Maybe you are fortunate and have never been down to your last dollar, but most likely not. We have all been there... when things are tight! I'm going to give you 10 tips to put an $1,000 into your pocket if you are down on your luck, trying to add some money to savings, or just trying to pay down some bills. No shame if you're trying to put yourself in a better spot right?
Check it out!
Assumptions:
I assume you have a "regular" job that you commute to.
I assume you have decent credit!
Kill your cable bill. This could save you upwards of $150 depending on the package you have. Lets face it... cable is overpriced, and if you are looking for a way to put some extra cash in your pocket, don't be shelling out unnecessary bills for that shit. You can find 99% of the things you want to watch online anyways.
Conservatively: $125Drive Uber or Lyft. So I don't recommend doing these long term because it really puts a lot of miles on your car. However, if you need to make some cash, it is a pretty much instant way to be able to. You can cash out immediately or they give you a payment once a week. Personally I drove both in CT for about a month, and I probably took home about $1,000 total. Friday nights from 5pm-2am seemed to be the best times and I found that driving cities was not as profitable as driving more rural areas. If you have a decent sized town with a strip or some bars you will likely end up picking up people who are going out to bars or weddings, etc and sometimes you can get tips too. My experience with cities was bad, and I actually ended up picking up a few sketchy people to drive them literally down the street, so personally I would stay away from the cities. Every area is different though. Another recommendation for driving is that you take advantage of some kind of promotional offer. If you know someone who does Uber or Lyft, sign up with them. If you don't I will leave my code so you can get the promo.
Sign up with Lyft code "ALEXANDER10967"
Sign up with Uber code "ALEXT26103UE"
Conservatively (4 Friday nights) : $400Open a new credit card. If you have good credit, a lot of companies will try to get you to open credit cards with pretty sweet deals. I have opened several credit cards that give you statement credits of $100, $150, or even $200 just for opening the card and spending a certain amount on them. I do not recommend this if you don't have discipline! I will say that I made about $1,000 this year in credit card offers, I look at it as free cash. I put a roof on my house, so I needed to spend a significant amount of cash on materials... so I opened up a credit card and bought the materials with it. Between the sign up bonus and the cash back offer the card had I took about $275 off the cost of my roof. Not bad! Please don't open credit cards unless you know what you are doing, but if you do and you have discipline and don't rack them up, definitely an easy was to save some cash. Here are some examples here, but shop around and see what you can find that is best. https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/smart-money/credit-card-sign-up-bonuses-no-annual-fees/
Conservatively: $150Open a new bank account. A lot of banks offer deals to open new accounts. The most common is if you sign up for an account, use the debit card a certain amount of times, and put a direct deposit into the account. Look around for some local deals. Some offer up to $300 but you likely need to have some kind of high minimum balance. Make sure you are not signing up for an account that requires a monthly maintenance fee.
Conservatively: $100Kill your netflix/hulu bill and use someone else's login.
$8 per service (about)I hate saying this one, but it can save you some cash if you are REALLY in a pinch. If you OWN your vehicle, you are not required to keep full coverage insurance on it. (at least in my state). You can often get away with only liability and comprehensive. Keep in mind that if you get in an accident you are shit outta luck as your insurance wont pay for the cost of the vehicle. You need to decide if it is worth it for the cost. If you have an older vehicle, maybe it makes less sense to pay for collision as your insurance company might not give you that much for it anyways. I have 2 vehicles, so realistically I am only driving one at a time. If I know I am not going to drive one for an extended period of time, I will take the collision off it.
Conservatively $ 60-120 for a 6 month premium, so about $10-20 per month saved. Keep in mind this can screw you if you get in an accident.Cancel your Amazon Prime account. You can always sign up later.
$9-$13 per month.Cancel your gym membership. This one sucks. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. My gym membership is $53 a month.
Conservatively $35.Stop getting your haircut. This one sucks too. But guys, a buzzer works and its free. Ladies, or guys with long hair.. sorry. My barber costs $20 every time I walk in. 2 haircuts a month is $40. For girls the price is even higher, sometimes hundreds of dollars.
Conservatively: $30 (guys, for 2 haircuts), $100 (ladies, for 1)Expensive habits: Going out to eat, coffee, drinking, smoking, etc. Look at your habits and figure out where you spend the most. I will give one example that spending $5 a day on coffee 5 days a week on the way to work is $25 per week or $100 per month. We all have opportunities here.
Conservatively: $100-$200 per month
Please note that this is not professional financial advise. I am just telling you some things that have worked for me. You need to do your own homework and research on a subject before you make financial decisions. I hope that some of these are helpful for you. At the end of the day the end goal is to put yourself in a position where you can be comfortable and don't need to think about every dollar... but until then there is no shame in grinding it out and pinching pennies, right? Most of the things on this list don't take a ton of time except for driving Uber/Lyft, and even that is something that you control 100%! Please leave a comment if you have anything that I could add to this list, and if this helps in any way please let me know as well, I love hearing stuff like that.
if you want the links:
List of credit cards with bonuses:https://www.thepennyhoarder.com/smart-money/credit-card-sign-up-bonuses-no-annual-fees/
Sign up with Lyft at www.lyft.com with the code "ALEXANDER10967"
Sign up with Uber www.uber.com with the code "ALEXT26103UE"