I Made a 2-Second Change to my Phone, and It Saved Me Almost $1,000 in 3 Months

If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet in the last few years then you’ve probably heard the phrases “treat yourself” and “girl math,” in which you find some illogical (and often humorous) way to justify overspending on something. While I love a little treat, I do use that as an excuse to make some questionable financial decisions sometimes. My biggest kryptonite seems to be online shopping. On my phone, it’s just so easy to swipe up on a cute ad and double tap to buy. It’s almost like the ability to purchase an item with just a few finger taps takes away the awareness that I’m spending actual money. 

So when I started realizing it was getting more difficult to put money in my savings every month and I couldn’t even find a place to put the random things I was buying, I knew I had to change my spending habits. While it was a cold, hard truth to face, I knew the easiest way to curb my spending would be to simply delete my saved cards from my Apple Wallet on my iPhone. This simple change has had an enormous impact on my spending. 

To remove a saved card from your Apple Wallet, simply navigate to the Wallet app, then open it and tap on the card you want to delete. Then, tap the ellipsis button in the upper right corner, choose Card Details, then scroll down to tap Remove Card. The task felt daunting, but it took all of two seconds to do. 

Not only do I use Apple Pay for online purchases, but I also use it to tap to pay whenever I go to the store. I was hesitant to delete my digital cards at first — what if I had an emergency and didn’t have my wallet with me? I compromised by deciding to leave one debit card in my digital wallet and delete all of my saved credit cards. 

When I deleted my credit cards from my Apple Wallet, I also deleted them from the autofill settings in Safari, meaning when I tried to buy something online I’d have to grab my actual card and type all of my information in each time. This quickly got annoying when I found myself shopping on my phone, adding things to my cart, and then realizing that I’d have to get out of bed to check out. With the spending shortcuts I was used to, it just didn’t feel worth it.

I found that within about a week I was no longer online shopping at all since it felt like a waste of time to scroll and scroll, add to my cart, and then not buy anything. It made me think twice about if I actually needed something or was just bored and making an impulse decision while on my phone at night.

If I found that I was still thinking about buying something a few weeks later, then I’d make the purchase — but more often than not I’d forget about the cute top or pet accessory by the next morning. I experienced a similar pattern when I removed my credit cards from tap-to-pay on my phone. If I was shopping in person, pulling out my credit card felt like a slightly higher barrier than just tapping my phone, which made me think twice about some purchases. 

In fact, a 2023 study found that the ease and convenience of services like Apple Pay that use tap-to-pay leads consumers to spend more compared with when they pay using a physical credit card. The researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found that how much and how often people charged their credit cards increased when using mobile payments.

When I went back and looked at my bank statement for all three of my credit cards over the past three months, I easily saw how my spending decreased after I’d removed my cards from my phone. I saved about $1,000 in total, but I was most surprised to see that on one of my cards I didn’t make a single purchase for an entire month, which never happens.

This experiment made me realize how much unnecessary spending I tend to do. Not only did this trick save me money, which is great, but it’s also helped me change the way I view my spending at a high level, which I know will only continue to pay off.