Robinhood

Sign up for Robinhood with this link and you get a free share of stock.

Typically I am not a fan of recommending individual stock investing to people. As research has shown, a monkey throwing darts has just as much of a chance as you.

However, I do believe in investing in individual stocks for learning and fun. Robinhood is hands down the best way to do this. The only downside is that you need to purchase whole shares. But hey, use the referral from above and get a free stock of something random.

Minimize Costs

My friends know I hate spending money. However, everyone has to spend money time to time. Even me.

To make it more acceptable in my mind to spend money, I do everything within my power to maximize every purchase. What do I mean by this? I try to do one of two things:

1. Minimize how much I have to spend.
2. Maximize how much I get back.

If I can do some combination of these, I will be more accepting of spending money.

Let me show you how to do this.

Minimizing Costs

Gift Cards

This may seem crazy, because why would you want to allocate money to be spent at one place?! Typically you wouldn't. But if you are going to make a purchase at a store and you are committed to that store you can save some big money.

For example, let's say you wanted to go to the movies? If you know you are going to AMC, you can get gift cards for 20% off.

If you were already committed to going to the movie, this just saved you 20% and I view it as getting paid 20% more.

I am a big fan of Gift Card Granny as it connects many different gift card sites. Another cool feature is being able to see historical prices to see if you have a good value. Here you can see the recent history of Banana Republic gift cards.

As you would expect, you can get a better deal on less popular gift cards. You usually won't find Amazon gift cards for more than 2% (which you can always do better with the Amazon credit card).

Because I am like most Americans in my demographic I buy almost everything through Amazon. But through camelcamelcamel.com I am able to set up price alerts and get an email when a product hits a certain price, thus minimizing how much I spend.

I would also recommend that you use smile.amazon.com because this allows you to choose a charity to receive 0.5% of what you spend on Amazon which may not seem like much, but I've donated over $10 which is money that would have gone to Amazon.

Maximize Money Back

I use Upromise, Unlimited Rewards (travel miles) or Ebates. Both are rebate programs in which you go through their site to the retailer and buy whatever you want. I typically use Upromise because we can pay off my wife's student loans. But you can also have the money go to a 529 or get cash back. As you can see with the account summary that we've gotten over $500 back through Upromise.

The other way I maximize money back is through credit cards. At the minimum, I expect to get 2% back on every purchase. Which because most retailers already add in the cost of credit card fees we are all still losing, but it is better to get 2% back than nothing!

Here are the best cards to get money back

• AmEx Blue Cash Preferred (6% back on groceries, which I use to load a Kroger gift card to pay for gas to essentially get 6% on groceries and gas) - does come with an annual fee
• Fidelity 2%
• Citi Cash Back
• Chase Freedom (rotating 5%)

When all is said and done. The best way to minimize the cost is to figure out the most effective way to make a purchase you have to make. So it may be using a 2% card to get a gift card and then going through Ebates.