4 Money-Saving Tactics You (Probably) Didn’t Even Know About

September 04, 2025

By Holly Trantham

Every now and then, it’s good to get back to the financial basics: track your spending, check in on your credit score, make sure your savings strategy is still working for you. And now that we’re all settling back into our normal post-summer routines, it’s as good a time as ever to evaluate whether your habits are still serving you. Here are several money-saving tactics you probably haven’t thought to implement yet.

First off: Start investing with tax-smart tools by your side. 

This might be just as simple as the smaller tips on this list, with a potentially bigger impact. Hopefully, you’ve already started investing. But if you’re just starting out, Betterment makes it easy to invest like the pros with their tax-smart tools.

Year-round tax optimization can make a difference in your investment gains. Taxes can steadily eat away at your potential returns over the years. And while you can’t control how the market performs, you can turn smart investing into tax-smart investing with Betterment.

Thanks to their automated tax-saving technology, you can keep some of your potential returns in your pocket, without having to lift a finger. Betterment’s tax-loss harvesting is a strategy utilized by the pros to help minimize the taxes you owe and maximize your potential investment returns. Get started, be invested. Click here to sign up in minutes.

Betterment does not provide tax advice. TLH is not suitable for all investors. Learn more.

Get free Amazon shipping, without a Prime membership. 

Moving onto some smaller money-saving tips that can still make a big difference in your bottom-line savings, this is something I recently figured out: you do not need to have a Prime membership in order to get free shipping from Amazon. My husband and I decided we did not want to subscribe to Prime anymore, both for the reasons you may assume, and because we just weren’t convinced the annual fee was actually worth it for us. Considering the only real perk we utilized was free shipping, it definitely wasn’t: we can still get free shipping if we must order off of Amazon, as long as we meet the $35 shipping minimum.

As car-free city dwellers, I can’t pretend that we don’t sometimes utilize Amazon when we really need something. But a Prime subscription is not the necessity we’ve been led to believe it is. 

Instead of regular takeout, use a “leftover” food app.

Listen: as a deeply pregnant person, I’m simply not going to tell you to stop ordering takeout. It’s not in the cards for me anytime soon, and I’m sure you have your reasons for depending on this type of convenience. But I do highly recommend finding ways to minimize your takeout costs, especially if you are in a heavy area of convenience-related spending like me. My two suggestions: order pickup instead of delivery to avoid the extra fees, and download an app like Too Good To Go. This service works with restaurants to offer food delivery that would otherwise go to waste, and for a steep discount!

Negotiate rates, even ones that feel “locked-in.”

Never assume a rate is set in stone. My husband was able to get a steep newspaper subscription discount by simply going to cancel the service, which prompted an option to continue his subscription for a year at half the rate we had been paying. Additionally, things like your phone bill or car insurance are more flexible than you may realize — especially once you start shopping around and comparing prices to (politely) use in your argument. Here is a great resource on lowering things like your car insurance costs.  

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At the end of the day, increasing your earnings and savings rate over time are going to be part of the tactics for building wealth. These tips alone are not going to make you rich, but they could help you continue living below your means — another key ingredient in the wealth-building recipe.