Ways to Save Money with Your Smartphone

Jul 6 | Money Saving Tips

How to Save Money with Your Smartphone

I'm sure that those of you that have smartphones know just how useful they can be. They help keep you in touch with friends and family, help you find a destination and even tell you the weather. Now, I'm also sure that those of you with a smartphone know that they can save you money! Yep! I've got a few favourite apps that I'd like to tell you about that save me money regularly.

The best part is that they only require about 15 minutes or less of my time each time I use them. Almost anyone can find that amount of time, I think! 

Find 15 minutes in your day to focus on one of the apps featured in this post and I can guarantee you’ll find some extra cash in your pocket over time! Let’s get started…

Cash-Back Apps

Canada has several great cash-back apps that offer you an alternative to physical coupons that help you save on groceries. (Or you could combine your coupons with the rebates from the cash-back apps to save even more!)

These apps include:

• Checkout 51
• Caddle

These apps are a great way to save money on groceries and more -- without clipping coupons! You can download these apps to your smartphone or use most of them straight from your home computer.

These Cash-Back apps help you save money on the brands you love or things you're already going to buy, like bread, eggs, milk, or produce. There are usually at least a few offers each week that are not brand dependent at all. Such as, get $0.25 back when you buy any vegetables. Talk about a great offer!

For an in depth look at how to use these apps, take a look at this post I wrote: Use Those Cash Back Apps to Save.

Gas Buddy

While gas stations in our city, don't really have gas wars, I can tell with the Gas Buddy app whether or not gas prices will be dropping or going up by taking a look at the app! If there's one or two gas stations with a different price on gas I can almost be sure that the rest of the gas stations will be following suit shortly. I'll aim to hit a gas station that still has the "low" price if I'm in need of a fill.

Gas Buddy is also a fantastic money saving resource for road trips.  Last year we did a two day trek to Winnipeg and the Gas Buddy app proved to be very useful! It helped us to time our fill ups as best as we could.

From the GasBuddy.com website:

The GasBuddy.com web site and app was developed as an initiative to provide all residents and visitors to the area access to local current gas prices. This is an entirely free service that depends on users to input gas prices on a daily basis to keep the database of prices up to date. Since the price of gas is often extremely volatile, posted gas prices may vary as much as 20% within only a few blocks of each other. By having access to the most recent prices at GasBuddy.com consumers now are able to locate the most inexpensive fuel price in the city and fill up on a budget.

Flipp

The Flipp app allows you to look at all your local store flyers so you can see the best deals of the week, saving you money on each shopping trip!

While I'm mostly a pen and paper kind of girl when it comes to creating my shopping list, I've been trying out the shopping list feature in the Flipp app. It's pretty neat because I can add something like cheese to the list and the app will pull up all the sales on cheese that week. Neat! That allows me to pick one or two stores with the most sales that I can hit up for our groceries.

Another feature that I use often is the coupon matchups. While browsing through a flyer, at the bottom, you'll see if there are any coupons available for any items that are in that week's flyer. While I don't think the coupon matchups are a comprehensive list, I still find some coupons and sales that I may have missed otherwise!

Something I haven't used, but the Flipp app allows you to save your loyalty cards so you have them all in one place. (and maybe not taking up room in your wallet!)

So there you have it, my three favourite money saving apps for smartphones!

Are there any apps that you use to save money that I missed? Let us know in the comments!