all right in this video we're gonna talk about some of my favorite money-saving
strategies and if you do all five of them you could probably save three to
four hundred dollars a month and the good news is is that they're not even
that difficult to do most of them you can do easily in less than an hour some
of them in just a few minutes all right so if this is something you're excited
about hang tight we're gonna dive right in
okay so first on the list is a website called billcutterz and essentially what
these guys do is that they help you negotiate your bills for you so all you
have to do is send your bills to them and then they take care of the rest okay
so this is a billcutterz website and if you're curious about how this whole
thing works let's just click over to this page and I'll just show you exactly
what to do so basically you just send them your bills you got to sign up for a
free account and then you send them your bills so like your cell phone cable
satellite TV internet landline if you have one of those any kind of alarm
satellite radio electricity depending on your state and I don't know what many
more means but but anyway point is like all your kind of home bills that you get
monthly you can send over to them and then they will call and negotiate for
you and so you don't even have to make the phone call in most cases I don't
even think you have to give him the phone number you just send them the bill
and they take care of the rest and then they'll get back to you and
they'll tell you all right this is how much we were able to save and then you
will notice that your cell phone bill is lower or your cable bill is lower or
internet bill or whatever and then they don't do this out of the goodness of
their heart they do want to get paid and so you split the difference with them so
if they save you $100 a month then you just pay them $50 a month for the next
12 months and you can either pay upfront in one big lump sum or you can just pay
them monthly but the most important thing to remember is that you do not pay
a dime unless they save you money so you're winning regardless and in my case
I had actually negotiated with a lot of these different companies and had really
good rates and billcutterz was still able to save me more money it was
somewhere from thirty to fifty dollars a month they saved me so if you haven't
done any negotiating with these I highly recommend using these guys and they've
been around a long time I've been working with them for probably I don't
know six years or so and I'm definitely a person who gets leery about sharing
too much information with too many companies but these guys have been on
the up-and-up and I highly recommend them now if you're curious about how
much you actually could save from this just come all the way down to the bottom
of their site and they have a link called
savings calculator and I just kind of want to show you what this looks like
here so we'll just kind of go through some random numbers here so let's say
you're paying say you're paying $80 a month for internet and then cell phone
you know maybe 125 and cable internet phone I don't know we'll do 75 or
something on that cable satellite TV that's you know we'll just skip that one
since we do the other one electric $150 a month home security maybe paying 25
for that and then you can just click calculate savings and they estimate
based on those numbers that they will be able to save you $1,800 a year which
comes out to somewhere around $150 a month so you can obviously come over
here and run these numbers yourself but definitely check this one out there's a
lot of money to be saved here and it's almost no work
all right so for number two I just need to give you a little bit background
information so I am a financial nerd and I have been running a financial website
where I help people with stuff like this for the last 10 years and I'm telling
you this just to give you a little bit of context but number two is saving
money on your car insurance and so someone like myself I assumed that
because I am pretty frugal with a lot of things that I had picked the best and
cheapest car insurance company and there's no reason to shop around again
but one day I decided I will just give it a try I'll go shop around and see if
I can actually get a better car insurance rate maybe save us 50 bucks a
year or something like that it's like it's better than nothing right so I
spend about five to ten minutes on the internet just getting a couple quotes
and I quickly realized that by switching and keeping the exact same coverage I
was able to save three hundred and thirty bucks and it doesn't stop there
it actually gets a little bit better so the old insurance broker who I was
working with before calls me back six months later after I switched and said
hey we'd love to see if we can get you back and I said okay if you can get a
better deal I'm happy to come back and then she goes and does a little shopping
for me and it turns out that she's able to save me an additional two hundred
dollars so within a one year period I was able to drop my car insurance by
five hundred thirty dollars a year which is about $45 a month and it took me not
much more than 10 minutes of just kind of research so if you haven't done this
in a while you actually could save a lot of money by doing it so I definitely
recommend shopping around for car insurance rates and see if you can do a
little bit better
for number three we're gonna look at in Amazon program so if
you like Amazon this is gonna be great for you it is
program that Amazon has that can save a lot of us hundreds of dollars a month if
we fully utilize it but the truth is is that not many people are actually using
it and I'll just flip over to the screen so I can show you how it works all right
so with Amazon you might have heard about this subscribe and save program
that they have a lot of times when you go click on an item to buy it you'll see
a little link to do this but if you're not taking advantage of this there's a
lot of money to be saved here and essentially the way it works if you're
not familiar is that you just agree to have them ship you an item every so
often and you get to specify whether you want it every month or every six months
or anywhere in between in exchange for that you will be able to save up to 15%
on that item and the great news is that you're not locked into a contract you
can change it or cancel it at any time and so there are even some items that I
don't need every six months maybe every nine months or every twelve months and
so for those items at the six month point I just push it off another six
months in the way that we have taken advantage of this and been able to save
hundreds and hundreds of dollars is just by buying a lot of dry grocery items so
that might be like a lot of snack foods canned goods maybe chips and things like
that we'll just buy a lot of that food maybe spices and then also a lot of
household items so pretty much anything that we would buy at Walmart or Target
we try to buy from subscribe and save so that might mean like dish soap hand soap
paper towels toilet paper toothbrush batteries just all that stuff you can
buy all of this on subscribe and save and save a lot of money by doing it
so to get started with this all you need to do is just find some item that has this
and I'm sure you've probably seen these before if you've ever shopped on Amazon
you'll see a little link right here it says subscribe and save and so we could
either buy this as a one-time purchase these batteries or due to subscribe and
save thing by default when you first get started with this you're only gonna save
5% but once you get up to 5 items in a given month then you will save 15% and
that's when the big savings start kicking in and then down here obviously
you can select how often you want to get it and then just hit subscribe and
you're good to go and so I went through and just kind of calculated what it
would cost to buy this particular item at Walmart over the course of a year or
it subscribe and save over the course of the year and what I found is that
subscribe and save was actually cheaper on almost every single instance there
was one where it appeared to be a little bit cheaper to buy it at Walmart but in
most cases it looks like subscribe and save
is the clear winner and so over the course of a year if you subscribed to
these nine items you would be saving about 290 dollars a year and in our case
we were subscribed to up to about 25 items and so our cost savings actually
was considerably higher than that so it's really up to you how much you want
to save the more you buy via that program the more you're gonna be able to save
okay for number four if you have some lightbulbs like these laying around
your house you are going to want to change them out and if you're anything
like me you probably think oh yeah I could do that Bob and I could save maybe
a dollar a month or something well this is where it gets exciting this one was
just so cool because it still blows my mind how much you can save by switching
to LED bulbs from incandescent bulbs so this is a calculator that will kind of
calculate what those savings will be for you just so you can see what it'll
actually be in your house and so I'm just gonna quickly walk you through this
so you can actually see what this cost savings could turn out to be and we'll
have a link to this down below in the description so you can use it for
yourself all right first section here number of
fixtures to replace number of light bulbs I did some research on this it
turns out the average household has 45 light bulbs which I was pretty surprised
to find you know I never would have thought that I had that many light bulbs
and you probably don't think you have that many either but when I went around
my house and actually counted them I actually at 53 and you know so when you
count like the bulbs and the vanities and maybe the bulbs out in the garage or
out on the outside of your house all those bulbs you know it begins to add up
and anyway in the US average is 45 I'm gonna go ahead and put 53 because that's
what ours were and they put a lot of defaults in here wattage here 75 watt
probably is average you know you might have some hundred Watts you might have
some 60s and maybe some 40s but we'll just go with their average they estimate
a dollar for the old fixture for to replace an incandescent bulb this is a
life span for the average incandescent bulb so we'll just leave that and then
now we'll do the LED light bulb here I mean the wattage is gonna be a whole lot
less because that's a big advantage of an LED bulbs is that it takes a whole
lot fewer watts of energy to power it to get the same amount of light so a 75
watt incandescent is equivalent to about a nine watt LED so we'll leave that
price per unit this is where this thing gets super exciting because I don't know
how longer they made this calculator but the price of an LED bulb is nowhere near
fifty dollars and I actually do remember paying about 35 or 40 for the first LED
bulb that I bought but the good news now is that they are so much cheaper so
we'll just flip on over to Amazon here and we'll just type in an LED bulbs and
just kind of see what we can find all right so we'll just kind of go with
this all right so I just want you to see something here so this is a 16 pack of
LED bulbs these are 60 watts equivalent and the price per bulb is a $1.35
it's not 50 dollars it's a $1.35 and this is what's crazy and this is why you
can save so much money so for the lifespan let's just see if they have it
listed all right so they have a lifespan of 10,000 hours so I'll just kind of
adjust that down and then moving in next section energy rate I don't know what
mine is off the top of my head this is the average across the US so if you know
what yours is you can adjust it accordingly but I'm gonna just leave it
because I don't know what mine is hours of operation I don't know exactly
how much we use them I think we probably had a lot of bulbs on 12 hours a day we
definitely have them on seven days a week so I'm gonna just stick with their
averages as well and don't need any help installing light bulbs so I will skip
that and then now we can calculate the savings here so first off initial cost
so it's it would be if you replace all of your light bulbs in your house it
would be 53 dollars in my case to do incandescent bulbs it would be 71 to do
LED bulbs so that's fine and where this gets crazy is right here in the
electricity cost so what we see here is to run the house on incandescent bulbs
cost $2,100 almost $2,200 per year and if we had LED bulbs it only
costs two hundred and sixty three dollars per year so that's over eighteen
hundred dollars a year just by switching to LED bulbs so if your house is full of
incandescent bulbs it is gonna cost you a little bit to save that money it's
gonna cost seventy bucks but but within about two weeks you will make that money
back in in the course of a month you will have saved yourself 70 bucks
so if your house is full of incandescent bulbs this is definitely something you
are going to want to check out
all right before we get to point number five
I want to let you know that we're gonna do a little giveaway here and I'm gonna
give away a $10 Amazon gift card to one lucky commenter who lets us know down in
the comments which one of these five you're gonna try and you can just leave
the comment however you want you can use words or you can use numbers it doesn't
matter all right so point number five has the
potential to by far be the biggest money saver for you if you are carrying a
balance on your credit cards you just have to do this one so number one we
talked about how billcutterz will help you negotiate all your bills well
there's one that they don't negotiate and that's credit cards and it's
unfortunate because this is where there's a lot of money to be saved and
this might be intimidating for you and you might not want to do this but let me
just talk you through it it's really not that scary and I'm gonna show you
exactly what you need to do so this will be it's easy as possible
so the first step of doing this is that you need to gather up any of those credit card
offers that you might have gotten in the mail so maybe you've got one that says
we'll give you 0% or we want to transfer you balances or a $500 bonus for signing
up for a card whatever you want to take those offers and have them in front of
you if you don't have any offers we have a website down below where you can go
find some offers that we recommend and the reason you're doing this is because
we're looking for some leverage when we call to negotiate to be able to say hey
if you don't help me we're going to take our business elsewhere gives you some
negotiating leverage
all right next up I want you to take your credit card pull
it out and on the back of that credit card you get a phone number and I want
you to call that phone number and you might need to press a couple buttons to
get to customer service and once you do get to customer service I want you to
ask for is supervisor who can talk to that lower level customer service rep
but in my experience most of them can't help you with this anyway and they need
to get you to a supervisor to help so why not just skip them in the first place
and I should mention if you don't know what your actual interest rate is
on your credit card you should probably figured that out before this call as
well now once you get the supervisor on the phone this is a time where you want
to plead your case and so essentially you can say something like this yeah hi
I have been a loyal customer with you guys for the last five years or so and I
was just looking to see if I can get a lower interest rate on my card because
currently it's a bit higher than I would like and based on my experience you have
about one of three things that are gonna happen they're either going to flat out
say yes which has happened to me a few times yeah we can do that or they will
offer you something else or they might just saying
so if they say no or offer you something you're not really interested in this is
the time where we want to use our leverage and we want to say hey I
understand but I have three different offers from other competing credit cards
who are actively pursuing my business and I'd hate to leave you guys because I
have enjoyed being with you but I just got to get a lower interest rate so if
you can't help me a minute to take my business elsewhere and at this point
maybe they'll start warming up a little bit and maybe you'll get a better offer
but the good news is that even if they say no you can still save a ton of money
here so even if they say no they're not gonna lower your interest rate it
probably is time for you to switch cards and move to one where you can get a
lower interest rate and so you might just want to take advantage of one of
those offers that you got or you can check out the website that we've linked
up below as well but the bottom line here is by reducing that interest rate
you can save yourself a lot of money each month some of you watching right
now we're probably paying 25 percent interest on that credit card and their
credit cards out there that will give you 0% for like 12 months so bottom line
there's a lot of money to be saved here if you're carrying a balance on your credit card
all right so if you found this helpful at all I would love it if you
can give us a thumbs up down below and on this channel we help you save more
money earn more and live generously so if that's something that resonates with
you feel free to subscribe that little red button down below if you aren't
already and if you haven't left to comment definitely do that so I can get
you entered in this Amazon gift card giveaway as well alright so that's all
for this one and I will see you in the next video