Since we’re getting close to the end of the year, it’s a great time to look at our spending and saving habits. I’m a big fan of using little “savings hacks” to make saving money feel a bit easier and more fun.
Of course, a good hack only works if you stick with it, and it’s hard to stay motivated when you can’t see the results. This is where your Tiller spreadsheet really shines.
Take the “No Spend Day” challenge, for instance. Instead of just hoping it’s making a difference, you can actually see it in your transaction feed. It’s pretty cool to watch your savings grow in real time. Or what about the “Round Up” method? You can make a special category for it and see exactly how much you’re saving over time just from that one little change.
What’s so powerful about using your spreadsheet is that you can truly verify which tricks save you the most money. You can even build a small chart to visualize your progress, and seeing those concrete numbers is the best motivation to keep going.
So, what about you? What’s one savings hack, big or small, that has really worked for you?
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist
Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
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I guess the closest I have is that I hacked the Savings Budget sheet to say how much of savings is allocated to what and how much we have that isn’t allocated to those specific categories. We budget in $100 a month that goes straight to a high-yield savings account that also has a monthly drawing where you can win more (we’ve gotten $1,000 twice now!) Other extra income goes to an “unexpected big expense” category most of the time as that’s constantly been getting depleted and rebuilt over the last few months due to a few appliance and vehicle failures.
We keep just enough in checking to cover monthly ACH-deducted expenses (cell phone bill, some utilities, mortgage) that we aren’t allowed to do with the credit card (which gets more reward points). We try to keep as much other as possible in high-yield savings, even if it only lives there temporarily until we have to pay the credit card bill, because it does get counted daily for compounding purposes. If I can keep an extra $2,000 in there for even half the month, we get at least an extra $5-10 in interest and that adds up over the year!
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Please tell me what bank that is w/ the HYS lol
Some banks and most credit unions will offer a savings account that offers a higher interest rate than most standard savings accounts. There may often be certain terms to them, like you have to keep a minimum balance, or you can only take the money out once a year or something. But in some cases, they treat it just as a normal liquid account. Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union, which we bank with, has no minimum balance for HYS and no limits on what we can take out, and it earns 4% annually right now. I expect that will probably go down a bit with interest rates lowering in general, but we’ve been earning $30-50 a month in interest on that account keeping most of our money in there. We’re on track to earn over $500 from that this year, and that’s with a few major expenses that set us back a little.
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Thanks for the explanation. I am with Forbright Bank for my HYS. They also offer 4% at the moment. They don’t offer $1000 draw bonus’.
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What bank can I get into a monthly drawing for? (Don’t answer that). Amazing that this has been so profitable for you.
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist
Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
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This is likely Captain Obvious for most already, but I have not been great about doing it…but turning on/off streaming subs. We’ve all taken double digits percentage increases for all of these services over the past couple of years and they keep getting more expensive.
All of the price increases finally forced me to build a sheet to compare and contrast different bundling options based on what we want to watch that month. I look at it every month because subs change price more frequently and if we finish a show on one sub and there is nothing in the queue then there is no reason not to pause or cancel it.
The current YTTV and Disney fight has elevated that all the more. What I’ve realized out of all of this is that we should kill our “live tv” sub altogether and just buy the Sling Day Pass for any live tv we may want to watch. If you aren’t aware of that service it’s pretty new, but Sling lets you buy a day pass or weekend pass for $5 per 24 hours.
For us, it will ultimately be cheaper than paying the $85-$100+ per month for any of the live tv services out there even if we buy it for every weekend which is the only time we watch live tv.
Apparently it’s a Minnesota credit union thing!
Great tip @YouBet96 , subscriptions creep up on you and really add up.
-Alice
Tiller Evangelist
Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
