Clark Howard

How I saved an extra $1,000 with this simple receipt trick

Could you use an extra $1,000 in your bank account? Over the past seven months, I’ve saved more than $1,000 using a simple strategy involving retail receipts.

When I got started down this path last November, I started calling it the "Save Your Savings Challenge."

RELATED: My 7 best money-saving tips for 2018

How collecting retail receipts helps me save more money 

Here's the idea: When retailers offer special sales and discounts, they're quick to tell you how much money you're "saving," but you're really just spending less than the regular price.

Most stores will even highlight the fake savings by listing a "You Saved" amount on your receipt:

Taking a look at the receipt in the picture, you can see that I "saved" $6.94 on groceries at Kroger when I tested out its new ClickList grocery pickup service.

But are you really saving anything if you just go spend that money at another store?

No way…

That's why I've been keeping all of my receipts in a box. I add up the "You Saved" amounts from retail receipts monthly and transfer that amount to an online savings account.

After seven months, I have 184 receipts and $1,048 in the bank. Now that's real savings!

There’s another benefit to collecting all of those receipts. When I go through them every month to calculate the “You Saved” amounts, I get another chance to analyze my purchases.

For example, I noticed early on that I was making too many trips to the store and cut back right away.

I started the challenge to keep myself from overspending during the Black Friday shopping frenzy last year, but this has quickly become my favorite way to save money.

My plan is to keep it up and transfer the total savings account balance to a Roth IRA at the end of the year.

Have you tried the “Save Your Savings Challenge” or another strategy to save more money in 2018? Let us know what’s working for you in the comments below!

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