Save Money Like a Ninja

Be a cheapskate without looking like one

There’s a lot of articles on Medium about how to become wealthy. I’m not a pro at affiliate marketing nor do I have a dozen side hustles to make me a millionaire.

However, I am a pro at one thing: saving money like a motherfucker.

In high school, my cafeteria had a muffin club card. Buy 10 muffins, get a muffin free. They were a little over a dollar. Being a cheapskate in my teens, I couldn’t justify buying a muffin a day. We were a school of cheap assholes, with everyone begging each other for cash. “Can I borrow two bucks? I promise I’ll pay you back!” was often overheard in the hallways with a resolute, “Fuck no!” in response.

A friend and I every day divided and conquered to get our daily muffin fix. We knew asking for a buck was a stretch back in the 90s when the minimum wage for our crappy part-time jobs was three bucks an hour. Instead, we would go around asking people for pennies and nickels. Everyone had a nickel in their pocket. And no one wanted to be cheap by saying “no” to someone asking them if they had five cents.

She and I asked ten people each, every day, for five cents. And every day we would toast our success with an oversized chocolate chip muffin. The best compliment came from another friend who rolled her eyes at me and said, “I don’t know what you’ll be one day, but I think you’ll be Alex P. Keaton”. That was Michael J. Fox’s character on Family Ties, who was the ultimate financial kid who could hustle for cash.

I’m a stickler about saving money. I learned from my mother, the pro of thriftiness. This is a woman who would reuse straws from McDonald's. She also tried to deny it, but back then their yellow and white stripes allowed for no straw deception. At least she saved some turtles.

Here are some of my strategies to save money.

Tax returns are not a source of income

Businesses rely on consumers overpaying their taxes, getting a huge refund, and then needing a place to blow that dough. If you’re getting money back at tax time, it means you’ve overpaid all year. So the government took your extra money, invested it, and made money…on your income.

Your goal at tax time is to keep the amount you owe and the amount you get back as close to zero as possible. You don’t want to underpay; owing a large chunk of money once a year isn’t the financial ninja way of life.

Cash-saving apps are easy

There are a lot of apps and websites out there that promise to help save you cash when shopping. It’s overwhelming and many of them seem like a scam.

The two key ones that work for me are the Target Circle app and Ebates (now owned by Rakuten).

The Target Circle app is easy. Open the regular Target app. Click Target Circle Offers from the home page. Click all the items you typically buy or a one time need. Enjoy a delightful trip to Target, the most wonderful shopping place on earth. At checkout, scan your phone. Done.

As of today, I’ve saved $1,153.78 on stuff I was buying anyway thanks to the Target app.

Ebates is a great site for online shopping. They don’t take your banking information; they’ll mail your check. Install a widget on your browser and it’ll alert you if you’ll get cash back from shopping at that site. Sephora, Old Navy, Target, and a million others are all affiliated with Ebates. It’s nice to get a check once a month for money back on sites I was shopping at anyway. As of this writing, I've earned $638 from months of online shopping.

Birthday presents made easy

This tip is especially important if you’re a parent of small children. Birthday party invites grow like weeds. That’s a crap ton of random presents to buy for kids you barely know.

I peruse the end caps of stores when I go shopping as well as check on sites like Slickdeals. When a crazy good deal on a kid’s toy comes up, I buy it regardless if there’s an upcoming birthday or not. My goal is to never spend more than $20 on a kid’s gift. However, my goal is also not to make it look like I spent $20 on a kid’s gift. I keep discounted Lego, Barbies, and other toys in a bin in my garage (away from my snooping kids). When we get an invite to a kid’s party I grab a toy from the bin without stressing over my budget at that moment.

A key tip: make sure the gift is relatively generic. As kids get older this doesn’t work as well since their tastes become more specific.

Freeze everything

I cringe when I see a recipe calling for a teaspoon of fresh dill. What the heck am I supposed to do with the rest of it? I hate paying $3 only to use a sliver of fresh chives.

I’m too lazy to go all fancy like freezing herbs in oil using ice cube trays. Instead, I thoroughly dry them, chop them, and pop them in a freezer-safe Ziploc bag. This works for most herbs and even scallions. Before I use a lemon (what the eff why are lemons a dollar when people around where I live have them growing in their front yards?! Is there some weird lemon monopoly?), I zest the rind and pop those in a Ziploc bag for the freezer.

If I don’t use bread items within a few days of baking or buying, I pre-slice them and pop them in the freezer as well. Frozen bagels and English muffins work well in the toaster; slicing before freezing is the key to saving money and your sanity.

Revisit sites for price changes

Discount sites like Overstock, Joss & Main, and Wayfair constantly change their prices. They also often carry the same merchandise, just under different names. You can score a better deal than the price initially listed, but it’ll take a bit of work.

I found a set of club chairs on one site. The price was $700 each. Hell to the no. I searched the other sites for “blue club chair” and found the same or comparably similar chairs. Their prices were also less than ideal.

Every day I opened up those chair pages on their websites. Every day their prices changed. Drastically. It was like airline pricing. I couldn’t make sense of it.

After three months of checking daily (it helps to have a desk job and a desire to having seating in my living room), I got the chairs at $400 each. Just from opening the page each day and being patient, I saved $600.

Free trials

Free trials are my jam. Sometimes I’m happy enough to keep the service or website I’ve subscribed to. Most of the time, I’m not impressed enough (or have the money) to continue the subscription beyond the trial period.

The best way to use free trials is to sign up and immediately put the end date, minus a few days, on your calendar. Why not put the real end date? Because life happens. Maybe your internet it out or you don’t look at your calendar. If you add in a buffer, you’ll be sure to cancel the trial within the time frame instead of cursing yourself a day later.

Lowest price on Amazon

My go-to store for anything is Amazon. My beef is their inconsistent pricing. They can list something as a “front page deal” which ends up being the same price as it’s been all year.

Use CamelCamelCamel to view the 1 year price history for any of their items. This is especially useful on Black Friday or Amazon Prime Day, when they try to pitch you a great sales deal. There is no need to rush and buy garbage bags or shampoo that seem like a great deal when you see that the price listed is common every few weeks. It’s also a relief to skip overpaying on Cyber Monday because it averages an even lower price most of the year.

Find your cheap brethren

You aren’t the only one in your social circle who is frugal, are you? Weed out close coworkers and friends who are also cost-conscious. I love when my friends text me, “Old Navy is 40% the entire site today, their kids’ clearance has stuff super cheap right now”. You can’t be everywhere at once; your network of frugal ninjas are like personal saving advisors in real-time.

Another perk of having fellow budget-conscious friends is being able to swap things with each other. When I end up with a purchase I don’t need but can’t return, or someone has gifted me something I won’t use, I’ll pass it on to someone I know who is more than happy to take it off my hands. In return, they’ll think of me when they end up with duplicates of lip gloss or clothes that no won’t fit their kids but will fit mine. Find your financial ninja posse.

This list sounds rather arbitrary. They don’t adhere to a single category of “stocks to invest in” or “ways to save when grocery shopping”. That’s the power of being a financial ninja: you’re saving money everywhere and anywhere, all at once, without anyone noticing.

It’s the ninja way.