Low Effort Ways to Cut Your Household Expenses

Cost of Living

Cutting expenses is something we are all looking to do these days. Some expenses are easier to cut than others, and some take more effort. In my world, I am trying to keep as much of my hard earned money as possible, with the least amount of effort. That sounds about right, doesn’t it? Well, cutting your household expenses can be one of the most difficult things to cut, and takes the most amount of time. So here are some ways that I have found to cut household expenses for minimal effort.

Subscriptions

One of the first places to begin cutting your household expenses is with subscriptions. We all have them, some more than others. And a lot of times we forget about some of the subscriptions that we have. We either stopped using them, or still use them and the cost has gone up, unbeknownst to us.

But there is a great app that can help with that!

Trim

Trim is a service that you run through your PC to help with subscriptions. It goes through all of your bank and credit card accounts searching for recurring payments. When it finds a subscription, it will determine where and if it can save you money on your subscriptions.

Then, Trim will begin negotiating to lower the subscription fees on your behalf. If it can’t get them lowered, and you don’t want the service any more, it will begin the process of cancelling the subscription for you. Or, if you just don’t want it, and don’t want them to go through negotiating, it will cancel right off the bat.

I don’t know about you, but this sounds like a wonderful dream. You mean I don’t have to spend hours on the phone with customer service reps negotiating my rates or trying to cancel my service? Oh, yes please!

Shopping

No matter what, we all shop for regular household things each month. Sometimes it is just to restock the toiletries, but other times an appliance or gadget has to be replaced. Either way, shopping for these regular things can really add up sometimes. So I have learned a few tricks along the way that have really helped me save money in this category.

Ibotta

I have been a huge fan of the Ibotta app since I first heard about it 3 years ago. Some months it saves me more money than others, but it all depends on what they are featuring at the time. It also depends on what my needs are for the month.

The way this platform works is as an app through your phone. They have a ton of stores listed on their app. If you can’t find what you are looking for initially, then just run a search through their search box until you find the store in question.

Once you click on the store, you can scroll through every single item they have a money back reward on. Just click on each one that you want to add to your bucket, so that when it comes time to redeem the rewards, you have them ready to go.

The next step is to click on “redeem” and take a picture of your receipt from the store. Ibotta will then ask you which items in your bucket you purchased. As you click on each one, sometimes it will require you to take a picture of the barcode on the package, but other times it just accepts it as it is.

Once you are done redeeming every item, finish uploading and the reward will be in you account the same day, usually.

Once you have $20 in rewards, you can cash it out via PayPal, Venmo or a large list of gift cards. I usually do an Amazon gift card, since we purchase a lot of our household toiletry items from them anyway.

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Ebates

This is another one of my favorite loves. Ebates is an extension you can put on your computer, but it also has an app version, so that you can use it on the go.

Once you put the extension on your computer, more often than not, it will launch automatically whenever you go onto a website to begin shopping.

The Ebates extension will tell you what the current rebate percentage is and ask if you want to activate it. I don’t know why you would ever say no, but you have to click it anyway to get it to activate.

Ebates will have certain categories, sometimes, that give you bigger rewards than others, so that is something to keep an eye out for. A good example of this is Amazon. The cash back percentage is different for every category on Amazon, and sometimes it is nothing at all.

You don’t have to cash out your Ebates, like you do with Ibotta though. Ebates will send you a “Big Fat Check” every 3 months instead. Although, it isn’t really a check, but a deposit into your connected account.

I, personally, love this because I don’t have to do anything other than click the activate button.

Paribus

Paribus is another pretty cool application that can be used for cutting your household expenses, or anything, really.

Once you sign up for Paribus, it connects with your email, main spending account that you enter, and Amazon.  The algorithm then goes through everything to see if any of the products you previously bought are cheaper now. If the prices happen to be reduced, then they deposit the difference into your account.

However, it is not the full difference. They have to make money somehow, after all!

Paribus takes 25% of whatever the difference is and puts the remaining 75% into your account. I am perfectly fine with how this runs because I wouldn’t have gotten any of that money back without them doing the work anyway. So the fee seems pretty nominal, in my opinion.

Food

Whether you have 5 kids that eat you out of house and home like we do, or you are still living up the single life, food can get expensive! This is another category that can be hard to cut down on, in a lot of cases.

But, there are quite a few apps that can help with that.

I, personally, use:

These apps don’t take very much of my time to scan my receipts in or activate, so they are well worth it for me.

Another good way to cut down on some of the food expenses are through programs such as:

Services like these either give you a monthly menu of dishes to make that are budget friendly ($5 Meal Plan) or ship meal boxes directly to your house (Blue Apron). Either way, these can help cut down on the costs associated with planning and preparing meals. This can not only help your budget but your stress level too.

Cut Household Expenses

In reality, there are a lot of different options for cutting your household expenses. But some of my favorites are by using extensions and apps that easily integrate into my life.

These make my life easier and help me keep more of my hard-earned cash in my wallet. I am, personally, a big fan of this!

What are some low effort ways you have learned to cut your household expenses?