I don’t know if you noticed, but this newsletter doesn’t tend to mess around with the puck.
Here, no list of ideas to save $8 on your next trip to the cinema, or to save 2 cents a liter on gas: I take it for granted that you can find all that on the Internet.
No, when we talk about saving, we are talking about real money, which makes a real difference in real life.
Like saving $10,000 in a year.
We recently learned that Quebecers’ savings had shrunk by 37% since last year. This section therefore rises to the front and participates in the collective effort to help reverse this trend of impoverishment.
So is it doable? Or does it seem like a mountain to you?
A sum of $10,000 in one year is $27.40 a day. Here are a few ways to make it happen. If some points don’t apply to you, spend a few minutes staring intently at your last credit card statement. Ideas will spring up – I’m sure of it.
Subscribe to your library
You already pay for your library, you might as well take advantage of it. In addition to an ever-updating selection of books, there are audiobooks, video games, board games, DVDs (remember DVDs?) and thousands of books and magazines in electronic format. , available online to all Quebecers through the Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec (BAnQ). What reduce (a little) the use of Amazon.
Savings: $50 per month.
Optimize cellular
I paid $16 per month on average for my cell service last year including taxes. How ? By taking the cheapest package at Public Mobile. Mainly, I determined in advance that I don’t need a lot of data because I download almost everything I need with WiFi. Does that seem impossible to you? For a small part of the population, no doubt. But when something “vital” wasn’t even offered 10 years ago, my probably not-so-vital expense detector turns on.
Savings: $50 per month.
No gray hair, no restaurant
When I go to a restaurant or a bar, I am always surprised to be surrounded by people in their early twenties who do not look like they are there to celebrate a special event, but because the calendar indicates that it’s Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday for brunch.
If you’re young, or have little savings, you certainly have better things to do than vegetate for two hours stuffing yourself with the most expensive calories of your life, or spend your evening helping the owner of a bar to send his children to private school.
My “no gray hair, no restaurant” rule is deliberately extreme. We can violate it a few times a year, of course, but generally speaking, we can massively reduce this expenditure item: the generations that preceded us went to restaurants much less, and studies show us that people were not more unhappy. Organize picnics with friends in a park in the summer, or group dinners at home to save two-thirds of the bill, and more when you take into account the cost of alcohol.
Savings: $175 per month.
Unsubscribe from Disney+
I have nothing against this service, but on their deathbed, no one says to themselves, “I should have spent more time watching Disney+. No one like in zero.
Savings: $14 per month.
Finished Amazon Prime
Buy for more than $35 and shipping is free anyway.
Savings: $11.50 per month.
Optimize TV
Good news: no one needs to pay hundreds of dollars a year to watch the Canadiens rebuild. Either way, the entertainment options are already overabundant (see point 1), a $30 digital antenna picks up multiple channels, and you’ve got Netflix and YouTube. All you need is a high-speed internet connection, which costs more or less $40 per month with Fizz or Ebox.
Savings: $90 per month.
Walk (a little)
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but walking 40 minutes to get to school, work, the grocery store or the library is no feat: it’s essential to mental and physical balance of a healthy human being aged 9 to 99 years. To give an order of magnitude, a 40-minute walk covers the distance that separates the University of Montreal from Saint-Denis Street in Montreal.
By integrating walking into your daily life, you do moderate physical activity without realizing it, and you reduce your travel costs.
If walking bores you, listen to podcasts or audio books. One can easily save half a tank of gas per month and several public transport tickets this way.
Savings: $40 per month.
Stop buying clothes
Really. Just for a year. For a story a few years ago, a colleague and I wore identical clothes to work every day for a month.1. Nobody noticed.
Savings: $150 per month.
Coffee bought outside
There’s a reason cutting lattes has become a personal finance cliché. For the next year, bring a thermos with you.
Savings: $3 per day, or $90 per month.
make your lunch
For years, I often bought lunch near the office. Those $15-20 spent each time went up in smoke – I forgot 99% of those lunches. Bring a lunch and simple snacks made quickly in the evening (date cookies, banana muffins, etc.) to the office, on skis, to the soccer field, to the arena. In short, wherever you will be hungry.
Savings: $30 weekly, or $120 monthly.
Take advantage of discounts
The bag of coffee you love is offered at a reduced price? Big blocks of cheese are half price? Are the pesto sachets on sale? Don’t buy two: buy 25. All of this can be stored or frozen. As a bonus, you will be protected against the empty fridge syndrome that always makes you want to order from the restaurant.
Savings: $10 per week, or $40 per month.
Total: $830.50 per month, or approximately $10,000 per year.
This list can be readjusted once the $10,000 is safely in the bank, ready to serve as an emergency fund or fuel your investments. And if you miss certain expenses after a year, you can take them back with the certainty that it is an essential expense for you.
That’s not all: save $10,000 a year and, after 10 years, nearly $148,000 will end up in your investment account if you get a 7% return on your assets, i.e. a return lower than what a balanced portfolio has offered historically. A person who invests $10,000 a year between the ages of 20 and 30, and who stops saving entirely thereafter, would cross the million dollar mark in assets at the age of 59 on average.
And note that my list remains on the surface: I have practically not addressed the “real” items of expenditure, such as housing or transport. Thousands of dollars in savings per year are often possible to achieve by optimizing them. This will be the subject of an upcoming newsletter.
Even after implementing these habits, you will have a richer, more diverse and more exciting daily life than 100% of the generations who have lived before us on this planet. As a bonus, you’ll get richer every day and end the year better off than you started it.