If you’re watching your cost of living steadily rise and frantically Googling “money saving tips for tariffs???”, you’re in the right spot.
President Donald Trump has unleashed wave after wave of tariffs, causing economic chaos. The stock market has dropped significantly throughout April 2025, with the Dow losing 2,200 points in a single day on April 4th.
Hong Kong announced April 16th that it would stop receiving US packages altogether due to tariffs, a huge disruption to international trade and small businesses.
So with all this chaos and what seems like ever changing news, what do YOU do? Are there any money saving tips for tariffs that can help you weather the storm?
Yes there are! Let’s dive in.
Do a Financial Checkup
Step 1. Gather all your financial information in one place
Before we try to make any changes, we have to know where we currently stand! So that means looking at every part of your financial life. Your spending, saving, debts, and income.
You can do this by hand, listing each category out in a notebook, but I find that time consuming and easy to make mistakes.
Personally I think it’s easier to have a robot automatically pull the data from all my various accounts so I use Empower, a free budgeting app.
Once you open an Empower account you can link your bank account, credit cards, car loan, student loans, and even mortgage up to it.
Then Empower will automatically track and update your financial moves. Here’s a screenshot of my credit card spending in Empower for April 2025.
See how Empower tracks my spending and categorizes it? All for free!
This information is critical to helping me understand where my money actually goes each month.
I work with people one on one to create budgets and I notice that many people ballpark their spending. And unfortunately, they are usually underestimating how much they spend, which throws off their entire budget.
So first: do a deep dive into your financial life and figure out:
-how much money you spend in each category each month
-how much money you have in savings
-how much money you have invested
-how much debt you have and what the interest rates are
This exercise is especially important if you’re someone who has always thought of themselves as “bad with money.” No one is inherently bad with money! But if we don’t have systems and habits for our money, it’s easy to feel lost in the money sauce.
Join a Local Swap/Trade/Buy Nothing Group
Tariffs are focused on the items coming INTO the US. Things that are already here are not subjected to tariffs.
So very helpful money saving tips for tariffs are to buy local or to get things for free!
Here’s a photo of a clothing swap I recently hosted. I was able to get 10 new pieces of clothing totally for free. Women’s clothing currently has tariffs on it, and they’re higher than men’s!
Resources for you to find free items are:
Your local Buy Nothing group
Freecycle
Local religious organizations
Friends and community members
Join a Local CSA or Try Gardening Yourself
Tariffs on food items feel especially cruel, since we all need to eat. I can tell you as someone with Crohns disease, I eat a lot of avocados and that’s not something we can grow a lot of in the US.
I’m a first time gardener this year and I’ve been able to find so many things for free or deeply discounted!
Again, the strategy here is to keep your money local. If you can provide some of your own food, you will pay less in tariffs.
If you get your food from a locally grown source, you will pay less in tariffs.
Consolidate Your 401ks
This is more a byproduct of tariffs. The stock market plunges each time a new tariff is announced. Market movement is totally normal, and there have been down years before.
Do not panic sell your investments just because there is a market drop. Even if it’s a big one! I know it’s scary but stay strong. We have 150 years of stock market data that tells us that the market will recover.
What you can do to save yourself some money is rollover any 401k accounts that you left at old jobs into an IRA.
When you leave a job and leave behind a 401k, that money is still yours. But you need to move it! If you leave it, you are still paying those 401k fees, despite the fact that you can’t contribute to the account anymore.
Rolling it into a 401k (which you can do for FREE right here) will eliminate those fees and thus, save you money.
Put Savings into a High Yield Savings Account
If prices are going up, you better be making more money! One easy and free way to do that is to transfer your savings to a high yield savings account, or HYSA for short.
Take a look at the interest rate Chase currently offers for their savings.
They offer .01%; that’s basically nothing!
Instead look for an FDIC protected bacnk that offers an interest rate in the 2.5%-4% range.
While interest rates do fluctuate and won’t always be in this range, you definitely don’t want to leave your money at a bank like Chase, Wells Fargo, or Bank of America.
Get Involved in Mutual Aid
Mutual aid is the idea of people and communities helping meet their needs outside of the existing traditional, broader systems.
For example, when you think about how you get food to eat, most people will say “I go to the grocery store and pay for it.”
A mutual aid system set up to help people need will be outside of that exchange of money. It might look like someone growing vegetables and leaving some vegetables on their front porch for their neighbors to take for free.
Or it might look like a more formal organization like Food Not Bombs, where people organize to cook and feed large groups of people at specific times for free.
To survive tariffs, you’re going to need your community more than ever before. Look into the mutual aid networks that may already exist in your community, or feel free to start a small one of your own.
You don’t need to found an organization to participate in mutual aid. Remember that small things, like letting your neighbor borrow a hammer, count!
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