We all try to save wherever we can – or rather, we tend not to throw good money at a problem; we can quickly fix ourselves. Take my friend, Ashley, for example. She is married to a roofer. One day, while finding herself overrun with boredom, she decided to unscrew the ladders from the side of her husband’s work van, and shimmy up the side of her house to clean out the gutters. There was nothing on TV. As if you need any help filling in the blanks, things didn’t go well. Her albeit well-meaning efforts towards saving a bit of cash on professional help landed her, quite literally, in a bit of a mess. Luckily, old Mr. Sanders next door was watering his Dahlias and was able to help her back to her feet. She was fine. What’s the lesson to be learned? Only clean your gutters if supervised by old Mr. Sanders (ha!). No but seriously, cutting back on lavish expenditure is a good thing (get extra help from Creditfix). Here are some tips on how to do it without a visit to the hospital.
Keep your kids out of your purse (or wallet)
Lovely and innocent as they are, children are thieves. They want everything. But they can’t afford everything. So, they need an accomplice. A “middle-man” (or woman). And that’s where you come in. Instead of earning money, they need for whatever it is they want; they prefer to steal it from you, in a rather sort of daylight robbery sort of way that involves you handing over the money like some trained and hypnotized zombie. Introduce a tasks-for-cash exchange, whereby you get a tidy house in exchange for a meager sum at the end of the week. It will also help to teach the value of money.
Go online and get things for free … seriously
Free to a good home. That’s what people say when they’re joking about getting rid of a cumbersome item that they can’t be bothered to shift for themselves. But this exists in the wild, specifically on social media. Use the site navigation to find the market/selling part of the site, and look at what is being ‘chucked’ in your area. Sometimes things are free, like a new table or chairs or a sofa or a wardrobe or an unwanted trampoline. Sometimes you may have to pay a small amount of money, granted, and you’ll rarely get the person to drop the item(s) off at your front door (this is more of a click and collect system, generally), but either way, it’s a great deal.
Forget-it-Fridays
Friday is everybody’s favorite day. It’s the end of the week. All you need is a quick shower after work, and you have the whole weekend ahead of you to re-tox. Bearing this in mind, switch to saying “forget it!” whenever you’re faced with an option to spend money during the daytime (such as on a particularly delicious-looking but rather expensive lunch). You’re about to enjoy the weekend, so this is a simple money saver that only pushes back your spending for a few little hours and could save you a heap.