10 Painless Ways to Escape Being Squeezed by Your Plastic

A particularly effective means of draining your bank account is to do so in small doses. $20 withdrawals from the ATM feel so petty that it doesn’t seem harmful to go through half a dozen of them over the course of a few days. Of course, when the monthly statement comes in, it becomes clear just how damaging they really are.

An obvious remedy to this situation is to cut down on trips to the ATM by withdrawing a lump sum of cash every week. Then again, old habits die hard and you might just find yourself taking out the big amounts with the same frequency that you did the smaller ones.

So how’s this for an alternate solution: Eliminate the need for some of those small withdrawals by making some minor adjustments to your spending habits.

For instance, cutting out the traditional post-work beers one night of the week might save you $20. Over the course of a month, that small sacrifice will keep an extra $80 in your account.

Here are a dozen other painless ways to cut down your trips to the bank machine.

1. Do Your Own Dry-Cleaning

   
   Keeping your shirts looking spiffy is a definite necessity; you can’t show up to work looking like a slob. So shelling out $3-4 per shirt certainly seems like a reasonable cost to have them cleaned professionally. A better price still would be to make the one-time $2 investment toward a spritz bottle and do it yourself.

   Instead of chucking your shirts into a pile at the end of the day, hang them on the shower curtain rod and give them a quick spray of hot water. They’ll be wrinkle-free in the morning, and you’ll be a few dollars richer every week you do so.

2. Clip Coupons

   
   Be warned: Clipping coupons may draw some crude remarks from your buddies, but if you do it consistently enough, you’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. Coupons will often give you around 20% off the marked price; apply this to a $100 grocery bill and you’ll be $20 richer.

3. Scalp the Scalpers

   
   If you’re in the habit of buying tickets for sporting events or shows off “street vendors,” you’re probably used to paying substantially more than the box-office price. Now while I don’t necessarily endorse black-market transactions, I do have a pertinent tip: Wait until 15 or 20 minutes into the event to approach a scalper. By this point, they’re usually so desperate to unload the merchandise that you’ll be able to haggle the price down to 50% of its face value.

4. Buy Generic

   
   A name brand is rarely the sign of higher quality, but usually guarantees a higher price. Among household goods especially (paper towels, aluminum foil, sandwich bags), there’s a fair chunk of cash to be saved when buying the generic equivalent (15-20% less).

   The cost difference between a $4.99 brand-name cleaner and a $3.49 generic equivalent may seem minimal, but when you apply that 30% discrepancy to a $50 shopping cart, you’re looking at an extra $15 in your pocket.



5. Make a Grocery List

   
   Shopping off the top of your head is a sure-fire way to overspend. Make a thorough list before heading to the grocery store and stick to it. Keep in mind that most impulsive purchases are among the more expensive ones — such as chips, microwaveable snacks and of course, beer.

6. Visit the Library

   
   Lots of people regard books as they do bottles of wine — as status objects, to be collected en masse. Well, a teetering bookshelf might make you feel like a smarty-pants, but it certainly won’t appreciate in value the way a stocked wine cellar does. Add this to the fact that you’ll probably only read them once, and all of a sudden books don’t seem like the wisest investment.

   Skip the trip to the ATM and take out a membership at the local library. Its stock of reading material is as up-to-date as the bookstore’s and most will allow you to reserve copies of the latest bestseller in advance. Furthermore, your tax money is already going toward its services, so you may as well take advantage of it.

   Hardcore bibliophiles who don’t want to give up on their collections might want to start buying books secondhand. The cost of used books is often in the range of 1/5th of the original list price.

7. Buy Food in Season

   
   Eating in accordance with the seasons will save you from plenty of small withdrawals. Vegetables such as avocados and asparagus are about twice as expensive in the dead of winter as they are in their mid-summer growing season. This same formula applies to a host of different foodstuffs — keep your eyes open.

8. Buy Clothes Out of Season

   
   You’ll know by the end of the winter whether or not your boots are going to survive another snowy season. Buy a new pair in July, and you’ll save anywhere from 15% to 30% off the regular price.

9. Christmas Shop in Advance

   
   You know exactly when Christmas is going to arrive, so why wait for the cost markups that inevitably accompany the holiday season? Christmas prices usually arrive at around the same time that Christmas marketing begins — early November. Try to have all your shopping done by Halloween, and your foresight will be rewarded with a load of savings.

10. Go Straight Home on Payday

    
    Panhandlers love Fridays, because working folk tend to be more generous with full paychecks in their pockets. They also tend to be more free-spending. Don’t set yourself up for impulse spending by stopping off at the mall on the way home; avoid tempting circumstances entirely, and your paycheck will still look like one come nightfall.

It won’t be long before all those $20 bills you’ve left in your account begin to accumulate into a serious savings stash. And what will you do with your newfound wealth? How about finding a sound investment for it?