Consumer-finance expert Andrea Woroch shares five simple but effective personal finance tips that can save you up to $740 in the next five weeks as we approach Black Friday and holiday shopping. Save nearly a thousand dollars for Black Friday sales by looking at subscriptions, stopping food waste, and more.

As Inflation Runs Wild, Here's How to Save Over $700 by Black Friday

Now the holiday season is still a few months away but with inflation at a 40 year high, let me tell you the best time to start saving is right now including for some of those awesome toys that we just saw. So here to give us tips on how to say before. Black Friday is consumer financial expert Andrea Warren, thank you so much for joining us. Let's get right into this because I gotta get through some of the tips that you have hopefully will work for all of us. Your first tip is to look at your monthly subscriptions. What do you mean by that? Yes, good morning, thank you for having me on. So ahead of black friday, you want to pay attention to you what you're paying in your monthly bills and look for those subscription services that you don't need or use or maybe that your kids signed up for that. You didn't even know about. This has happened to me, we were paying for a subscription in a subscription because they signed up from amazon music unlimited, It didn't know wasted $10 a month for six months. So don't make the same mistake, comb through those monthly bills, cancel what you don't need and then even think about how you can get some free subscriptions. First of all, some wireless carriers offer free video streaming services with your plan, so take advantage of that and don't double pay or stream content for free through your local library. They use platforms like hoopla so you can get free movies, tv shows, even video games and audio books, all for free. That's amazing. And there are some apps out there that will tell you what all your subscriptions are. Even the ones you don't know about. So that's a good one as well. Next up you have this tip called basically rethink your data plan that you mean like your phone. Yes exactly. A lot of us sign up for those unlimited data plans because they seem like the best value. But a study was recently done that found that 90% of consumers who pay for those aren't even using that much data so you can look at your usage and then compare it with the different options that your wireless carrier offers because we use free wifi from home maybe at your office. Even stores offer free wifi these days. So maybe you could switch to a lower tier plan that costs a lot Less than those unlimited plans or switch completely. I love these online only wireless carriers. Mint mobile does a great job. They sell service in Bulk, giving you a really low price. So you can get talk text and data for just $15 a month. Or if you really do want that unlimited plan it's gonna cost you just $30 a month with them. And compared to those big wireless carriers that's a huge area of savings and help you save a lot by by friday. Okay tip number three rack up more cash back. I love cash back. I mean who doesn't love cash back and because a lot of us are gonna be buying these gifts and shopping these early holiday sales, you want to use the right credit card And there was a study done that says that credit card users are missing out on $1000 of free money every year by using the wrong cash back card. So just make sure it's working hard for you and giving you more cash back in the areas where you spend more or less, you get a flat rate cash back card. I love the bread cash back american express card because they give you an unlimited 2% back everywhere you shop and there's no spending limit. So essentially it's gonna allow you to earn more cash back by black friday or just through the rest of the year and then you can use that to pay off your gifts. And here's another app you're gonna love fetch rewards. This is a cash back app, take pictures of all those receipts on groceries, gas or early holiday presents. You're gonna earn points which you can then redeem to free gift cards to stores like amazon Target or walmart and you can use those to buy those last minute gifts in december. Now we're almost out of time. So I just want to mention to tips and we'll go to the last question you say meal plan to help reduce food race as well as avoid impulse purchases, Which Hello, I hope my wife is listening. Now if we do all of these tips, the things that you suggest we do, how much do you think we would be able to save between now and black friday? I mean I estimated based on the data that I pulled, you're gonna save about $740 and of course that's you know give or take. Yes. And when I was talking about meal planning essentially it's so you don't throw food away in the trash. That's a huge area of waste and if you're gonna order take out there actually coupons coupon follow head 50% off at Uber eats 25% off grubhub or doordash. Hey that's gonna add up in savings and put more money back in your pocket for black friday. Yeah, coupon is no longer for just the grandma's I'm all for it. All right thank you. Andrea warren thank you so much. Consumer financial expert appreciate those tips. I hope y'all were listening