In a strange way, the title “Acorns & Honey” makes me very hungry. I think my hunger stems from a Winnie the Pooh book we read with the kids where Roo makes her famous “Haycorn” cookies. We’ll save the cookie recipe for another time because today we have a recipe created to help you save…when you spend.
First ingredient up, we have Acorns. The Acorns service has many features, but what attracts many users is the “automatic roundup” feature. When you spend money on anything, even simple everyday purchases, Acorns will round up your total and save the difference. If you buy some Haycorn cookies at the store for $3.39, Acorns will round you up to $4.00 and save that additional 61 cents for you. It may seem insignificant, but it adds up quickly! There are three different tiers of service with the most basic, which offers the auto round up, starting at $1 per month.
One Idea: Maybe you’re not sure about saving or setting aside money for a child or grandchild’s education just yet. You can use something simple like Acorns to get the ball rolling. Over the course of the year you may save $300 or $500 and not even notice. Next thing you know there is a very generous pile of money to help them get a head start.
Next ingredient, we have Honey. Honey is a browser extension (I use Chrome mostly) that searches the web while you are shopping online looking for coupons and better deals. If there is a coupon or deal that lowers your price, Honey will automatically apply that discount. Honey will also look for better prices on Amazon while you are shopping. I have used Honey, on my personal computer, for a couple weeks now and although it doesn’t always find hidden treasure coupons, it has worked on two different occasions to save me a nice chunk of change.
One Idea: In this midst of this pandemic, retailers are rethinking the Black Friday scarcity approach and opening the window for all their doorbuster deals. This is going to lengthen the holiday shopping season, since seeing a Christmas tree in the grocery store in mid October wasn’t long enough. Use Honey for the holiday season when you may be doing the most large item shopping and then remove it for the rest of the year.
Saving money is great, but spending money is also pretty great. Every ingredient we can add that helps us do both will sweeten the pot.
Happy Friday! Be healthy and please stay safe!
Disclaimer: With both of these, and most any technology service you are leveraging these days, your data is very likely being collected. I can’t speak to the specific user agreements of either of these sites, but to be conservative, I would just assume your purchasing data is being collected even if for no other reason than to “improve your experience and the overall product.”