I think there’s a lot written about cutting back but not nearly enough written about just optimizing what you’re going to do anyway.

When I first heard of the latte factor, and laughed hysterically at the idea of not buying tons of coffee while on tour, I did get a little obsessed about how you can get the best deal for what you’re going to buy anyway.

You’ve probably heard me harp on all these things if you’ve been a reader for years, but there’s a lot of spending during the holidays. I figured I’d recap some of the easy tools and tricks I use to rack up some savings when I’m spending money anyway.

Browser Extensions

Hands down, easiest way to save some money with minimal effort, is installing a few browser extensions.

Many moons ago, before browser extensions, there was a site called eBates and you would go to it and do your shopping from there and the website would automatically apply any rebates from the sites you were shopping on to your account there and then deposit the rebates into your PayPal account a few times a year.

eBates was bought along the way by a company called Rakuten and now, rather than having to go to their website to shop, you can just install a browser extension and when you’re on a site with a rebate offered, it flashes.

You click on it and accept, shop like you were planning to anyway, and whatever the rebate amount is will just get automatically added to your Rakuten account.

If you’re interested, you can install the free extension via this link here.

The second best one I use is Honey, which actually does something a little different and scours the web for coupon codes. Once this extension is installed, it will usually pop up a box to tell you there are coupon codes available for the site you’re on.

Sometimes it runs through them all and finds nothing, but sometimes it finds a random code and saves me some cash. If I accept it and tell it to run through the codes, it can take about 30-60 seconds to do so, depending on how many codes it finds to try.

Honey also sometimes has rebate codes and will work like Rakuten to tell you the site qualifies for some cash back if you just click accept on their popup. Honey will then give you with “Gold Reward” points, which can be redeemed through PayPal or for gift certificates. Each Gold Reward is worth a penny.

One thing to note is that you can only use the cash back aspect on one browser extension at a time, so if Rakuten and Honey are both offering cash back, check to see which amount is higher.

Honey also tracks prices on items you leave in carts to let you know if a price has dropped.

My final browser extension is from CapitalOne Shopping. I find I don’t use this one as much, but it also offers cash back and flashes when a site I’m on offers rebates. The funny thing is that I find it works on some sites where the other two don’t.

You can redeem It for gift cards but the options are very limited.

That being said, with little to no effort, I added CapitalOne to my browser and it’s made me $27.26 in cash back. Honey has easily doubled that in cash back and saved me hundreds with their coupon hunting. Rakuten is closing in on $1,000 in savings over the last few years.

Gift Card Sites

Here’s an example from this year. My brother and I decided we were getting our dad a helicopter flight for Christmas because he talks about wanting to go on one really often.

These things are expensive.

We looked on Groupon and Living Social to start saving some money. From there, we found a deal on Groupon, but we were still looking at over $200 for the three of us to go together.

So I also checked out Raise, a site where people sell gift cards they don’t want, and was able to save us an extra $10 with about 2 minutes of work.

Another (and more lucrative) example was last year when I went to North Carolina to stay in an AirBnB for two months, I bought several gift cards from Raise for AirBnB first and saved about $100 in total with about 2 minutes of work.

Maybe you know you like to do your holiday shopping in a particular store, so you pickup $200 in Macy’s or Sephora or Cabela’s gift cards at a reduced rate before heading out.

You can also just gift the discounted gift cards directly. There is a section called Highest Discounts and you can see if any apply to the folks you’re buying for Fandango and AMC often have 15-20% discounts. Usually the more niche something is, the higher the discount, because folks who received those gift certificates just want to get rid of them.

And, fun fact, if you’ve got Rakuten installed on your browser, you get 1% cashback from Raise too.

Credit Card Rewards

My next tip is for those who pay off their credit card balances each month.

If you know you have higher spending than usual during the holidays, it can be a good time to get a rewards card and use those purchases to get reach the reward.

If you have generally good credit and pay off your balance each month, and you’re not in the process of trying to buy a house (don’t do anything that will mess with your credit scores during that), I find each time I open a card, my credit score actually goes up a bit (probably because I now have a higher amount of credit available to me) though when I close them, it does generally drop a few points.

Personally, the effect of credit card churning over the last seven years has been overall negligible to my credit score.

If you know you aren’t entirely on top of your spending or are currently unable to pay the entire balance monthly, reward cards aren’t for you right now. The big problem with them is that their interest rates are sky high, so as soon as you’re paying interest on them, any of the rewards and benefits are probably not worth it.

When I open a new card, I also set a reminder in my phone for 11 months in the future to cancel it.

Not only is this important to avoid any annual fees, it also resets the clock then on when you can open the card again and possibly qualify to the rewards scheme once more. Previously, I noticed a lot of cards could be reopened for the rewards again after two years, but lately it seems to be creeping up to four years, especially on some of the cards with particularly good rewards.

What do you do to help minimize the pinch during the holidays?