10 Money Saving Ideas
- Do it yourself,
- Find someone to talk money with,
- Actually eat your leftovers,
- Pack a lunch,
- Wait until things go on sale,
- Sleep on it before buying,
- Negotiate,
- Cut up credit cards,
- Take out cash, when the cash is gone stop spending money,
- Start an auto draft to a savings account.
Here in America negotiating is something we aren’t use to anymore. My wife makes fun of me because I couldn’t negotiate anything when we first met. She was right, in America I never negotiated anything. When I was overseas I negotiated everything. Here’s the thing to remember, at some point, quantity, time, or in some way everything is negotiable.
Dave Ramsey says use these three things; never misrepresent yourself, never intend to rip someone off, and create a win-win deal. It should be a simple principle in your life, don’t lie and don’t try to rip people off. That’s the easy one, and you either get it or you don’t. The other one is to create a win-win deal. To start making a win-win deal find out the other person’s motivation for the sale.
On the retail level it’s normally easy, they just want to make a profit. The question is how much and when. Sometimes a company just needs to get rid of stock. It takes up space that could be used to actually make money. If the company has 1,000 blue widgets up front that won’t sell, but 1,000 red widgets on order that will, they just need to get rid of the blue ones to make room. They will make you a deal on the blue ones. How big a deal depends on how many you want and how badly they want the space back.
Example; my friend wanted tons of Easter eggs for a public hunt our church was doing. So after Easter one year he went in and bought out Walmart. The egg packs were on sale for $.99, he offered the guy $25 for the entire display. The clerk had to get a manager and my friend had to wait. As soon as my friend made the offer to the manager he said done. The display took us 3 SUV loads to get them all out of there! There were probably 3 or 4 hundred packs in the display. The store just wanted to be rid of them.
In that example everyone won. The store just wanted them out of there, and my friend wanted cheap Easter eggs. Both of them won.
This works on every exchange everywhere. I really enjoyed going to Mexico and buying things. You can haggle back and forth and no one gets upset or pissed off. They actually expect it. In the Middle East it’s intense. The buyer and merchant start yelling at each other and the “I can’t feed my family” always seems to come out on both sides. I use to laugh just watching people go at in the market place.
Once you figure out what the other side wants, give it to them. Zig Ziglar says “You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”
Next time you are out try asking for a discount at a big store or try asking for a better price from a small merchant. It can’t hurt, all they can do is say no.
Stay Safe,
Ben