Watch this informative video from BuzzFeed and read more below.
1. Change the oil in your car every 3,000 miles. You will get tens of thousands of miles of extra use out of your engine and potentially save thousands of dollars.
2. Gas is expensive, switch to regular even if your car says to use “Only Premium.” If your engine still runs smoothly, without pinging or dieseling, stay with regular grade.
3. Go to the website for your free annual credit report with Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion, and dispute every negative item in the report. This generates a notice to the company that put the information in your file. Oftentimes, they won’t bother participating in the dispute process and even if the item is true, it will be deleted from your record.
4. Put money into an expired parking meter. There! You’ve just improved someone else’s life.
5. If you live on a busy street or it’s otherwise hard to back out of your driveway, see if you can back in instead when you park.
6. If your car always has frost or moisture on the front window when you come out in the morning, check the back window and if it is less frosty, try parking your car facing the other direction next time.
7. Restaurants expect you to send back food that is poorly prepared or wine that has turned bad. Also, most retailers have more liberal return policies than you might imagine, and often do not require the original receipt.
8. If you’re on a budget or can’t get out of the office, make a pseudo-mocha by mixing office coffee with a hot cocoa packet from the breakroom. You might even find ice cubes in the freezer to make an iced pseudo-mocha.
9. Always carry jumper cables in your car. This is another tip that can also benefit others.
10. When traveling by air, at home, or before you get to the airport, stuff a couple of pieces of fresh fruit, a sandwich, a Happy Meal, a candy bar, a cookie, or whatever you might crave later, into your backpack or briefcase. They’ll cost a lot less than what you might find at the airport and you won’t have to pay $19 for the airline’s “Bistro Box” meal.
11. If you love to read, buy your books at Goodwill. Or go to the website for your local library and find the “Friends of the Library” organization. They hold regular book sales, and often, on the last day of the sale, you can fill a shopping bag for a dollar or two. Either way, you can get hardback and paperback books for $1 to $3 each, with no shipping costs.
12. Another reading and entertainment tip. Your library system may be able to reserve books and DVDs from anywhere in the system and deliver them to the branch that is the closest to you. It’s almost like a Netflix queue, but it’s free.
13. Sign up for Amazon Prime at just $99 a year, that’s less than $9 a month and you get thousands of streaming movies and TV shows AND free two-day shipping on all Amazon purchases.
14. If you have $19 in your bank account (or some other odd amount that is not a multiple of 20) and want to withdraw it at an ATM, go to your own bank’s ATM, deposit $1 cash, and then withdraw $20. You can even borrow the difference from a friend, make the withdrawal, get change and pay back the person you borrowed from instantly. (Only works of course on ATMs that accept cash deposits.)
15. For trips that start at home but end up in an unfamiliar location, set a starting point on your GPS as far from your home as possible, in the general direction of the destination. This way the navigation system only covers the unknown portion of your trip, and you don’t have to listen to an annoying stream of audio directions for a route you already know.
16. Don’t play claw machines. Instead, splurge on a fun toy such as a larger stuffed animal, you can even get one with candy attached to it for less than you would spend trying to win one.
