How I saved extra $6,000+ last year!

Omar Abou El-khir
6 min readJun 23, 2018

Since I relocated to US and got married, I’m more focused on controlling my expenses and saving money, so I’m sharing with you some hacks I do (with numbers) to save more money everyday:

1. Do it yourself

The idea is to replace services you are getting consistently by doing it on your own, for example: -Ladies, bear with me here but you will get the idea :)- I noticed that I’m going to the barber every month to get my hair cut and buying beard razors to shave constantly, so, I replaced this with buying:

2. Shop from Costco monthly

As for groceries (and all other things), I compared between Costco prices and other supermarkets, the savings are always consistent, 50% lower prices in Costco for a $120 annual subscription with up to 4% cashback.
I advise to go to Costco monthly instead of weekly to save time & gas. Also by visiting monthly, you are decreasing the exposure to shopping which tends to lower your purchases.
Shopping from Costco saved me around $3,500+ last year.

3. Get cashback on your credit cards transactions

For credit cards benefits, I’m a fan of cashback, it’s straight forward & flexible. I compared between all credit cards that got my attention as below:

Green cells indicate the best in category. The “Special” column is the cashback related to the credit card issuer. Discover has 5% cashback rotating on different categories every 3 months, so the average is 1.25% per year.

In my opinion, the best 2 credit cards are “Costco Citi Bank Visa® Card” and “PayPal Cashback MasterCard®”, both covers wide selection of cashback venues that complements each other with highest gains.
Note: this generally depends on where you spend most of your money, for example: “Amazon Visa Card” might be perfect for you if you are shopping from Amazon a lot.

Omar Abou El-khir

Principal Science Architect at Microsoft | Building great products is my true passion!