You can’t cancel your reservation within 24 hours. You can rebook it. Okay, rebook it for one week out. Call back a day later, cancel.

Don’t be a dick to service workers. Your entire life will be better.

Many years back, at a caravan park games-room they had ping-pong, pinballs, pool, and a cocktail table Space Invaders.

I had little money for the videogames and pinball.

Some older kids had figured out that going to Space Invaders and flicking the wall power switch off, for a tenth of a second, would sometimes give an odd-number of free credits.

We played 7, 21, and then maxed out the registers at 99 credits.

Everyone played in rotation all day and turned it off with about 20 left.

There was a big freeway running over our city with a few exits which always backed up with traffic and didn’t go where I wanted. One of the exits led into a convention centre pay carpark, with ridiculous costs per hour.

I realised I could pull in there and if you left within ten minutes they didn’t charge you.

It was my personal freeway off ramp for years.

Aglet

You can get a kindle with ads for cheaper than ask them to remove the ads.

Amex can get your money back on anything. Went to the vet they tried to gaslight me into doing an expensive procedure so I dispute the visit fee 75$

If you get married the tradition is for one partner to change their last name to match so both have the same last name.

We didn’t do that, so we have different last names.

So when you sign up for services that offer (x) months free or discounted cost per unique household, you use one name, cancel, and sign up under the other name. They don’t know you’re married, don’t know if it’s a rental, or don’t know if it’s a roommate thing. So when we were poor AF we could save a lot of $ on services at least for a few months or so. Usually cable tv that offered a 6-month discount.

The best loophole I’ve ever learned about is closed now.

Early in the Dubya administration they were pushing the dollar coins pretty hard. They went through a whole thing where any government coin-operated machine had to take dollar coins (veterans of the time mostly saw this as it mostly effected military bases but this is why the stamp vending machines at the post office suddenly became useless; they now took dollars instead of quarters).

One of the ways they “encouraged” the use of dollar coins was selling them directly on the Mint’s website. You could go on the US mint’s website and pay face value for them with a credit card, and they paid for shipping. Spend $500, and 500 $1 coins would be shipped to your door.

So people would order tens of thousands of dollars in coins on a credit card, as soon as they arrived they’d haul the coins to the bank and deposit them, immediately pay off the credit card bill with the deposited currency thus accruing no interest, and then they’d have all those rewards points to spend. The government was taking it up the ass shipping tons of coins to residential addresses, the goal of putting them into circulation utterly failed because they were being taken directly to banks, the credit card companies were taking it up the ass on rewards points that weren’t generating enough interest payments to feed the parasites. The policy got canned.

Imagine getting to fuck over a Republican administration and the parasite industry in one perfectly legal move. Too bad I was 14 at the time and wasn’t allowed to have a credit card.

Not sure if these are exactly loopholes, but whatever.

Learning to shave with a straight razor will save you a fuckton of money on shaving products. Shaving soap makes each shave cost a cent at most. The downsides are the initial cost of the razor and strop, the initial learning curve, the upkeep, and the couple extra minutes necessary to shave with a straight razor (it’s not too much, but it does take a bit longer).

Learning to roast coffee will cut your coffee costs by 50% if you enjoy high quality arabica beans. Some of the best coffee I’ve ever had I roasted and brewed myself. The extra time investment and clean up necessary is pretty intensive though, and yeah, there’s an initial learning curve and equipment cost (though not too bad, you just need a stovetop, an old school stovetop popcorn popper, and a burr grinder).

Back in the day they were “selling” dollar coins through tv. It was legal tender so banks had to accept any deposit of it. The U.S. mint offered free shipping in the continental U.S.A.

Some smart folks started buying them with their credit card that offered air travel miles as a reward. Then they took all the coins and depositing them in their bank and paid off their CC. Rinse and repeat.

Yes they were out no money and had thousands of dollars worth airline miles.

Tried cancelling adobe. They wanted to charge for the rest of the year or something as a cancellation fee. Instead, I “upgraded” to a more expensive package, giving me their 14 day refund policy and was able to cancel immediately and still gave me access to the rest of the month. Fuck adobe

I went to Catholic school, so probably the poophole loophole

If you want to cancel a subscription for whatever reason, worst comes to worst (dark pattern nonsense like trying to cancel an Adobe subscription) you can call your bank and request for a replacement card

The ROTH IRA (USA) requires earned income to be allowed to deposit (add) money. There is no rule that the money earned is the money deposed. If your kid has a job, and you have extra money, look into opening a ROTH with them. Kid spends their money (or not), and deposits your money in their account. Bingo setting kid up for old age.

I am not a tax accountant.