📌TL;DR:
If budgeting apps make you yawn and spreadsheets give you hives, this post is for you. These are low-effort, high-impact ways to save money without dramatically changing your lifestyle — or, honestly, even trying that hard.
The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving
Some people wake up excited to track their expenses in a spreadsheet. They say things like, “Money is a mindset,” and they know what an ETF is.
This guide is not for those people.
This is for the rest of us — the nap enthusiasts, the serial snackers, the “I’ll start budgeting next month” crowd. You know saving money is important. You just… don’t want it to feel like a part-time job. Fair enough.
The good news? You can save money without fully transforming your life into a minimalist Pinterest board. It’s possible to make small, barely noticeable changes that snowball into real savings over time.
Lazy saving is still saving. Here’s how to do it without sacrificing your snacks, your sanity, or your Saturday.
1. Unsubscribe From Temptation (a.k.a. Store Emails)
Every time you open an email that says “25% OFF (today only!),” a little voice in your head whispers, “I deserve this.”
That voice is not your friend.
Retail emails are professional enablers. They want you to spend. Even if you weren’t planning to shop, suddenly you’re six clicks deep into a new pair of shoes you just remembered you needed.
Lazy Fix: Use a free service like Unroll.me or just scroll to the bottom of those emails and hit “Unsubscribe.” Less email, fewer impulses, more money staying exactly where it is.
2. Automate a Tiny Transfer
The easiest money to save is the kind you never touch in the first place.
Set your bank to automatically transfer a small amount from checking to savings every week (or payday). It doesn’t need to be huge — even $5 adds up. And because it happens behind the scenes, you’re not making a daily decision. You’re just passively growing your balance.
Lazy Fix: Log into your bank once, set it, forget it. One day you’ll check your savings and be pleasantly surprised, which is the adult version of finding $20 in your coat pocket.
3. Turn on Round-Up Savings
This one’s even easier. Some banks and apps let you round up every purchase to the next dollar and toss the spare change into savings.
Buy a coffee for $3.60? Forty cents goes to savings. You won’t notice the difference — until you do.
Lazy Fix: Check if your bank offers this. If not, apps like Acorns or Chime do. Setup takes five minutes. After that, your coffee addiction will finally do something productive.
4. Use the 24-Hour Rule (Sort Of)
Impulse buys are sneaky. One minute you’re fine, the next you’re convinced a mini waffle maker will fix your life. (It won’t.)
So before you hit “buy now,” pause. Wait a day. That’s it. Half the time you’ll forget about the item entirely — which is your brain’s way of saying, “This wasn’t that deep.”
Lazy Fix: Add to cart, close the tab, walk away. If it’s still calling your name tomorrow, maybe it’s worth it. But 9 times out of 10, you’ll move on and keep the money.
5. Nuke One Useless Subscription
There’s at least one service you’re paying for that you forgot about, don’t use, or honestly never needed. Maybe it’s a streaming app. Maybe it’s an online course you opened once. Either way, it’s money slowly dripping out of your account every month.
Lazy Fix: Search “subscription” or “invoice” in your email. Find the guilty party. Cancel it. Instant raise.
Bonus: Some banks flag recurring charges for you. Take 60 seconds to scroll through your transactions and see what’s quietly eating your paycheck.
6. Make Your Laziness Work for You
Here’s a weirdly effective trick: don’t save your card info on shopping sites.
Why? Because making a purchase should be just annoying enough to make you think twice. If you have to get off the couch to grab your wallet, you might not bother.
Lazy Fix: Log out of Amazon. Don’t let sites remember your card. The extra 30 seconds of effort might save you from 3 a.m. purchases you won’t even remember ordering.
7. Use Cash for Your Weak Spots
Everyone has that one spending category they just can’t control — coffee, skincare, snacks, whatever.
Try this: withdraw a set amount of cash for that thing each week. Once it’s gone, that’s it. You don’t have to do this for everything. Just the one area where your willpower routinely takes a nap.
Lazy Fix: Pull $20-$40 in cash, put it in an envelope, and use it for your vice of choice. No tracking apps needed. No spreadsheets in sight.
8. Rename Your Savings Account Something Dumb But Effective
It sounds ridiculous, but labeling your savings account something like “Do Not Touch” or “Vacation Fund – Seriously Hands Off” actually works.
It creates a tiny mental barrier between you and your money. And sometimes, that’s all it takes.
Lazy Fix: Log into your bank and change the name of your savings account. Pick something that makes you laugh or guilt-trips you just enough to close the tab.
Final Thoughts: Effort ≠ Effectiveness
Saving money doesn’t have to feel like a diet. You don’t need to eliminate every joy from your life or transform into someone who reads budget books for fun.
What you do need is a few lazy-friendly systems — small tweaks that run in the background while you go live your life.
No guilt. No pressure. Just easy wins, stacked over time.
And hey, if all else fails… just unsubscribe from that store that emails you every day. Start there. You’ve already saved something.