The Half-Year Savings Tune-Up

Is it June already? I totally can’t believe it. But this is a good time – the halfway point in the year – to give your savings a nice tune-up. Here are a few easy things that you can do to help build your wealth. Try them and see how much more you can save. And then put these extra savings to work for you.

1. Make your change count.
You know all those dimes, quarters, nickels and pennies that you throw into a jar or a drawer or an empty 2-liter plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi? Well, they can really add up.

Don’t think so? Check this out. About every 3 months I take two 2-liter bottles full of my change to my local Commerce Bank, where I use their Penny Arcade change machine to turn my change into dollars. And every time, the total is around $300. That works out to about $100 a month. Or $1200 a year. That’s not bad for some loose change. And that money goes into one of my interest-earning accounts, not my pocket.

Just think of how much change you can turn into cash. If you’re like me, you’re probably looking at around $1200 a year.

2. Pay yourself $5 a day.
You’re probably worth a heck of a lot more than 5 bucks a day. But for this easy savings plan, just pay yourself $5 a day either by putting $5 into a jar every day or subtracting from your paycheck $5 for every day you worked and throwing it into an interest-earning account

If you work full-time, that’s about 260 days a year. At $5 a day, that works out to $1300 for the year.

3. Turn your “coupon” savings into cash.
I know that coupons are big. They always have been. And if you use them, that’s great!

But there are a ton of other ways that we can save on everyday items without using coupons. There are savings cards for supermarkets, drug stores, retail stores and even road tolls. On my keychain, I have a bunch of these little savings swipe cards that I use all the time.

We also have a lot of ways to save when buying stuff online. For instance, if you buy from Amazon, they tell you have much off of the retail price that you’re saving.

So, what can you do with this? Well, every time you see on a receipt that you saved some money, just take that savings amount, in real cash, and put it into an interest-earning account. For example, if you saved $5 at the supermarket, take $5 in cash out of your pocket and put it in your interest-earning account. Try it for a month and see how much you’ve saved. I average about $50 a month. That’s a nice $600 a year. Not too shabby for basically just swiping a card.

Would you like to save a hundreds of dollars more a year? Then start using those coupons and savings cards.

4. Research the best place(s) to put the extra money you save.

So, now that you’ve saved all this money, where are you going to put it? Well, you can use these extra savings to help fund a variety of things like your IRA, your kid’s 529 College Plan, your emergency fund or your long-term portfolio.

There you have it – our easy half-year savings tune-up. Give these ideas a try and let us know how it goes.