30 Money-Saving Hacks That Seem To Work For Everyone Except These Folks, As Listed Online

No, we are by no means saying that frugal tips are not helpful at all. Just the opposite - but it often turns out that we cannot apply them to ourselves. For example, advice to do gardening for a person who lives in the very center of a metropolis, or follow that '50/30/20' budgeting strategy at a time when about half of your budget is being eaten up by debt payments. Without immersion in the context of each individual case, advice is almost useless.

And yet we sometimes tend to believe in universal solutions. Scientists call this the 'Forer effect' or the 'Barnum effect' (named after Phineas Barnum, creator of the legendary circus empire in the 19th century). According to this effect, it is natural for a person to project even the most vague and uncertain forecast or advice onto themselves, finding similarities even in opposite situations. It is possible that the numerous financial literacy tips are just a special case of the Barnum effect.

In any case, not a single selection of even the most useful tips can replace an individual consultation with a financial expert, because we are all completely different. If you remember, the great inventor Thomas Edison once said: "Genius is one per cent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration". It sounds impressive, but in practice it is probably applicable only to one person - Edison himself, who until the last years of his life had an incredible capacity for work, but always lacked theoretical knowledge. Similarly, advice from, say, Warren Buffett may sound very convincing, especially given the name of an expert, but it can only be suitable for a limited circle of people.

Here, by the way, we are faced with another misfortune of our time - a huge amount of available information, among which there can be both useful things and one hundred percent fakes that can even be harmful. Therefore, we should act like gold diggers of old times, sorting through tons of sand for the sake of one or two golden grains. So please feel free to scroll this list to the very end and who knows maybe at least one of the tips enumerated here would come in handy for you.