Shannon Maloney rejoins Paula and Jon this week to talk about savings tips that she shares with her clients. It's important to save for retirement, but that's extremely difficult when you're living paycheck to paycheck.

If you're still feeling the pain from holiday spending, you'll love Shannon's first tip. Buy a gift card every month for the whole year. Come December, you can use them or gift them, without taking a huge holiday hit to your wallet.

We also talk about credit cards. Treat them as cash; only spend what you can pay off in full every month. Yes, there are perks like travel rewards, but if you accumulate interest on your cards, that will far outweigh any benefits. When spending, think about "needs" vs. "wants."

You can set up your mortgage to pay bi-weekly instead of monthly. This will create two extra payments a year so you can get the balance down faster.

Paula and Shannon talk about thrift stores. Many times you can find tags-on clothing . This has benefitted everyone from Paula to Shannon's teenage daughters.

Prescriptions can be a huge part of our monthly spend, especially as we get older. Talk to your pharmacist about generics, or discount plans like GoodRx.

We spend some time on tracking your spending, including a discussion of the "envelope system" that Dave Ramsey popularized. How much are you spending on going out to eat, on groceries, and on takeout? Taking stock of this was a real eye-opener for Paula.

Bottled water, coffee, speeding and parking tickets - there are so many areas where you can save a lot of money with some due diligence.

To reach out to Shannon and get her list of tips, email her at Shannon@SRPretire.com.

For bigger picture financial help, you can email Paula Christine: paula@paulachristine.com, or visit her website: https://paulachristine.com/

Disclaimer: Investment advisory services are offered through Strategic Retirement Partners, an SEC registered investment advisor. All the opinions and comments made on this podcast today are the opinions of Shannon Maloney and not the opinions of Strategic Retirement Partners