@sinesalvatorem, I was going to reblog your post [link], but I figure giving poverty advice in a reblog when the OP is about how one shouldn’t give poverty advice is asking for trouble (especially when OP has relatively few notes), so I’m pinging you on a fresh post instead.
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>>On that note, if anyone who reads this has any life hacks wrt saving money or earning extra income, or knows online resources that have compiled a bunch of them, please tell me! I already know of quite a few, but I’m always looking for more.<<
Hey, look, a special interest!
(or, well, part special interest, part coping mechanism)
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(Disclaimers: I acknowledge that for any or all of these things, you [may already do them]/[may not find them worthwhile]/[may not be able to do them at all]. If anything in the rest of this post sounds like I don’t, that’s just because it’s sometimes easier to get the words out that way.
A more specific version that I feel is particularly worth pointing out: while I have had plenty of financial difficulties and qualify as “poor” by many definitions, I have never (quite) been *broke*. Some of these tips will be stuff like “how to spend $800 in one day in order to avoid spending $1,400 over four months”, and if you never have $800 on hand at any given time feel free to ignore that (though maybe file them away for if/when you reach a point in your life where you can afford to tie up some money for a while in order to spend less in the long run).)
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This has been kind of a recurring theme on my blog lately, but: housemates are so important. Finances are best played as a team sport: going it alone is sadly necessary in some situations, but it’s definitely Hard Mode, and being poor is hard enough as it is without adding more difficulty modifiers on top of it.
(It *is* painful to have to watch people you share finances with spend money in ways you don’t approve of, but–I remind myself at such times–it’s still completely worth it for all the bulk discounts and such you can get. (Although I’m sure there are *some* people out there somewhere who are careless enough with money that this would not be true, and obviously you don’t want to share finances with such people.))
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People hate on Uber-type things a lot, but honestly, they really can be a lifesaver. Delivery gigs are what tipped us over into being in the black for March†. (Up ~CAD$230 over the course of that month! God, it’d been *so* long since our money had been on any kind of upward trend for any significant length of time.) Some companies in some places will also hire bicyclist or even pedestrian delivery freelancers.
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People also hate on advice to avoid bank-related fees because sometimes when you’re poor they’re unavoidable, but it’s still worth checking that each fee really *is* unavoidable before resorting to it.
(You know why I switched from annual statements to quarterly? Because I found out while preparing the 2017 statement that my parents had gone below their minimum chequing-account balance (which incurs a CAD$11 fee for each month it happens) *eleven months* out of the year, and had been quietly shouldering it *even though the household as a whole had enough money to cover everyone’s minimum balances*: it was just disproportionately in the kids’ accounts because at the time only the kids were employed. I immediately insisted on providing my parents with an informal, indefinite loan to help them cover their balance††, and started doing more frequent statements so we can catch shit like that sooner.
(Apparently Dad was embarrassed and Mom didn’t want to ~burden~ her children when she was ~supposed~ to be providing for them. And I was like “You can use the money you’re saving in bank fees towards buying me food.”))
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You make a remark about the restaurants in San Francisco being expensive, and of course in this part of Tumblr I hear plenty about how high the rents are. To what extent does the Bay have generally high prices across the board (or for groceries in particular: grocery prices are about to be important), and how far away do you have to get from the Bay for things to stop having that markup?
The New York trick (travel to an area with a lower cost of living, stock up on cheap groceries to bring back) is harder in a place with no nearby-ish country borders or similar clear markers of “you are now entering the Cheap Zone”, but it might still be doable there.
(I think the trick used by people who *live* in Cheap Zones is to use coupons *intended* for places with higher costs of living (with discounts sized accordingly), but which are technically valid there. Occasionally these can even be stacked: Mom almost always brings some coupons (from American websites) to New York.)
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Target does ad-matching: if you show them that another store’s flyer has a sale on a certain food, they will sell you that food at the other store’s sale price, letting you avoid the hassle and transportation costs of running all over town chasing deals. (note that Target does not match produce) The Flipp app [link] will give you the flyers for a (U.S. or Canada) postal code of your choice.
Walmart does not do ad-matching as such (in America; Canadian Walmarts still do it), but if you scan your Walmart receipt into their app, they will issue you an e-gift card for the amount you *would* have saved if they allowed it.
There might be other stores in your particular area that do matching, but these are the only ones I found when I was looking this up in an Arizonan context recently. It seems to be less common in America than it is in Canada.
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Running ad videos and occasionally doing other stuff through Swagbucks is a nice way to get a bit of supplemental income. I recently helped Mom write a guide to using it [link], so I will direct you there. (please use the referral links, I’d very much appreciate it)
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If you have anything that gives you a discount on Amazon purchases and/or generates income in the form of Amazon credit (like, say, Swagbucks), bear in mind that Amazon has an ever-expanding selection of other stores’ gift cards [link] (including, notably, Safeway [link]), almost all of which can be purchased using Amazon credit.
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There’s this one program of incentives to encourage lower electricity use during peak periods [link] that I keep getting ads for from advertisers who don’t realise I’m not Torontonian, which is only available in Toronto and parts of California (weird list, I know). Is that applicable to you, or likely to become so?
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I haven’t done any freelance audio transcription for Rev [link] in a while, but you might be better suited to it than I am. (Maybe your picking-out-what-people-are-saying-at-crowded-parties ability would help you here?)
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>>At one point, I even had a list of which staple items are cheaper at which stores, but homelessness means I keep moving too much for that to ever stay relevant.<<
Some grocery stores let you look up their prices online, making it easier to collect data for such lists and less painful (relatively) to keep making new ones for new places.
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I recently systematically went through the websites of every cell company available in this area and determined the single best phone plan for getting our house phone to do everything we currently need it to do while paying as little as possible, and I am very glad I did. If we hadn’t been careful, we could easily have ended up paying twice as much or more.
Unfortunately, there is essentially zero overlap between my available cell companies and yours, so I can’t just skip you to the end result of “Public Mobile is great; Freedom Mobile *might* be even better *if* you’re planning to only use your phone in cities”: you’d have to either do the comparisons yourself or find somebody more local who’s done it.
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Some restaurants and the occasional grocery store will give you free food on your birthday. The selection is heavily location-dependant; there are various websites listing the available things for a given place (example: https://www.favoritecandle.com/free-birthday-meals/San-Francisco/CA), though their information is often out of date and you’ll need to check with each restaurant’s own website. Most require newsletter signups (I have a dedicated email address specifically for newsletters from people who might give me free stuff); many require you to buy something else in order to receive the freebie with it, but there are a few that are outright free (except transportation costs, of course: plan your route carefully, and ideally have them be on the way to somewhere you were going anyway). Last year I got a muffin (Starbucks) and a large fruit slushie (Booster Juice): this year Starbucks has unfortunately stopped offering freebies unless you buy at least one thing from them per year (any time during the year, though, not specifically your birthday! still suitable for lots of people!), but I’ve found a couple more newsletters and am set up to get a bag of chocolate-covered almonds (Giant Tiger) and a hamburger (Harvey’s), plus another slushie. (And who knows, maybe I’ll end up at Starbucks at some point between now and November and regain muffin eligibility for this year.)
(maryellencarter, if you’re reading this, note that I’m planning to give you a pre-sifted list of these for your birthday: you don’t need to go figuring this out yourself. I’ll probably compile and send it in October sometime, so that there’ll be less time for circumstances to change while still leaving room for the restaurants to consider you to have been on their newsletter for a sufficient length of time beforehand.)
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My finances tag, “adventures in human capitalism”, might have some other stuff that I missed or covered in less detail here.
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†I don’t have a good picture of our finances after March yet: I’ve switched to preparing quarterly financial statements (formerly annual), but I haven’t finished collecting and processing the data from Q2, so right now it’s scattered around various bank accounts and credit-card records of four different people and I can’t see what it’s like overall.
††Honestly, I don’t really care whether they pay it back or not. Money used for things beneficial to me is mine for all practical purposes, and I’m not too concerned with whose bank account it happens to be in. (Mom expressed her gratitude at my “selflessness” recently, but I’m *really* not selfless: I’m just very aware that working together is in my own best interest. I don’t make anywhere near enough to survive alone: hell, often I can’t even contribute an equal share towards the group’s expenses, and have to find non-income ways to contribute like accounting and pest control. (I’ve gotten pretty good at killing houseflies. As long as they’re up against a window they’re easy.))
Thank you! Some of this may help me out.
Brinens and Things 