The Road to
Big Savings
aving money isn’t about just
clipping coupons or denying
yourself that daily latte.
By attacking areas where you
spend the most money—your
home, food, health, clothes,
car, entertainment, travel, and
investments—you can save
up to $10,000 or more: the
equivalent of more than five years of forgone lattes. “I’ve
always preferred to save a lot of money on a few things
rather than a little bit of money on a bunch of things,” says
Elisabeth Leamy, ABC’s Good Morning America consumer
correspondent and the author of Save Big.
Learning the new rules of saving also means taking full
advantage of Internet and mobile tools, beating hungry
retailers at their own game, and thinking like a consumer,
not a patient, at the doctor’s office. For the shrewdest
advice, we interviewed several of the nations’s most aggressive supersavers, including “Coupon Mom” Stephanie
Nelson, “Cars and Money” blogger Jerry Edgerton of CBS
Money Watch.com, and real-estate guru Ilyce Glink.
Here are their top 25 tips.
Your Home
Bargain with brokers
In today’s lackluster housing market, real-estate
agents and mortgage pros are increasingly willing to give buyers significant discounts, says
Leamy. Be bold and negotiate. Your agent might
accept a 2 percent fee instead of the traditional
3 percent. The difference would knock $2,000
off the commission on a $200,000 house.
payment will be about $450 higher but your
total interest will be only $75,397.
If you’re in your 50s, a shorter-term mortgage also means you can pay off the note by the
time you retire or soon after, says Glink, whose
most recent book is Buy, Close, Move In!
Choose a 15-year mortgage
With a 30-year, 5 percent, $200,000 mortgage,
you’ll end up paying $186,513 in interest. With
a 15-year, 4. 5 percent mortgage, your monthly
Chop your renovation costs
If you’re renovating your home, let your keyboard do the walking to save on building materials. “You may be able to go online and find
boxes of discounted tile at a fraction of the
price at a local store,” says David Lupberger, a
home-improvement expert with ServiceMagic,
an Internet-based contractor-referral service.
Just search the Web for “discontinued” or
“discount” and the type of material you need.
You may
still be able to
get $50 to $500
back from your
state for buying
an energy-
efficient
appliance. It’s a
limited fund—
first come,
first served.
Check out
energysavers
.gov/rebates
for details.
