This post is brought to you by ME Bank
I’m a pretty money savvy gal. It kind of goes with the territory when you’re the product of two working class parents – a nurse and a plumber. When you’re raised in a household where your parents earned their money by touching gross stuff, you learn to respect the hard earned Aussie dollar.
Trying to get money out of my parents was like trying to get blood from a stone – they were like ‘We worked hard for this money – why should we give to you?’. Fair point. In honour of my frugal upbringing I’ve teamed up with the peeps from ME (formerly ME Bank) to introduce you to their new buck Debit MasterCard®. Basically it’s a card you can use ANYWHERE and it doesn’t cost you ATM fees… for real. So I’ve put together a few tips for how to save $1000 without even trying, because we’re all a bit lazy at heart aren’t we? Why would we put effort into something if we don’t have to? Here’s how to get $1000 in your bank account almost without lifting a finger…
1. Entertain at home
If you like to wind (wine?) down on a Friday or Saturday night with a few glasses of wine at a bar, you could save yourself a fortune by doing this at home. Drinking at bars is lovely but if you do it every week, it gets super expensive.
1 bottle of wine at a pub = $45
1 bottle of the same wine at a local bottle shop = $15
If you replace one evening at the pub per week with an evening at home
52 (weeks in the year) x $45 (cost of a pub bottle of wine) = $2340
52 (weeks in the year) x $15 (cost of a bottle shop bottle of wine = $780
Total yearly saving = $1560
2. Pay attention to the little things
Little things like paying for parking when you could park for free further away, using only your bank’s ATMs or avoiding toll roads to save money on fees. A few dollars might not seem like a lot of money at the time but it really adds up. For example if you get charged $2 every time you use an ATM that’s not your bank’s ATM and you do this a few times a week (because your ATM is a good 15 minutes away from where you shop), you’re wasting hundreds of dollars a year.
3 x $2 ATM withdrawal fees per week x 52 (weeks in the year) = $312
If you want to avoid these fees you can sign up for a ME Everyday Transaction Account with the buck card. Seriously at any bank, at any ATM in Australia, the buck card will cover your transaction fees. For those of you (like me) who are too lazy to go to their own ATM this will save you about $300 per year and you don’t have to change your behaviour at all. Win. Plus, there are no monthly account-keeping fees and no minimum deposits required. It will stop you getting that nasty shock every month when there’s $25 in withdrawal fees.
Total yearly saving = $312
3. Thoroughly check your credit card statement every month
Cancel subscription service, gym memberships. If there’s something you’re being charged for like a music subscription service that you no longer use, cancel it. Over the course of a year $14.99 per month for something you never use really starts to eat up your money.
12 x $`14.99 for a music subscription service you never use = $179.88
Total yearly saving = $179.88
4. Buy in bulk
If you buy a muesli bar from your work cafe every day for $4 when your local supermarket stocks the same muesli bar $2.50, you need to start buying in bulk.
48 working weeks in the year where one $4 muesli bar is purchased every week day = 240 x $4
= $960
Buying the same 240 muesli bars in bulk at your local supermarket = $600
Yearly saving – $360
5. Make your savings automatic
This is a huge one – if you just pretend your rent or mortgage payment is $100 more per month and pay that money into a separate account you’ll effortlessly save $1200 over the course of a year and once you set it up, you don’t even have to think about it.
Yearly saving – $1200
So I lied at the beginning of this post. If you make the above adjustments you’ll actually save $2831.88 without even noticing. You don’t even have to do without anything, you’re just redirecting wasted money.
So the cool cats at ME are running a competition for Smaggle readers (yep – this competition is exclusive to Smag-lets) and you have the chance to win a buck card with $500 on it. All you have to do is…
- Pop over and visit buck – www.mebank.com.au/meetbuck
- Come back here and tell me which colour buck card you would pick (Bonus: guess which colour I picked?) and leave me a comment telling me what you’d spend the cash on if you won.
Easy peasy! T&Cs are here.
So tell me… what would you spend $500 on? A holiday? Some fancy new duds? And which colour buck card tickles your fancy?
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