15 Things To Try If You Want A Nice, Lazy Way To Save Money (2024)

When you have to throw on some shoes and walk or drive to your bank to deposit money into your savings account, you might be more likely to keep putting it off. But when you can transfer some cash into your savings with just a few taps at any time of the day, saving money becomes a task that takes less than 60 seconds.

Of course, easy access to send money into your savings account can also mean easy access to withdrawing that money, too. Just make sure that every spending decision is being made mindfully!

Loyal Digit user here! Since I also manually save a fixed amount each month, the app makes me feel like I'm really maximizing my savings by stashing away every dollar I can! The app connects to your bank account and lets you set up different goals (like saving for a rainy day or holiday shopping). You can specify the maximum daily amount you want saved for each goal, which makes the app super flexible for a variety of income levels. So let's say you don't have a lot of wiggle room or have too many surprise, variable costs — you can choose to save a max of just $2 a day toward any given goal.

And you can also manually add money toward any savings goal. This is super helpful if you want to beef things up a bit. It's actually kind of exciting to see how much progress you've made toward a specific goal!

You can put a little money back into your pockets just for buying things you really want, or things you would've bought anyway. Drop has a ton of popular shops and brands in their network — like Starbucks, Amazon, Sephora, GrubHub, and more — that are ready to give you back a percentage of the money you spend there. All you have to do is connect your credit and debit cards to the app and shop offers from your favorite stores through the app. Plus, you can earn points just for playing games on the app or taking surveys, so you don't even need to shop to earn!

You can redeem your points for gift cards to your favorite stores. Basically, you're pretty much paying yourself to shop.

Spending out of boredom is not the same as conscious spending. Conscious spending is when you make a plan to cut back on things you don't care about so you have more money to spend on the things that matter to you — like iced coffee, candles, cologne, video games, and more. Buying because you're bored sounds more like wanting something because you don't know what else to do with your energy (and it can become financially destructive quickly if you aren't careful).

But when you stop and save that same amount instead, you avoid buying something you don't actually care about, and you bring yourself a little closer to your financial goals.

Ten dollars per month may not seem like an obnoxious amount of money to spend on a service (i.e., gym membership, subscription box, streaming service, etc.) that you don't use often. In fact, it might sometimes be easy to miss. But you might actually start to feel the burn when you add it up over the span of a year and see that over $100 went to a service you didn't even look twice at.

Take a few minutes to make a list of all the subscriptions you pay for; don't forget to count any streaming services, membership sites, and recurring fees. Now comes the hard part: Ask yourself if you really care about it as much as you think you do. If not, then it might be time to pull the plug on that service (you can always resubscribe in the future when it better suits your needs).

It's easy to make an impulse purchase, and sometimes, it ends up being money well spent. Other times, though, they don't work out, and the cost of all those impulse-buys really adds up! Enter the 24-hour rule: It's where you add an item to your cart but wait until the next day to actually buy it. After you've had a day to think about the purchase, you can buy it if you still really want it. But often, you'll realize that you don't actually care that much about it. Besides, when you leave items in your cart for a while, the brand may actually send you discount codes — so if you do decide to buy, you'll wind up spending a little less.

And if 24 hours isn't enough for you, wait 48 hours or 72 hours instead. Others have success with waiting an entire week and sometimes up to a month!

While each bank may have a slightly different policy when it comes to refunding fees, it's often possible for you to put those overdraft and maintenance charges back in your pocket. Keep in mind these fees are expensive, and getting a refund can actually go a long way. It doesn't hurt to call your bank's customer service line to ask! Just be sure that the fees you're requesting refunds for were issued within the past 60 days (this time range might change depending on your bank).

Also important to note: If you do find success in getting your refunds, 1) yay, congrats! And 2) avoid using it as a "free pass" to overspend.