In this post, I’ll show you how to save $1901 every single month, and how you can save more money each month as well!

$1901/mo is $22.8K/yr – this is a significant amount of money! With this extra cash, you can feel free to use this money to pay down debt, save up so you can spend it on things or experiences on your bucket list, or simply invest it.

Where You Can Save More

A lot of our expenses could be saved if we’re not dumb with our money. Don’t buy luxury goods and spend money unnecessarily.

This is extremely easily done and will get you far.

This post isn’t about that. This post is about saving on things that aren’t as easy or as obvious, such as:

• Eating out
• Spending $6 a day on coffee (+tax and tips)
• Utilities
• Rent (bonus)

These are things that are very to get into a habit of excessive spending in because one $6 won’t make you bankrupt, but 1 year’s worth of expensive coffee adds up. Eating out once in a while won’t break your bank, but eating out every single day can add up to a huge sum.

As a result, if you save more money each month (even if it doesn’t seem much), it’ll add up to a lot in the long-term.

But let’s break this down.

Eating Out Is Killing My Bank Account

I’m looking at my Mint for this month, and here’s what I spend on groceries vs. eating out:

I spent $629 on groceries so far this month, and it’s the 29^th. To see how much I would have saved if I never ate out, we’ll need to do some math.

First, I eat out 3/4ths of the time during the weekend, and there’s 4 weekends this month. Hence, the $520.59 went towards 3 weekends, or 6 days. Each “eating out” day costs $86.76 (NYC is expensive, your numbers may vary).

It’s the 29^th and so all the days where I’m not eating out is simply 29 – 6 = 23 days. This means eating in is around $27.37 per day.

Hence, I can save roughly $63.39/day by not eating out!

Please NOTE: Your own situation will vary a lot. Your city’s offering of restaurants, your choice of restaurants, etc. will most definitely land you a different number in savings. This is personal finance, and as such you have to get a Mint account and do your own math here. Find out exactly how much, on average, you can save per day if you ate in vs. eating out so you can build your math from there.

But for clickbait purposes, I’ll just say I’m saving an extra $1901 on food each month (how much more money you’ll save each month will vary, and likely vary for me month-to-month – you should use a bigger sample size than 1 month but I just moved here this month so I don’t have much to go on).

Saving Money On Utilities, Caffeine Addiction, And More

The second way you can save is on utilities: if you invest in low-flow showerheads, took 15-minute instead of 25-minute showers, used portable AC, and bought LED bulbs, you could save $41.66/mo. You’re likely to save much more than my measly $42/mo if you live in a place that’s bigger than a 1bd/1ba though.

Finally, we’ve got Starbucks, which is the worst sugary addiction of all time. In this post, I save you $2200/year, or about $180 more money each month by showing you how to make good, affordable coffee at home.

In total, we’re saving around $41 + $1900 + $180 = $2021/mo just by using the 3 tactics above.

This next one is a bit harder to pull off because it’ll really cut into your quality of living. But you can do it if you’d like, and that’s saving on rent.

According to Zumper, current median rent for 1bd/1ba in NYC is $2,570/mo:

I’m paying $4,000/mo. Thus, I’m overspending by about $1570 when compared to median. If I’m willing to downgrade, I can be saving a total of $2021+$1570/2=$2806/mo instead (I divided by savings by 2 since the rent is split in half).

I highly encourage you to see what your median rent is in your area and see if it’s a possibility for you to downgrade to save more each month.

How Much Money Should You *REALLY* Save?

Saving money is awesome. With little to no effort, you potentially could get an extra few thousand bucks in your bank account each month.

With all the extra cash, you can invest it and let it compound over the long-term. You can also save the money so you can spend it on things and experiences you actually love and on your bucket list, instead of buying stuff to impress people you don’t like. The extra money can even be used to pay off debt quicker so your overall expenses will go down even more when you pay it off.

But saving isn’t the end all and be all of personal finances. Like anything else, saving is just one of the many tools in your financial toolbox to use.

Saving money has its tradeoffs: you need discipline, you get to hang out less, and your quality of life might decrease depending on how aggressive you are about saving cash.

So while saving is great, spending money on the right things (and not wasting it on dumb things) is a better balance in my opinion. Intangibles like your lived experience, your feeling of safety and convenience are all things that spending more money will give you.

The last bad thing about saving money is simply this: there’s a ceiling on how much you can save. Theoretically, you can save on all your rent if you choose to be homeless…but you’re not going to do that since the feeling of safety goes away. There’s always some minimal fixed cost each month so your life is good.

Knowing how to save more money each month is easy. The hard part is finding the right balance between spending and saving.

A better alternative is to save reasonably, and at the same time earn more. Here’s a bunch of articles with various tactics and strategies on how you can earn more money.

And unlike saving money, earning money has no ceiling. You can earn as much as you want.

Both saving money and earning money are very painful. The main difference is that the former has a ceiling / is easier to do, and the latter can be unlimited / very hard to do.

On the saving money front, my recommendation to you is this: calculate what your maximum savings could be based on all the points above, and go from there. Save as much money as you can where you wouldn’t feel a large deterioration in your quality of life.

Example: If you can save $1500/mo without feeling a lot of the pain, you’re doing it right! If in the next month you save $2000/mo at the expense of all your family and friends, then you need to go back to saving only $1500/mo – the extra $500/mo isn’t worth a significant downgrade in your quality of life.

Good luck, and save responsibly.

P.S.: This is a new blog and if you’ve found this helpful at all, it would mean the world to me if you were to share this post to someone that you think this post might benefit. It would also be immensely helpful to me if you could give me any feedback on the content at hello@goodmoneygoodlife.com