Saving Money In Down Economic Times
Our nation, over the last three decades, has been on a consumer credit binge. The thought of saving, or investing for the future, has more or less become passé. How many items have you purchased, knowing that you’d be disposing of it in a year or two? Cell phones, laptop computers, cars - the consumer driven economy is built to consume things, and it’s not built to save or invest in things.
That has to change, on both a nationwide and a personal level. The virtues of frugality and thrift, while old fashioned, are never truly out of style. Here are some things you can do to help cut your bills - either to handle a reduction in work hours or to stretch unemployment benefits:
You can’t learn to save until you know what you’re spending. Do a realistic look at your monthly expenses. Keep receipts for everything you spent in a month or six weeks and tally up how much you spend on things like eating out, having a coffee at Starbucks and other non-essentials. If you smoke, look at how much you spend on cigarettes for a month. Then look at how much those items cost you in a year. For example, if eating lunch at a fast food place costs $7 per meal, and you do it every working day, that’s an average of 22 meals a month, times 12 months, or over 250 per year. Is spending $2,000 a year to eat at McDonalds worth the money to you? Additionally, full coverage auto insurance from Allstate Car Insurnace may run you an extra $50 a month or $600 a year. Is it really worth it if you don’t have to have it?
By contrast, if you make a habit of eating in - of packing a week’s worth of lunches on Sunday and putting them in the freezer, you can often feed yourself for a dollar per meal - and eat healthier as well. We’re not saying cut out all the fast food, but thrift and frugality starts by doing for yourself rather than paying for others to do things for you. Angie’s List, Service Magic, and Legal Zoom may be great places to find people to perform the professional services that you need, but you may have to bite the bullet and learn to perform these services yourself if it means saving money. You should also be looking for a bargain everywhere you go. Online sites like bargain.com can help you to do this.
Similarly, when you’re dealing with the aftermath of credit binging, it’s worth your time to do things for yourself. Get copies of your credit reports and go over them at least once a year. Look for items that are incorrect; your credit rating influences how much you have to pay in interest rates and monthly payments. When you’re stretching paychecks to cover bills, having your minimum payment double on credit cards is a disaster.
If you’ve got items that are wearing out, learn to fix them. It’s surprising how easy it is, for example, to repair shoes with a bottle of rubber cement and a can of shoe polish. Or to mend jeans that have ripped, or to turn them into shorts. Rather than buy paper towels, turn old tee shirts into kitchen rags. If you’re driving an older car, rather than trading it in (and getting a new, larger car payment), pay it off and drive it until it’s not worth it to fix it any more. If your old computer will access the internet, there’s no real need to buy the latest and greatest, especially when PC Pitstop can spruce up your pc for little to nothing.. If you have kids, don’t forget hand-me-downs. Likewise, take the time to know your neighbors, and run swap meets for old items that you aren’t using - it’s amazing what sorts of things can turn up at them.
Learning how to cook is an amazing way to save money, and there are plenty of public domain cookbooks from the 1920s and 1930s that were written when being frugal and thrifty was a matter of survival, when butter was a luxury, and being able to afford meat for the cookpot was a once a week thing.
If you do have the cash flow to be able to invest in real estate, now is the time to do it. You can get a lot for your money through For Sale By Owner and Foreclosure.com
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