Published on November 3, 2025 4:54 AM GMT

Epistemic Status: Hastily-written, but I think it’s good to consider the various ways non-obvious ways one can save. Obviously everyone has their own situations when it comes to money.

I think most people spend much more money than they should. Whether they’ve been successfully influenced by the constant stream of advertising, following the patterns they see from friends and family trying to find ways to keep up on the ever-moving hedonic treadmill, we make it easy and desirable to use money to purchase goods and services.

However, I see the stress it causes people, I see debt, I hear from people stuck in golden handcuffs, and I see a common pattern where people trade their future security and optionality for small conveniences that really won’t have mattered to them at all by the time the month is out. And I know that the issue of money goes far beyond “well have you tried just saving more lol,” but there’s also a lot of cost-saving options and reasons to save money that aren’t immediately obvious, or don’t seem realistic if you haven’t seen them modeled by someone else.

The steps I took to save money immediately out of college have given me confidence that it’s easy to achieve enough success in life, a safety net to try new things without being worried if they don’t work out, and is definitely a part of the fairly deep life satisfaction I currently feel. My first job out of college paid me a bit under 60k a year, and after some supplementary income from violin/piano gigs around town (estimating another 10-13k offhand), I saved over 85% of that income for the nearly year-long time while I was carefully tracking it. It wasn’t exactly easy, but it also wasn’t exactly hard either. My rent was extremely low, thanks to 1) happening to live in a low CoL town, 2) putting effort into finding a deal within that town and 3) having two roommates. Most other cost savings came down to living cheaply food-wise, using my bike as transportation when possible, and having an extremely minimal discretionary budget (there’s so many things to do that are free). Maybe I’m just lucky temperament-wise, but I never felt deprived doing this, and spent all the money I needed/wanted to.

More importantly to me, things you do to save money often make you a way cooler/skilled/more interesting person than if you had spent it. This idea goes back to my previous post, Do Things for as Many Reasons as Possible, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of car-maintenance, combining exercise/transportation, trading favors for other favors, and for me having more to do with my time usually results in me making better use of my time. If there’s something you’re paying other people to do for you, at least check if you’d be able to do it yourself. In many cases once you learn just a little bit, you’ll gain an advantage on the activity besides cost-savings. For example, it can often be faster/more convenient to do basic repairs yourself once you have the tools/knowledge, the cooking you make will taste better than meal delivery, etc. The extra money you save will also begin to compound over time, and it’s just a great situation.

I rushed this post out, but I plan to do better on consistency this month for Halfhaven, so maybe I’ll return to these ideas some later.