How to Save Money Around The House in Unusual Ways

Here are four ways to save money around the house that are unusual but simple to put in place. They save a small amount--but done together and over the months the savings add up to real dollars. Here are quirky but truly do-able techniques we use in our home to save us at least about $700 a year and hardly notice it.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

1. 1. Turn off your water softener. Consider if you can live without the water softener, especially if you live in town where the water is already treated before it arrives to your home. If a bag of salt costs $6.00 or more and you use four bags of salt a month, that is a savings of $24 a month, or $288 a year. That doesn't count the reduced electricity and water bill since you are using each of less each week when the softener system isn't running.

2. 2. Don't always flush the toilet. This may gross out some people, but by following the rule--at least during the night if not during the day--of flushing only following bowel movement, the water savings can easily reduce your bill at the end of the month by $5 or more. That's another $60 or more a year you can save.

3. 3. Run the air conditioner or heat in only part of the house when you are sleeping. The strategy here is to close a door and the registers in part of the house each night so that you are heating or cooling only the part of the house you are in. (Be sure the thermostat, though, is in the part of the house you are heating or cooling). This goes along with the standard advice to install a computerized thermostat so you can set it to heat and cool at different levels during a given 24-hour cycle. This one is harder to calculate because of all the variables of a given house, but we estimate--based partly on the comparison-to-neighbors bills that our electric and natural gas companies provide us online each month--that we save $20 a month on electric and gas bills. That's $240 a year.

4. 4. Never buy postage stamps to pay bills again. Most every bank now offers free online bill payment service, and for free if you bank at the institution. You can easily set up each of your utility accounts, but also you can make individual payments to individual people using such a service. So if you want to pay someone electronically but don't want to ask for the person's bank account number, you can still set up the bill payment service to send a real paper check to that person's physical mailbox. Even for this, most services don't charge a fee for the postage! At close to 50 cents for one postage stamp, and with say a dozen bills to pay a month, that is a savings of about $6.00 a month, or $72 a year.