3 Secret Ways to Save Money

5 min readMar 19, 2020

You’ve been told countless times to budget, to spend less, and you may have even been told to stuff cash into envelopes.

This tired advice paves the way for most financial-literacy blogs, but that’s not why you clicked on this article.

You want to learn the Dark Arts of saving money.

You want the subversive back-street shit that saves you money and makes you feel alive.

You son of bitch, I’m in!

1 — Save on Insurance

New Business Discounts:

My top tip to save money on insurance is to leverage their new-business discounts. These discounts typically start at 15% and then ebb off a few percents per year until their gone.

When they expire, or once they show any sign of erosion, you can save money by shopping around.

That being said, it is important to ensure that wherever you end up, you get the full coverage you need.

As a rule of thumb, I would recommend sticking with big, well-known insurance companies since they are less likely to act immorally when it comes to paying a claim.

Pick the Right Insurers:

Insurance premiums are calculated by equations that are rubber-stamped by the government.

All insurance companies that I know of account for collisions, tickets, mileage, driving experience, and other mainstay variables like that.

However, insurance companies weigh these variables differently. Furthermore, there is some variance in what variables insurance companies measure.

For instance, some companies will account for your level of education in their equations and some won’t.

In order to save money on insurance, you should find a company that accounts for the variables that suit your wallet best.

To help you do that, I recommend that you use Cover.com.

Cover.com takes down your information and uses it to get quotes at thirty companies at the same time. As a result, you know for sure that you are picking the best insurance company for you.

2 —Save on Flying

Last year my girlfriend moved to New York for an 8-month work term. As a result of her living away, we both budgeted for flights so that we could still see each other.

But I never touched my budget, in fact, I made money from flying.

On the way back from my first visit I heard an announcement for volunteers to take a later flight. In this case, the flight would be the next day.

Because I had a flexible work schedule — and because I would be sitting out for a day in Montreal, my sister’s city, — I decided to volunteer.

For my sacrifice, they gave me $800.00 cash, $45 dollars in airport food vouchers, and a free stay at a hotel.

I was so impressed and surprised by the deal that I did a little digging to find out more about what was going on. Here’s what I found:

Often, airlines will oversell flights in the hope that someone misses their flight.

If someone misses their flight, the airline does not offer a refund. Instead, they pocket the airfare for 101 tickets on their 100 seat plane. And often, they oversell more than one ticket.

This is a great way for airlines to make extra money, however, if everyone shows up for the flight, the airline has to buy someone out of their ticket, and as my example above shows, they pay top dollar when buying back your ticket.

So, knowing this about airlines, I begin to fly differently.

Since I know airlines pay big bucks to have people sit out on their flights, I now plan for delays when I fly.

In addition to flying with more buffer time, I also plan my flights with extra connections so that I have more chances of flying on an overbooked plane.

Last but not least, I always make sure to volunteer to sit out for the flight as soon as the flight attendants arrived at the gate. This ensures that I am the first person they choose if they need to buy someone out of their ticket, or if they need to bump someone to first class.

My $800 payout was in Canada, but judging by the US Department of Transportation’s website, if I had been in the States, I would have received more money. So I guess, as a fourth strategy to get big overbooking payouts, you should plan to fly through the States whenever possible.

Here is a chart from the US Department of Transportation’s website that outlines how passengers are paid out.

https://www.transportation.gov/individuals/aviation-consumer-protection/bumping-oversales

3 — Save by Buying in Bulk

We are creatures of habit. More likely than not, we will do the same things, consume the same products, and think the same thoughts, day after day, year after year, forever.

For instance, the average person consumes 100 rolls of toilet paper, six tubes of toothpaste, and 1 095 cups of coffee per year.

These are just a few of the many products that we consume habitually. And, they are just a few of the many products that we can save bundles on by buying in bulk.

Here are links to all sorts of different products that you can buy in bulk:

Toothpaste — https://amzn.to/2wbG3Ra

Dental floss — https://amzn.to/3b6wIc3

Toilet paper — https://amzn.to/39ZD5h4

Deodorant — https://amzn.to/3aflguN

Paper towel — https://amzn.to/2UhQ2wd

Kleenex — https://amzn.to/2IXSPVZ

Laundry Detergent — https://amzn.to/2WqTjMn

Office Supplies — https://amzn.to/2wlaXGG

Garbage and Recycling bags — https://amzn.to/3daxnuJ

Buy a grinder and coffee beans — https://amzn.to/2wnCkjf

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3 Secret Ways to Save Money

Written by Conor Writer

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