Money tips we ranked, worst to best

We ranked normal money-saving tips from worst to best. Most of them sound sharp in a caption and then do almost nothing by the end of the month. The useful way to read a list like that is to ask what the tip is actually touching. A habit you can see, like a coffee, is easy to film. An account you never open is harder to film and usually worth more.

Why the small tips lose

Cutting coupons that save you almost nothing landed near the bottom. So did skipping a daily coffee. Personal finance writers have argued about that coffee for years. A month of skipped cups is real money. It is also a small pile next to a bill you can renegotiate, a fee you did not notice, or a balance sitting in an account you treat like furniture. The reel put the coffee low for that reason. You can still skip it. The month will not rearrange itself around the skip.

A tiny coupon has the same shape. It feels like a win in the moment and a rounding error on the statement. A coupon only helps when you were going to buy the thing anyway, and when you use it before the date. That second part is the whole post on using a coupon before it expires. The live list is on offers. If the offer is for a shop you will not visit, it is not a tip. It is a flyer.

Money you already have

The top tip on the reel is money sitting somewhere you forgot to look. That shows up in a lot of costumes. A savings account you set up and stopped checking. A gift card in a drawer. Points in a program you used twice and then ignored. Canadians are trained on this by the big programs. PC Optimum piles up on groceries. Aeroplan piles up on flights and on cards. Tims Rewards and Starbucks Rewards pile up on coffee, which is a neat joke if the reel just told you the coffee was not the point. The points on the coffee might be.

The habit is the same in every one of those. Open the balance. Decide if it is worth spending, moving, or ignoring on purpose. Ignoring it by accident is how the money stops being yours in any practical way. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada publishes plain guides on saving and on reading what you already pay. Start there if the reel made you want a grown-up version of the same idea.

The local version of the same habit

1Mint points are a smaller cousin of those balances. They show up when you visit a place and use an offer, and they live in the wallet. How points add up follows one normal trip. There is no dollar rate on this page, because a blog post goes stale and the wallet does not.

If the saving you care about is dinner, the four rooms on our food reel are reviewed in the GTA food ranking. A cheaper meal you did not want is the coffee tip again. A meal you were going to eat, at a place you can find on places, is the version that survives the month.