How Simply Examining Your Spending Records Can Help You Save Big Money

I’m going to demonstrate how I manifested $360, and how you can too. This method (if we can name it that) is also tested to work for thousands of dollars. No joke. Here’s the account and the fundamental numbers that makes it all achievable.

San Francisco just recently introduced Clipper Cards for its commuters, which are pre-load, pay-as-you-go. Originally, our bus company, Muni (rhymes with puny and is short of Municipal), supplied Fast Passes that were good for unlimited rides every month. It sure won over having to manage exact change or transfers that expire only after a few hours.

The first one I ever bought when I was in school was worth $30. I concluded, the price was $1 one way and I had school pretty much every weekday, which would cost me about $40 every month.

Math: $1 x 2 rides per school day x 5 days a week x 4 weeks a month = $40.

So, it made sense. I would save $10+ every month (that is, assuming I attended all my classes). After that, if I remember correctly, the Fast Pass was eventually raised to $45 and the one-ways went up to $1.50. At that time I was no longer in college, but was still commuting to various places for work and various projects. The increase in fare annoyed me but once more, I crunched the numbers and it still looked OK to go with the Fast Pass.Math: $45 = 30 rides per month x $1.5, exact same travel cost as the prior fare.

And as economy would have it, the price was raised again, this time to $70 with one-way fares costing $2.The undercover math: $70 / $2 fare = 35 rides, which means each commuter would now have to ride 5 more times than before in order to break even.

Unfortunately having been somewhat mentally conditioned to loathe it but still get it anyhow, I did just that. That is, until the Clipper Cards dropped just recently. Muni is still serving Fast Passes, but as a study, I purchased one of the new cards to determine exactly how much I was actually paying for transportation. Nowadays, I work regularly from my house, I purchase my groceries on the web in addition to office products and books, furthermore I have generous friends and family who own automobiles for those times when I might have to move about sizable stuff or journey through extreme downpour. The truth is I’m only riding the bus approximately twenty times each month – that’s $40. Wow. I was wasting $30 every month and didn’t even consider it. Nor did I feel any constriction or suffering when I “tightened my belt.” I didn’t fire anyone, raise my workload, or reduce my quality of life. In truth, I was liberated and, in fact, I have expanded my funds.

Math: $70 Fast Pass – $40 Clipper Card = $30 saved monthly.

I have since switched over completely (until future situations shall determine otherwise) and I’m now “trimming the fat” by a total of about $360 annually on this one trick by itself. I didn’t know until I experimented.

So is this piece honestly about saving a couple hundred bucks on bus rides? Hardly. This is really about your either healthy or unhealthy relationship with moolah – or “wealth consciousness” as some experts might name it. It’s not about being cheap or on the reverse side, funding a ridiculous spending spree. It is about just learning to leverage the money that you do save.

What can someone do with $360? I could get a smart phone, a digital camera, a new computer printer, or an external hard drive. I could register in a full semester of courses at a local junior college, pay for registration to a conference, or cover airfare for a research trip to any American city. I could hold an appreciation party for valued partners and clients, employ an assistant for a short-term project, enlist the services of a graphic designer, or pay for web software to help out with the optimization or analytics of my sites.

Maybe you’re doing something similar – spending thoughtlessly and out of routine. What automatic payments or commitments do you have that you can renegotiate, minimize or subtract entirely? Do you hardly watch your cable television? An unused gym membership? Is your house still using incandescent lamps and lights? You too may have hundreds, even thousands, of dollars leaking out of your bank account. Imagine what you could possibly be able to do, how you could perhaps advance your education or get professional development tips, and how saving that money could in due course help you to make more money, thereby permitting you to make big moves, both personally and professionally.

Consider this- In the 80s, former head of American Airlines, Bob Crandall, famously removed a single olive from its salads. No customers complained. Who knows if anyone even knew! It was an easy maneuver that he felt may save a couple dollars. And he was right, to the tune of $40,000 a year. I’d take a look around for such resources if I were you. You are likely to amaze yourself.


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