How I Save Money Tip #11: Control Your Email!

Tip #11: Control Your Email!

This one might seem a little odd, but stick with me.  How I Save Money Tip #11 is Control Your Email.

What do you see when you open up your Email Inbox every morning?  Tons and tons of offers?  Here’s a Sale! Here’s a Coupon! Free Shipping!  Limited Time Offers!  It’s crazy.  When you’re trying to save money, you need to STAY FAR FAR AWAY from these deals.  Well, most of them anyway.

The email inbox is out of control.  I go about dealing with this in a couple of ways.  First, when I check my email in the morning, usually from my phone, I quickly scan email subjects and delete all offers.  I don’t sit around and read them all, I just click edit, check off each one, and delete them.  Now, I could use a program like Unsubscriber to stop getting those emails in the first place, but sometimes, I want to take advantage of those offers.  I might want to take advantage of future offers.  In times of tight budgeting, its best to just mass delete them unread.

My Strategy

Now, I don’t mass delete every promotion deal every morning.  If I know there’s something I’m going to need to purchase in the next two weeks, like kid clothes or something, I won’t delete the Carter’s or Old Navy emails or whatever.  But I also don’t read them.  I just keep them unread until later.

If you have a Gmail account, they have a really cool feature where they auto-separate your emails into tabs.  One of those tabs is a promotions tab.  For the most part, all of those evil emails go under that tab, so you could just ignore the whole tab, but its best to just delete them.

Create Email Folders

I have a Gmail account, and I recently re-organized my folders and added filters to maximize my organization.  Gmail offers a ton of cool things to help you organize.  I set up folders with subfolders in order to get things out of my main inbox and organized into a common-sense place.  For example, I have a 2015 Taxes Folder.  Under that, I have a Charity Receipts folder, and a Medical Receipts Folder.  Any emails I get pertaining to that subject, or needed to complete my taxes next year, go into those folders.

Here’s a look at my folders to help you come up with your own:

• Current Year Taxes
  • Charity Receipts
  • Medical Receipts
• Family (School Items, Extra-Curriculars, etc)
  • Son
  • Daughter
  • Daughter 2
• Important Stuff
  • Benefits
  • Job
  • Vacation
• House
  • Insurance
  • Remodel
    • Bids/Estimates
    • Invoices
    • Folder for Each Specific Project
• Old Stuff (Things I need to keep that are no longer relevant/current i.e. Old Tax Folders, Old House Stuff)
• Online Shopping
  • Coupons
  • Order Confirmations
  • Receipts
  • Tracking Information

Pretty cool, huh?

Filters Make Folders Better

Now, folders are great, but Filters make them even better.  You can set up filters by going into Settings > Filters and Create a New Filter.  You can create filters that filter by email address to, from, subject, keywords, it’s awesome.  See that survey folder?  I have filters for each survey company set up with the email addresses that are used when I get emails from them.  I clicked “Skip Inbox” and “Apply Filter” for the specific Survey Company, and those emails automatically get filed in the folders!  How awesome is that?  The folder is then shown in bold so that I know there is a new email for me to check.  I do that for the Shopping ones too.  It’s pretty cool.

I don’t know about you, but I love having an empty inbox.  It saves me money.  That’s why Controlling My Email is my #11 tip for How I Save Money.

Learn More

Follow me on Instagram for more money saving tips every day! Also, check out all of my easy, actionable money-saving tips in my post 15 Easy Ways to Save Money!

How do you control your emails?  Have you found that getting rid of promotion emails saves you money?  Tell us about your methods in the comments!