Saving money doesn’t have to be difficult. In fact, it can be smart and it can be easy, as long as you have some type of overall structure to your plan. The following five tips will help ensure that you’ll be saving money in no time, and you’ll be doing it through the path of least resistance.
The five tips include – set up budgeting on your mobile app, replace credit card purchases with check purchases, eat before you eat out, use automated billing and payment options whenever possible, and make bad habits harder to accomplish. Easy as pie, right?
Set Up Budgeting On Your Mobile App
Your first step to saving money is to install a budgeting app on your phone. After you get all of you bank account information in there, you’ll have the opportunity to see what you spend money on, and compare it to how much you should be spending. With some simple math and a greater awareness of dollars and cents, you’ll instantly make better choices about what things to buy, hence saving you money right away.
Replace Credit Card Purchases With Check Purchases
Credit cards are easy to use and seem harmless until you get the bill. To help get you out of this habit, put your credit cards somewhere you can’t get them. Instead, force yourself to write checks for purchases. Yes, that’s right. Order checks today, complete with all of your updated information, and start using them. You’ll find it’s a long process, and not everyone accepts checks, so if nothing else, you’ll be giving yourself a self-imposed roadblock to unnecessary purchases, and force yourself to think about what you’re buying much more logically.
Eat Before You Eat Out
Think about how much money you spend eating out. And now think about the fact that you only really enjoy the first few bites of taste, and after that, it’s just importing calories into your face. Want a simple way to save money? Eat half a meal at home before you go to a restaurant! You’ll save 50 percent of your bill, and you’ll enjoy the taste just as much, but you won’t fill up on calories that are expensive.
Using Automated Payment When Possible
Another easy way to save money is to avoid late payments on bills. And the easiest way to make that happen is to use automated payment whenever possible. Almost everything these days works on automated systems, and you can use the money you saved from late fees to pay the actual bills themselves!
Make Bad Habits Harder
If you know you already have bad spending habits, do something to make spending harder. Lock up your cash behind different locks. Give your money to someone else and make it so you have to ask him or her to get it back. Those are all easy ways to make bad spending hard.
