my expenses and continually looking for different streams of income. This post will be focusing on ways to hack your expenses.

• 1.Stop Paying for Cable

These days there are so many ways to get around having to pay for cable. Before I realized this, I was paying $166.88 for my home phone, internet, and cable. That might not sound like a lot of money but if you multiply that by 12(because there are 12 months in a year) that totals up to $2002.56. I personally rather spend that on a vacation. I looked at my options and I decided that I don’t need a home phone because no one has called me on that phone in 5 years. I didn’t even know my phone number. I also realized that if I buy a fire stick, or an Apple TV I can just download Netflix and call it a day. All I would need to do is call my internet provider and ask to disconnect my cable and phone and only keep my internet. The internet provider agreed and I now pay $80 per month for the fastest internet they provide. I know what some of you are thinking,” But I like watching my shows when they come out. I don’t want to wait for it to show up on Netflix”. If you were thinking something similar to this then I have the perfect solution for you. I realized that even though I was telling people about how much money I was saving by disconnecting my phone and cable, most would just ignore me and continue their lives speeding through the rat race. This is actually beneficial for you because now that you have a fire stick or an Apple TV, you can now download the app for whatever channels you want to watch whenever you want. But wait, don’t you need a username and password of someone who pays for these channels? Yes you do and those same people who continue to pay for cable even though you tell them not to are your friends and family so they should have no problem supplying you with their credentials. I do this all the time. Not only am I paying saving 86.88 monthly, but my internet is faster than yours and I watch live TV just like you.

• 2.Credit Card/Travel Hacking

This is by far one of my favorite ways to save money while still having the opportunity to travel. Before I go into detail on how to credit card or travel hack works, I will say that this strategy will only work for people who have no consumer debt and a pretty good credit score. This strategy is also for the person who is financially disciplined and if a person reading feels they cannot follow these guidelines then I recommend not doing this. Now that we cleared that out the way, let’s get to it.

Once I discovered that you can travel the world for little to no cost, I knew I just had to figure out how. After extensive research through tons of blogs, one blog stood alone. The Choose FI (www.ChooseFI.com) website really breaks it down for you. Whether you are a beginner, or someone who has used this strategy for years, Choose FI supplies lots of information on how to do this.

The first thing I did was take out a Chase Sapphire credit card. Chase offers 50k points which is equal to $621 to anyone who spends 4k in 3 months. For some people that might sound like a lot of money but there are ways around this. I took out the credit 2 weeks before I went to Mexico because I originally decided to take 1k in cash to spend. I instead used my credit card in Mexico and then took the 1k I originally had and transferred it to my credit card account. My friends and I rent a boat every summer. It cost us about 2k and we split it among all the people that want to go. I decided to collect everyone’s money and just pay for it with my credit card and then transfer over the money to my credit card account. Those two moves already took me to 3k and now I was only 1k away from getting my 50,000 points. The next thing I did to achieve my 4k in three months was simply move all my expenses to my credit card. For example, I would pay my phone bill, cable bill, utilities, my brother’s car note and everyday expenses with that credit card and simply use the cash I was going to originally use to simply transfer it over to the credit balance. That got me to 50K points.

After I gained my points, I realized that I can then recommend my girlfriend for this card and I can gain another 10k points and we can then get her 50k points. Another cool thing is that Chase allows you to transfer points to people so we were then able to combine our points which gave us 110k points toward our next trip. That is about 1300 dollars towards travel. This is by far one of the best hacks I have ever heard of and done. Hopefully you have an understanding but this is just an introduction. If you are really interested in Credit Card and Travel Hacking, I recommend you go to https://www.choosefi.com/all-articles/travel-rewards/

• 3.Food hacking

I wrote another post previous to this one that really went into depth with how important it is to make you control how much money you are spending on food. Something that you must realize about your food expenses is that it can creep up on you. Let’s say for instance, every morning you buy your self breakfast and coffee. I live in New York City so the price might vary from city to city but for New Yorkers, you are looking at about 5 bucks. Now it is lunch time and you and your coworkers want to try the new restaurant that just opened up down the block. Lets say you spend 10 dollars on that lunch. You are now at 15 dollars but wait, we are not done because after a long day of work you don’t want to cook something. You rather just order some dinner or pick it up on the way home. Let’s say that goes for another 10 dollars. You have now spent 25 dollars in one day for food. Let us say now that you do this every day for a week. That is a total of 175 dollars a week. In a month that is 700 dollars. In a year that is 8,400 dollars. I am not recommending you starve yourself. I am recommending that you stop for a second and create a plan.

One plan I used to bring down my food expense was to simply go food shopping every week on Sunday and prep my food for the week. Before I decided to make this move, I was spending about 20 dollars daily on food. That’s about 140 dollars a week. Once I made the change from buying food outside to food shopping, I spent 50 dollars a week which saved me about 360 dollars a month. I personally go to Trader Joes because it is very affordable and offers quality products. Whichever supermarket you choose would probably work. The important thing is that you figure out a plan to help you save money to get you one step closer to purchasing that property or purchasing that stock.

• 4.Tracking expenses

This is another hack I learned through reading blogs and listening to other people in the FI (financial independence) world. I realized that I didn’t have to give myself a budget every month. All I had to do was track my expenses. By tracking expenses, I allowed myself to see where my money is going. This will begin to play a factor in your everyday life because whenever you see your self spending too much money on a particular category, you automatically begin to hold yourself accountable because you know that at the end of the month, you will have to type in those really big expenses on to your expense tracker. The guilt alone will have you think twice about spending money on things you don’t have to. If you don’t believe me give it a try and you’ll see.

Conclusion

There are many other ways to hack your expense but theses 4 really impacted my life and I hope they do the same for you. If you would like me to send you my expense tracker, please send me a message and I will send it right over.