You would never turn down free stuff, right? A free meal? A free car? What about free money? Every day you choose not to save money, you’re turning down free cash.

Admittedly, a lot of this free money is down the road — it’s available in tax incentives or interest. But there are significant reasons to save money while you can.

Retirement Accounts

If your employer offers a 401(k) plan with any sort of matching, there is absolutely no reason not to invest in that plan. Any matched funds really are free money — that’s money your employer won’t give you in any other situation. Even better, any money that you contribute to your 401(k) plan doesn’t show up on your taxes. If you earn $50,000 next year, but deposit $3,000 in your retirement account, you’ll only pay income taxes on $47,000. Most other retirement plans, such as IRAs, also provide tax incentives for saving.

College Funds

If you have any children, there are a whole list of college savings options — and there are plenty of rewards for using them. A 529 plan, for instance, can reduce your state income tax bill in some states. Money deposited in a 529 also grows tax-deferred and tax-exempt money can be withdrawn for college expenses. Basically, that means that you can avoid paying taxes on the money you earned to send your kids to college. Other college savings plans offer a variety of incentives, and many of them make it easy for your children to also save as well. Every dollar that your child can save for college before the fact is a dollar he or she won’t have to pay interest on after graduation.

Health Savings Accounts

Health savings accounts have some major advantages, especially for people unable to obtain health insurance. That’s a pretty big chunk of the U.S. population, and if you’re included, you probably haven’t done too much planning for a health care emergency. An HSA, however, allows you to save money exclusively for the purpose of covering health expenses, from immunizations to surgeries, as long as you are enrolled in a high deductible health plan, which is fairly inexpensive. Deposits made to an HSA are tax-advantaged: depending on how you set it up, you can save either pre-tax or post-tax dollars. Either way, though, your taxes will go down.

Interest

While interest isn’t the coolest way to make money, it is steady. You’ll never get rich working a steady job, but if you can keep your money earning interest, it can build up surprisingly quickly. In fact, interest is one of the key methods for making retirement accounts and college funds worthwhile. Otherwise, I think most of us would keep our savings in a jar buried in the back yard (and off the books so that we could avoid taxes).