There are countless articles about all the different ways to save money by not going out to eat, cutting your cables, and giving up your entire existence and living in a shack in the forest. While that all sounds realistic…

Here are five actual ways to save money, every day, without completely changing your lifestyle or what you do on a day to day basis.

Ways to Save Money

1. Meal prep with friends
   • One of the worst parts about meal prepping for your whole week on Sunday is that you generally prepare the same dish, in a mass quantity, leaving you to eat the same thing for lunch or dinner every day. It gets old after about the second time you’ve had it. That’s where sharing cooking responsibilities with friends come in. Get together with 4-5 friends and have everyone decide to cook a different dish, but enough to prep for a week. This way, you’ll have a different meal each day when really you only had to make one big meal up front. It saves money, time, and you won’t hate what you’re eating by Wednesday afternoon. Let’s look at cost savings. A home cooked lunch will likely cost around $5. If you get lunch at work, it’ll likely cost around $10. So each time you eat a prepped meal instead of eating out, you’ll save at least $5. If you do that at least four times a week, you’ll be saving over $1,000 each year.
2. Skip the drink at lunch or dinner when eating out
   • It’s unrealistic to think you’re not going to go out to lunch with co-workers or grab a bite to eat during the week with friends you haven’t seen in awhile. It’s also a well known fact that the margins on drinks at restaurants is incredibly high. That goes for even sodas, iced teas, lemonades…you get the picture. So while you’re out eating, just stick with a water. You might only save a few dollars each time, but if you go out to eat multiple times a week, this can really start to add up. As an example, if you go out to eat three times a week, you could save around $5. Over 52 weeks, that translates into $260 that you could have padding your bank account instead. Besides, water is probably better for you anyway.
3. Put money into an IRA automatically
   • While this doesn’t directly decrease the amount you spend every day, it certainly has a long term impact that you may not even notice. Many online financial investment options, like
     Betterment or Mint, allow you to auto-deposit any amount you’d like into accounts that automatically invest for you, or into IRAs and Roth IRAs. With most of these apps and online institutions, you can set the auto-deposit on a recurring schedule. Start with a small amount and do it as frequently as possible. Can you afford to put in $10 a week? If yes, great, just start there. Over the course of the year, you’ll have saved up an additional $520 into your retirement accounts without even noticing and this doesn’t take into consideration the money you’ll be earning on the investment side of things from dividends and the like.
4. Skip the your morning coffee Get a smaller sized coffee
   • Could you imagine the outrage if I had actually advised skipping coffee altogether? Definitely not realistic. But, could you go with a slightly smaller amount? Again, like drinks while eating at a restaurant, you’re not going to be saving much here on a daily basis but over time is where this adds up. Let’s say it’s $1 a day in savings and you buy a coffee every weekday. That’s another $260 every year.
5. Only use credit cards that gives cash back
   • Most credit cards now offer a cash back often of at least 1% with some going even higher. As long as you don’t abuse them, they’re totally worth it. Some people only choose to use debit cards as they only want to spend what they have and don’t want to take on any debt. There’s two issues with this: 1) this doesn’t help to build up your credit history and 2) you don’t get the cash back advantages of credit cards. The trick here is to make sure you limit your credit card spending to what you’d normally spend on a debit card. Additionally, you need to make sure you pay off the credit card in full, every month. As long as you don’t accrue any interest, you won’t have any problems. To put some numbers to this, let’s say you spend $50 a day, on average, on your credit card. This might sound like a lot but if you include rent, all meals, gas, and more, this is less than $19k a year total which is typical. 1% back on $50 is $0.50. Woah, crazy right? O.K. maybe not that crazy. But let’s expand that to a year. 365 times $0.50 is $182.50. So if you use a credit card and pay it off in full each month, you’ll have an extra $182.50 that you wouldn’t have had if you had only used a debit card.

The Results

Let’s add all of these ways to save money up on a yearly basis:

1. $1,040 in savings from meal prep
2. $260 from getting water when eating out
3. $520 in retirement savings automatically
4. $260 from getting a smaller sized coffee
5. $182.50 from using a credit card (and not accruing interest)

Total: $2,262.50

And that’s just from these five simple ways. Now it looks a lot easier to afford that trip you’ve been wanting to take!

Looking for other ways to save money? Check out our guides to buying cheap sunglasses and affordable art.