1. Budget Cooking
One of the best things to do for your wallet is to cook at home. When you are always eating out, it is a huge waste of money on food that you could be cooking at home. Even if you are the worst cook in the world, there are always going to be simple yet delicious recipes that you can make for yourself and your family at home.
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| Homemade Pot Roast by Good Cheap Eats. |
Here is a list of healthy, yet filling, and delicious meals that can be made on a shoestring budget:
- Lentil stew
- Oatmeal with banana
- Pot roast with veggies
- Burritos
2. Shop the Trends for Cheap
Trends may come and go, but your budget is forever. There is no use in breaking the bank for clothing that will probably just go out of style soon anyways. Instead, shop for trends at thrift or consignment stores, and spend your money on sturdy wardrobe staples that will last you a long time and never go out of style. Of course, some stuff, like quality hiking apparel, is not something you can or should go too cheap on, but you can still find ways to shop the trends for cheap.
This is the smartest way to shop due to the cyclical nature of trends. If something is trendy, chances are it will go out of style and then back into style in a few years. Because of this, a lot of people will have donated their old trends to thrift stores, which you can then find at a dirt cheap price tag when the trend comes back around.
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| Children's Museum at the War Memorial of Korea. |
A lot of museums will offer free or reduced admission prices for state residents, and a lot of national parks are free or very cheap for admission. Why not pack a picnic and go to a park? Or take a walk and look at all of the architecture that your city has offer? There are always great choices for cheap or free activities in your city.
4. Save for Something Fun - or Necessary
Saving money is so much for fun if you’re saving for something that you love or want to do. If you have the ability to, put aside a little bit of money each week for something fun. Maybe it’s a vacation, or a new video game, or something else that’s fun that you’ve been wanting for a while.
If you are also saving money for something that you want or somewhere that you want to go, then you are more likely to implement good saving habits in your everyday life. You should set both long term and short term savings goals, including saving for something like a car or a tooth crown in addition to a fun vacation or something else fun.
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| Saving up! :) |
Saving money is so much easier when you have a great money saving tool to help you out. Obviously, opening a savings account is the best first step. Shop around for a savings account with the best interest rate for the amount of money that you will have to put away each month.
In addition to a good savings account, there are some awesome budgeting and investment tools that you can use. Check out features such as Bank of America’s round up tool, which rounds your spending up to the nearest dollar and puts the difference in your savings account, or an app like Acorns that allows you to round up to the nearest dollar and invest your change.
You can also be your own money-saving “tool” by checking your spending to see if there are areas where you can cut costs. If you think you are spending too much on your web hosting service, shop for more affordable web hosts. For business owners, this can also mean finding a SEO agency with better rates than the one you currently work with.
Being on a budget does not mean that you have to be scraping by. Instead, rethink the way that you look at saving and the way that you spend money to be able to save money in ways that you may have never thought about. Saving money can be fun and easy with our money saving tips.
13 replies:
Great tips for saving money! I have fun searching for the best price possible and always look for coupon codes online. The price difference on web hosting can be huge and is a good place to save your money.
I'm all about saving money, so I absolutely love these tips. Especially the one about finding cheap and free ways to have fun - that can save so much money!
i love this! I think saving for something fun also makes it more fun and rewarding as you know you have worked hard to enjoy it.
These are good money saving tips, especially for food. Lentil stew is my friend <3
Budget cooking is great. Planning and organizing meals to use leftovers helps so much, but saving money on the things you spend is so wonderful.
We love cooking on a budget. These are great tips. Thanks for sharing.
I absolutely agree with you that saving money is important. I often take advantage of deals to places for my kids or families. The free days are sometimes our first experience at places. Eating at home and using a new recipe helps help us eat for less and treat us to something different.
This is awesome. I love saving money, especially on food. It always makes me feel better to spend less.
That's a nice new way of looking at budgeting especially when it comes to cooking. I have a way to save money but sometimes I get carried away with lavish food.
Indeed, oatmeal is not expensive. But people tend to buy them, which I think is totally not cool. :) Great post!
Great tips! So, budget cooking is something I recently started to implement. Admittedly, in my former corporate life, I could afford to buy whatever food I wanted or go out. Now, I'm an entrepreneur, so I have to be much more cognizant of how I save money. It's forced me to become creative in different ways. So, budget cooking has actually become a fun game for me. Trying to make all the gourmet stuff I like (which tends to be more costly) on the cheap.
What a great post, I am always looking to save money and these are wonderful tools.
Budget is huge for us. I love that you've painted it in a positive light. Instead of thinking of it in terms of what you can't have, looking at it as the freedom that it is!
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