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7 Big Budgeting Tricks You NEED To Know!

7 Big Budgeting Tricks You NEED To Know!

Plus, all of my Favorite 4th of July Deals! 🇺🇸

Matt Granite
July 01, 2024

If summer is a time when your household expenses soar, I have you covered in almost every major spending category.

This email is dedicated to all of my favorite ways to help you take back control of your budget!

What’s included this week:

💰 7 Budgeting Tricks For Household Purchases
🕵️‍♂️ This Website Helps Keep Your Accounts Safe!
🇺🇸 Best 4th of July Deals
👀 An Exclusive Newsletter Deal

💰 7 Budgeting Tricks For Household Purchases

🪑 APPLIANCES / MATTRESSES / FURNITURE / POWER TOOLS: This is an important budgeting trick! With the exception of an appliance breaking and needing immediate attention, plan your replacement or upgrade purchases scheduled around national holidays and long holiday weekend shopping. All of the items mentioned above drop 30 - 40% for President’s Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day (🚨 RIGHT NOW IS YOUR TIME! 🚨), Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas and drop in price one more time at the very end of the year.

🚨 HOME SECURITY: If you feel as though you are over-paying a major national carrier for your home security monitoring, consider a DIY-based system with professional monitoring from Ring or Simplisafe. Your best time to buy a home security package is on Prime Day (July or October), Black Friday / Cyber Monday or at a warehouse club where bundled deals drop every 6-9 weeks.

👚 CLOTHING: Stores operate two months ahead of the average person’s style schedule. That means bathing suits hit store shelves for most parts of the country in April even though you may not actually be ready to swim until June. Winter coats start to appear on shelves in August so when it’s finally time to replace your fall jacket with a warmer coat in November, buy it then - and that coat will be on clearance.

🧸 TOYS: In our house, our budgeting trick tied to this category is shopping for almost every toy we’ll need for the year ahead during the two weeks that precede Christmas when sales are strongest. With ample planning, toys for our kids, nieces/nephews and any birthdays we expect to be attending (or a handheld set aside for gifting in storage) ensures we are saving at least 50% in this category.

💻 DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT: Add up what you’re paying for your various subscription services whether it’s Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Disney+ or another provider. At this point in time, a cable or satellite package could be as much as 30% less than what you pay for your multiple streaming services (thanks to all of the recent price increases from folks like Netflix).

📚 BACK TO SCHOOL SALES ARE GREAT FOR EVERYONE: The sales marketed toward students from the end of July until September are ideal for anyone who uses technology, runs an office or works from home. If you need a laptop, display, printer, office furniture or all sorts of crafting supplies, this is a great time to stock up even if you are not a student or the parent of one.

📦 AMAZON SHOPPING: My final (and maybe the most important) tip is regarding everyday Amazon purchases. Websites like CamelCamelCamel will show you the historical pricing of any Amazon product to help make sure you don’t fall into the trap of buying an item at its highest price.

As you can see from the image above, while the Instant Pot is currently “on sale” for $69.99, it was actually reduced to $49.99 back in December 2023. So if you are able to hold off, there is a pretty high chance you should see that sale occur again within the next few months.

🕵️‍♂️ This Website Helps Keep Your Accounts Safe!

(THIS IS NOT SPONSORED)

Have I Been Pwned is a website that helps you find out if your personal information (like email addresses or passwords) have been leaked in data breaches. While this website won’t help you with your budgeting, it helps ensure the logins you use for banking or shopping apps are more secure.

After you enter your email address, it is cross-checked against a large database of known breaches and you’ll learn in seconds if your data has been exposed or if it is potentially at risk. This information can be vital in terms of securing your accounts.

As you can see from the image above, my email has been breached more than 16 TIMES. While there isn’t much I could have done to avoid this from happening, I can now use this crucial information to not only change my passwords for those accounts, but also change the passwords on any other account where I may have used the same or a similar password.

If one of your passwords has been compromised, my best advice would be to use a password manager like 1Password (affiliate link) to store and create unique passwords for each of your accounts.

You can find out more about Have I Been Pwned by clicking here.