I love books. The closet of our apartment is currently a library. There are no clothes, just wireframed shelves lined in plastic sheets to hold up my hundreds (yes, hundreds) of books. Given that I try to read 50-100 books a year, this isn’t a crazy number of books for me. I work hard to stick to our monthly entertainment budget, and that includes my book buying habits. Growing up in a house with a mother who also loved to read, I learned at a young age how much money a public library card was worth. You may not (read: likely don’t) read as much as I do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t save big with a free library card. I’ve already waxed poetic about my not-so-secret love affair with my favorite budgeting hack AKA the public library. Below, I recap a year in the life of my library card to show you just how much money you can save with a library card.
Saving money with a library card for reading
Books are the obvious starting point because that’s what everyone thinks of when they think of the library. To figure out how much I saved, I went through my reading list for the past twelve months. Below, you’ll see a summary of what I read, if I owned it or borrowed it, and how much I saved if borrowed versus buying it off Amazon.
Cheat sheet for my coding system:
B: borrowed from the library
O: part of my closet library
S: listened with a gifted Scribd subscription
- (B) Abhorsen – $8.77
- (B) Accidentally Amy – $16.00
- (B) Alaska Reunion – $9.99
- (B) The Art of Making Memories – $13.49
- (B) Betting on You – $9.74
- (O) Book Lovers
- (B) Breaking Free From Broke – $17.92
- (B) The Break-Up Pact – $16.29
- (B) The Breakup Tour – $12.29
- (B) The Brothers Hawthorne – $10.39
- (B) Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies – $9.89
- (B) The Cheat Sheet – $8.20
- (B) Canadian Boyfriend – $12.39
- (O) Cinder
- (S) Clever Girl Finance
- (B) The Comfort Crisis – $17.59
- (O) Congo
- (S) Crash Test Girl
- (O) Cress
- (B) Dating You / Hating You – $12.06
- (B) Defiant – $14.99
- (B) Delilah Green Doesn’t Care – $9.99
- (S) Desire or Defense
- (B) Die With Zero – $10.95
- (O) Disclosure
- (B) Done and Dusted – $13.48
- (S) The End of the World Is Just the Beginning
- (B) Everyone is Beautiful – $15.99
- (B) Evvie Drake Starts Over – $9.99
- (S) Finding Mr. Write
- (B) Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing – $16.49
- (B) Funny Story – $16.20
- (S) The Getaway List
- (B) Great and Precious Things – $10.01
- (B) Hannah Tate, Beyond Repair – $12.39
- (B) Happiness for Beginners – $12.08
- (O) Happy Place
- (B) Hearts Overboard – $10.40
- (B) Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute – $8.50
- (O) The Hunting Moon
- (B) I Did a New Thing – $18.98
- (O) Jane, Unlimited
- (B) Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating – $9.98
- (B) Just for the Summer – $12.34
- (B) The Layover – $9.28
- (O) Leviathan Wakes
- (S) Lirael
- (O) The Little Book of Hygge
- (B) Love, Naturally – $13.24
- (B) The Love Wager – $12.54
- (B) Luck and Last Resorts – $9.99
- (S) A Match for the Marine
- (B) The Mercy of Gods – $24.29
- (B) Mr. Wrong Number – $11.29
- (S) Minimalist Budget
- (O) My Favorite Half-Night Stand
- (B) Never Vacation with Your Ex – $9.79
- (B) The No-Show – $11.99
- (B) The Paradise Problem – $17.87
- (O) People We Meet On Vacation
- (O) Pirate Latitude
- (B) Ready or Not – $12.59
- (O) Rebel Belle
- (B) The Rom-Commers – $18.49
- (S) The Roommate Pact
- (B) The Rule Book – $8.80
- (S) Sabriel
- (O) Scarlet
- (B) The Score – $9.34
- (O) The Simple Wild
- (O) Spark Joy
- (B) Spy x Family Volume 10 – $9.58
- (B) Spy x Family Volume 11 – $9.58
- (B) Stormbreak – $17.66
- (B) Summer Romance – $12.88
- (B) Tangled Up in You – $8.73
- (B) The Tourist Attraction – $8.24
- (S) Tweet Cute
- (S) The Wall of Winnipeg and Me
- (B) What Does It Feel Like? – $17.96
- (S) When We’re Thirty
- (B) Wild About You – $9.80
- (O) Wild at Heart
- (O) Winter
- (B) With You Forever – $12.15
- (B) The Woman in Me – $18.14
- (B) You, with a View – $11.59
My eyes officially hurt from looking at the scene long enough to do all that research and type it up, but we have an answer, my friends. In the past year, I saved $683.58 in books alone, and that’s before sales tax, so let’s call it an even $725.
An added benefit of borrowing books from the library is that there is zero buyer’s remorse when a book ends up sucking. There is no financial pain, which makes it easier to DNF and move along. Life is too short and free time’s too scarce to read bad books!
Saving money with a library card for music
Along with being a massive bibliophile, I love music. I almost always have something playing in the background while I work and while I do chores (unless I’m listening to audiobooks). I have an impressive CD collection to keep my books company, but CDs are becoming less and less common. Streaming is all the rage now, but most people are like me and don’t have the attention span for ads. Instead of paying for expensive subscriptions (explore our subscription send off challenge to see how much you can save by cutting subscriptions from your budget), I use my library’s free Hoopla digital media access to borrow free music.
Here’s everything I borrowed digitally on Hoopla in the past year:
- 30 Seconds to Mars – It’s The End Of The World But It’s A Beautiful Day
- Chase Rice – Lambs & Lions
- Dierks Bentley – Gravel & Gold
- Hunter Hayes – Pictures
- Hunter Hayes – Yesterday’s Song
- Jason Mraz – Mystical Magical Rhythmical Radical Ride
- Lindsey Stirling – Duality
- Luis Fonsi – VIDA
- Rob Thomas – Chip Tooth Smile
- Thomas Rhett – Tangled Up
- Various Artists – The Greatest Showman Soundtrack
Instead of pricing these out as CDs since I’m probably one of the few people on the planet who still enjoys popping that slim round disc into the player in the car and jamming out, let’s compare it to what it would have cost me to get a music subscription for the year.
Amazon Music costs $10.99/month, or $131.88 a year. Spotify is even more expensive at $11.99/month, or $143.88.
Borrowing your jams from the library, or sucking it up and listening to ads, could save you around $140 a year.
Other entertainment we saved on by using the library
But wait, there’s more! We’ve also borrowed movies and TV shows from the library to save on renting or buying them digitally (because, again, I think I’m the only one who still tries to buy discs to own physical copies).
- 80 For Brady – $3.99
- Anyone But You – $3.99
- Barbie – $3.99
- Despicable Me 4 – $5.99
- Gilmore Girls S1 – $29.99
- Ghostbusters – $3.89
- A Haunting in Venice – $3.99
- Heartland S12 – $23.99
- Liar, Liar – $3.99
- Mad Max: Furiosa – $3.99
We saved another $87.80+ taxes, or around $95, by grabbing movies and TV shows from the library. And that’s on top of the massive collection we already own physically because in high school and college, I thought DVDs were going to be my retirement plan.
Say you stick with streaming instead. Around 85% of US households have at least one video streaming service, and the average is three or four each. Let’s look at the different ones we’ve had at different times before we cut the digital cable completely this year:
- Amazon Prime: $14.99/month, $139 a year
- HBO Max: $16.99 per month, $169.99 a year
- Netflix: $15.49/month, $185.88 a year
- Paramount+: $7.99 per month, $95.88 a year
And before you try to write off Amazon Prime as a technicality for free shipping, we’ve covered how you don’t need Amazon Prime to get free shipping. The Disney/Hulu bundle is around the same price as Amazon if you swap that out. Let’s even say you get a Black Friday discount for even half of these and score half off. That’s still around $450 a year.
How much money can you save with a library card?
Adding up our savings above, we’ve been able to save about $960 this year by utilizing the public library that we already pay for with our taxes. While I read a lot, we don’t stream at all, so the average American household could still easily save around $450-$600 a year by switching a majority of their entertainment over to the public library system, or coupling it with free, ad-supported versions versus costly subscription services.
A bonus perk we were discussing around the dinner table this week is that when you’ve borrowing from the library, you have to be selective about what you get, as newer releases often have a waitlist. Not only does this allow you to catch up on hidden gems you’ve missed in past years, but delayed gratification makes it a lot more exciting when it’s finally your turn for a new release, which isn’t something you get when you just click to stream. It adds to the entertainment value, and I think it also helps build a contentment muscle.
Where do you think you stack up? We’d love to know how you’ve found ways to utilize the library to cut your expenses.
As a reminder, many public library systems also offer free passes to museums, zoos, and other entertainment around the city, as well as technical courses. It’s worth stopping by to see all the resources available and to grab your library card.
If you live in a small town like we do now and your local library offers limited resources, many have deals with larger systems where you can still borrow their digital offerings. All Colorado residents, for example, can use Denver’s public library system, which is where I get most of my digital audiobooks and ebooks from.
Other ways to cut expenses
If you’re looking for other ways to save, you can also check out: