Money Saving Websites

Why would anyone need money saving websites? Because a few really good ones can take you far on your path to saving money for investing.

About 5 years ago I was not good with money. I was not frugal and had no thoughts on my long-term financial future. As a result, I spent too much money and needlessly carried credit card debt. I figured it would work itself out eventually. Bzzt! Wrong!

I made a huge turn around in my spending and, therefore, turned credit card debt into cash savings pretty quickly. I did not come up with all the money saving ideas myself. Money saving websites played a large part in not only my actually being able to save money, but in my motivation to turn my finances around. I got a lot of my ideas from the websites and some of them helped me nail down some great reasons for why I should strive to save money.

The best of the money saving websites - personal finance website

At the top of the list is The Simple Dollar. Trent, the author, talks a lot about money-saving tips as well as some of the bigger picture items about money and life. What I like about his site is that he doesn't just focus on doing certain things that will lower your monthly costs, but focuses on creating a quality life himself and his family. He isn't just trying to save money, but be frugal in the true sense of the word. Being frugal means using your money efficiently as opposed to just being cheap -- which is just looking for the lowest-cost item possible.

He has discussed some of the things that he's willing to spend more money on because they dramatically increase the quality of life. For example, he's willing to spend extra money on organic food because it's healthier. That is frugal. However, he tends to cook with low cost items often (and publish his for recipes on his blog). For example, beans are an extremely low cost staple he uses in a lot of recipes.

He also talks a lot about how the money we spend relates to the life energy we use to get that money (ie time working). When he does the calculations to figure out actually how much we make using extra costs incurred to work the type of office job that most people have, is a huge eye-opener. It helps to think about how much work you have to do to buy an item. For example, if you make $30 an hour, but after taxes and all the costs you incur, you really make $20 an hour, then when you go to buy oil are item you can ask yourself, "would I work an hour for this?" Many times this causes you to not buy when before you would've bought.

Honorable mention: Get Rich Slowly, My Money Blog, and Consumerism Commentary.

The best of the money saving websites - online shopping website

Amazon.com is great for finding really good deals. Their prices are usually very hard to beat by the traditional brick-and-mortar store. Now I'm back, but they have a huge selection, so you can really pick out the high-quality items. My favorite thing about Amazon is the reviews. Sometimes I go there just to look at the reviews and then I buy somewhere else if I think I can find a better price. But, I usually can't. I also like their free shipping on a ton of things and have a were words card gives you 3% back.

I chose Amazon over eBay to list here, despite potentially better deals on eBay, because Amazon is really hasslefree when compared to eBay and they provide many additional services around the shopping.

Honorable mention: Newegg and eBay

The best of the money saving websites - deal finder website

FatWallet.com has some amazing deals. The real goodies are found in the hot deals forum. Usually if I'm looking to buy a large item or techie item I will go to the hot deals forum on FatWallet and search for that item. Every once in a while I'll I stumble on huge savings. Sometimes they even have good deals listed on medium level items like shoes.

Generally, how FatWallet works is that people weed out store discounts that are often paired with rebates -- sometimes in multiples -- for big savings.

Honorable mention: slickdeals.net

When you put together all these money saving pieces, you can save a lot of money. And that is more money that you can put towards investing. After all, if you don't have enough money to invest, there's not much point in a beginner learning how to invest.

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