Saving Money In Hard Times

Our nation, over the last three decades, has been on a consumer credit binge. The thought of saving, of investing for the future, has more or less become pass. 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.

This needs to change; but change cannot come from the national front, it must begin at the grass roots level. It must begin with you. The advantages of living a more frugal and thrifty life, while antiquated, are never really out of fashion. The following are some things you can do to help reduce your expenses during this tough economic time:

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?

In addition, eating at home can save you lots of money. You can cook a meal for less than $20 that will feed a family of 4, two or three times. Eating at home is also much healthier because: you can control what goes into the food yourself. In fact, that is one of the key elements to frugality: doing things yourself instead paying others to do them for you.

Also, you should take a look a your credit report. Many times people find items on their credit reports that are not accurate or correct. These things effect the interest rates that you receive on credit cards and other credit products that you uses. The items on your credit report can effect how much you are paying. Since this is money you could be saving, it is a good idea to make sure that everything is accurate.

If you own things that are getting old and are worn out, it’s time for you to learn to make do, or learn to fix them. There is absolutely nothing that a little wood glue, super glue, or Windex can’t fix. Reuse everything in your home and re-purpose it so that you get the most use out of it that you can. If you are driving an older vehicle, you should drive it until it dies and you can’t fix it any more. Anything is better than having to get yourself involved in another car payment.

Doing all of these things will help you in your effort to save money. They may seem painful right now but in the long run it will all be well worth the effort.

Dorthy Weatherbush takes her personal finances very seriously. That’s why she uses Legal Zoom to make sure that her financial house is in order. She used Legal Zoom to make sure that her will was filed so that her kids would get her life savings.