How New Yorkers Save: From Sales to Vacations in Neighboring States

Avoiding a car, doing it yourself and doing sports to maintain health are some of the New Yorkers' secrets that they use to save money. The blogger Milana Rudinskaya spoke in detail about this for Yandex Zen.

New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world (after Moscow and St. Petersburg). This is confirmed by the annual ratings of the high cost of living in one place or another on the planet.

Everything is expensive in it: travel on the subway for $ 3, and mobile Internet for $ 120. If we talk about housing, then the cost of monthly payment of own housing is so high that it sometimes resembles rent - this is due to the impressive amount of property taxes.

“Living in New York is expensive for most Americans. Nevertheless, local residents have adapted to this high cost and have developed habits that allow them to save significantly, ”the author notes.

Here are 6 American habits that save them:

Coupons To save money, Americans cut the coveted discount coupons from newspapers, summarize them with bonuses for credit programs of retail chains, and use cashback services to buy.

Also here in every supermarket there is a whole rack with gift cards of different stores: you can pay with them and return a few dollars to the account.

Discounts and bonus programs are another way that US residents are used to using often.

Sales. You will not find real New Yorkers in luxury boutiques on Fifth Avenue and Madison. They shop at Century 21 or Marshalls outlets. The price here is always lower than the original four times.

Also, local residents follow the sales schedules, trying at this time to make large sales. Most often this happens before public holidays.

Sample Sale - when designers sell samples of new models - this is another way to save money for the residents of this metropolis.

DIY repair. Any human labor in New York is expensive (for example, a music lesson costs $ 100 / hour). "If in Russia the cost of repairs is determined rather by materials, and it is not a problem to find a team with a feasible price tag, then here the opposite is true," the author writes.

For a New Yorker, repair is a very expensive pleasure. For this reason, DIY building hypermarkets are popular here, where you can buy everything you need for DIY repair. Given that the city has a very developed market for rental apartments, making serious investments in repairs is even pointless.

Try not to get sick. Medicine in America is very expensive. Therefore, people resort to medical help only as a last resort. “Calling an ambulance for a New Yorker is like flying to Space, even driving an Uber to give birth,” the author notes.

On the subject: The treatment of a common cold cost an American $ 28 thousand: how is it possible

To maintain health, Americans play sports, eat vitamins, and prefer expensive organic food. “And oddly enough, this way of saving works - they live long and get sick as if less,” the author added.

Refusal of the car.

A car is a luxury for New Yorkers, as not everyone can afford to park and maintain a car here. "If you live in Manhattan and own a car, you are a very, very rich person," the author notes.

Basically, they use applications like Lyft and Uber, or a XNUMX-hour metro. And still walk a lot. Manhattan is the most “pedestrian” place in all of America, many of its residents rent an apartment near the office and get to the office all year round on foot.

Vacation in neighboring states. Since the Americans have a very short vacation - no more than two weeks a year - they try to break it up and add it to the official holidays. Of course, with such a short vacation, flying far is not a good idea (although wealthy Americans travel to Europe, Mexico or Latin America), most of the working townspeople take vacation in the summer and simply rent a house in the states of Pennsylvania and Vermont, close to New York. The ocean coast of Long Island is also popular.

New Yorkers are trying to save on basic, regular spending, guided by the principle of "cent dollar saves." But they are happy to leave the waiter 25% tip or grab a "coffee with you" on the run for $ 6.