Innovative Ways to Save Money Thanks to the Internet

There aren’t a lot of people in the world who are very good at saving money. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that we’re all generally much better at spending money than saving it. And in a consumer culture like the one we live in, this isn’t even surprising – we’re bombarded with shopping advertisements nearly everywhere we turn, on TV, on the Internet, on the street and so on. Because of this, many of us keep buying things that we don’t actually need, end up with a lot of it and then wonder why we never manage to save any money.

This is perfectly normal, though, furthermore, it’s to be expected. But there are certain ways in which you can save a considerable amount of money, and it doesn’t even have to affect your lifestyle very much. Thanks to the marvels of the Internet, you can not only get all sorts of discounts that you normally wouldn’t even know about, but you can get money for the stuff that you no longer need, and if you’re lucky you can even grab some things for free – incidentally, stuff that someone else out there no longer needs. Today, we’re going to be talking about just that; how to find these kinds of opportunities via the Internet, and how to take advantage of them properly so you can start saving big money today.

Trade In Your Old Things

If you have an attic or a basement full of old things that you sincerely doubt you will ever need again and don’t have any real emotional value, a great idea is to trade them in for money online. There are dozens of fantastic websites that you can use to do this, such as Gazelle, which will actually pay the shipping cost for all your old electronics, in addition to paying you for the actual stuff. So if you happen to have some old MP3 players, walkmans, obsolete platform games that you doubt you’ll ever touch again, hit up Gazelle and check how much cash you can get for them.

Coupons

Did you know that you can use the web to scour for various coupon deals that you can use to get a ridiculous discount on most of your purchases? I’ve known several people over the years (one of them is an ex-girlfriend of mine, actually) that spent hefty amounts of time just researching coupons online, for basically anything that they shopped for; electronics, groceries, even furniture at times. You can get discounts of up to 60% just on groceries alone, which equates to hundreds of dollars just over the course of a few months.

Streaming Instead of TV, VoIP Instead of Calls

When I was a bit younger, I used to spend quite a hefty amount of time sitting on my couch and watching TV, until one day I realized that there really isn’t that much quality programming on there, that I can’t get over the Internet for a fraction of the money I use to pay my cable bill. So one day I simply canceled my cable bill and got a Netflix subscription, and went to paying to from more than $1000 a year for cable (and that’s without all the pay-per-view I used to order every now and then), to less than $150.

Another way that you can use the Internet to save on bills is to simply use VoIP services such as Skype or Viber to conduct your calls, especially if you tend to make international calls often. VoIP calls are either free or very cheap if you’re calling a landline from your smartphone or PC.

Low Prices on Flights with VPNs

A lot of websites on the Internet are quite inconsistent with their prices in terms of the buyer’s location, so you can get vastly different prices if you’re buying from a different country. A lot of people use this when purchasing airline tickets, for example, and you can save hundreds of dollars this way. But since it’s a bit inconvenient to actually travel to a different country when buying tickets, you can try to fool the website into thinking that you’re located somewhere else by using ExpressVPN to change your IP address. This won’t always work, but a lot of times it does, and it’s always something that you should consider before making any large purchases.

Adam Ferraresi is a successful web developer from Dallas, Texas and one of the writers of wefollowtech.com. He is twenty-three years old, and when he isn’t working on some interesting new article, he enjoys listening to music and watching old movies.