The Ultimate Guide To Spending Less

Extracted from The Ultimate Guide To Spending Less: 117 Tips! by Klaus Nymand.

Are you the type of person who wants to save money but isn’t about that spreadsheet life? You don’t live for crunching numbers and you don’t need an in-depth course in personal finance. This guide to money saving tips is exactly what you’ve been hoping for.

Use this guide on how to save money to pick up savings tips you like and skim over the rest. There is something in here for everyone. Remember that the smallest change can yield big results over time.

1. Use The Envelope Budgeting Method

This method works best for cash stashers. You have to have some willpower or the ability to not rob Peter to pay Paul. Work out your monthly expenses and assign an envelope for each. Deposit the correct amount of cash in each envelope each pay period to equal the amount due at month’s end.

2. Segment Your Money In Multiple Bank Accounts

These days, most of us need our income available in digital form. We pay bills online and that’s a challenge with the envelope method above.

Luckily, you can accomplish the same end by opening a second checking account. This second account is your master envelope. Put all of the correct apportioned amounts into that account each pay period.

When it’s time to pay your bills, all of the money is ready to send out from that account.

Paypal has a great prepaid debit card that you can use for this purpose if you can’t or don’t want a new bank account.

3. How To Use Prepaid Cards To Budget

In fact, prepaid debit cards can really help with budgeting! For starters, there are no overdraft fees to drain your already strained finances. If you play your budget to the razor’s edge, a prepaid card will give you some peace of mind. Use them to pay bills and shop online.

4. Why You Should Keep An Allowance In Cash

If the methods above sound like too much work, reverse engineer it! Figure out what your weekly bill figure is. Leave that amount in your bank account and take cash as your spending money.

Of course, if you prefer your spending money on a card, grab a prepaid debit and load it with your weekly allowance.

5. How To Earn More With A Side Gig

Depending on your talents, you may find a side job is a great way to budget since it creates more money to work with. Websites like Fiverr, Upwork, and People Per Hour make it relatively easy to pick up some digital side work you can do from home. You can even monetize your photos through platforms like Pixabay.

The Penny Hoarder is a great resource for learning about potential side hustles. Just be sure to research anything you find there before you jump into it.

6. Leverage Rounding In Your Budget

If you have some room in your budget after bills, try rounding all of your bills up a few dollars. If your electric bill is generally $37.50 a month, stash around $40. This will slowly pad your bill account for emergencies.

7. Remember To Pay Yourself First

When money is tight it’s so easy to scramble to pay your bills and forget to set any aside for a rainy day. Whether you invest in a retirement account or keep a meager savings, putting your own savings at the top of your bill list helps you actually save.

This tip covers matching your employer’s contributions to your retirement accounts if you can.

8. Eliminate A Luxury On A Rotating Basis To Save

Think of this tip like financial Lent. You’re going to look at your debit account and see where you spend the most money on a luxury. Hopefully, there is more than one so you can rotate your cuts. If not, you can go a week on and a week off.

Once you see where you are spending extra money, abstain from those purchases for a week. When the week is over, add that bonus back in and remove something else.

This way you never feel too depressed about skimping to save money.

9. Choose Accounts That Work For You

Bank of America’s Keep The Change program rounds up every purchase using your debit card and deposits the change in your savings account. This is a brilliant way to save if your problem is actually setting money aside.

If you can’t swing that kind of increase in your spending, look for new accounts you can open that give cash with sign up. This may be actual cash or in the form of a gift card.

Many online banks provide higher interest rates to their customers to entice them to sign up. If you are paid through direct deposit you can open a high-interest checking account at a bank like Allied Bank and earn more interest than most standard accounts.

10. Try Micro-Investing

The Stash app and others like it capitalize on the popular trend of micro-investing. Users invest as little as $5 in fractional shares. Buy as often or as rarely as you like. You can also combine this tip with skipping a luxury and invest the cash instead.

In addition to Stash, Acorns and Clink work similarly but with slightly different features.

To read more of Klaus Nymand’s excellent money saving tips (there are 117 in all) please visit 

https://moneybanker.com/us/blog/ultimate-guide-to-spending-less-117-tips/

Ways to Save on Daily Expenditure

Ways To Save on Daily Expenditure

Saving money is something that everyone could agree is a good idea. While not everyone has to rub pennies together to get by, a tighter budget might not necessarily be such a bad thing. There are many people who have seen the benefits of making their money stretch a little farther. If this is something that you too are interested in, you can find five quick tips to help you limit your spending without limiting yourself.

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Cut Out The Extras

You might be able to save quite a lot of money just from limiting the areas that are high cost with low usage. A great example of this would be your home phone (landline). It is easy to get caught in an idea that having a landline is great for emergency situations or to limit the use of your cell phone while you are at home. But given that nearly all wireless plans are now offering unlimited minutes for even the most basic of packages, you are adding an unnecessary bill each and every month.

Energy Efficiency

While it is certainly a noble effort to “go green” for the environment’s sake, being energy efficient for your wallet’s sake might inspire you a little bit more. There are a few ways that you can help cut your costs, and subsequent energy consumption.

  • Make sure that all of your windows and doors are sealed properly. Drafts through any season cost you money, as they require either your air conditioner or your furnace to work more than it should have to in providing the ideal temperature you have selected.
  • Ensure that your electronics are not just turned off, but completely unplugged if they are not being used for a while. Even something as simple as a phone charger can draw a lot of energy throughout a month just from being plugged in.
  • Cut your thermostat down a few degrees. A simple change like this could spell big savings for you, even if you have to wear a sweater some of the chilly nights.

Shop Around Online

The internet is a vast marketplace and a plethora of information. When you are utilizing the latter, you should appreciate the simplicity of your shopping experience and take full advantage of your ability to instantly shop around. Some websites are big on competitive pricing, without skimping on the quality of the products they offer, from foods, clothes, hobbies, entertainment, office supplies, home improvement and even travel, a vast choice for wants and needs are offered. A few great examples would be www.tkmaxx.com, www.sportsdirect.com and Glasses Direct. If you combine quality eCommerce experiences like these with the use of promo codes and coupons then you can really see some big savings.

Use Coupons and Price Matching

Printable coupons to use in physical stores are kind of dying out, but it isn’t gone completely yet. So as it stands right now, this is a suitable means of saving money. The trend that is taking over physical retail locations now is price matching, which most of the major stores are doing in an effort to stay competitive and promote customer loyalty. You only need to show your cashier a competitor ad featuring a cheaper price on the product you are buying, and you get it for that rate. It’s simple and it keeps you from having to drive all over town hunting good deals.

Consolidate Your Car Trips

The last point goes directly into the next way that you can save money on a tighter budget, and that is through consolidating your errands into a single trip when possible. You might not live all that far away from your local grocer, but that little bit of gas really will add up quickly when you are making several trips a week. Stock up, plan ahead, and consider all of the things that you need to do and attempt to make those all happen with as little wasted gasoline as possible.

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These are five quick tips (that are really easy to do) that can have you saving money this month. With just a few changes to your routine, and a few minor changes to your life, you can make a tight budget not feel quite so limiting.