If you’re like me. some months you really need to save some money. For most young professionals, our income is fixed; a known quantity. If you pay rent or a mortgage those bills are known in advance as well. But how is it that we still get to the end of the month and think; where did all that money go? I’ve found it’s the little things really make the difference and can make you feel like you’ve gotten a pay raise, instead of feeling like you’re missing out. Here’s my top ten tips:
Take your lunch to work
Its easy to spend 15 or 20 dollars on food from a restaurant on your lunch break. That much money could make 3 or 4 meals if you spent it on ingredients and made your lunch at home. If you couldn’t be bothered to make an extra meal or don’t have time in the morning, just cook dinner as if you were serving two extra people. Put two serves in takeaway food containers and you’ve got 2 lunches for no extra effort. And since you don’t have to wait to be served and have your food prepared for you in your lunch break, you’ll feel like you’ve got a longer lunch break too! I use the time to go for a walk to a park near my work to eat lunch.
Write down all the little stuff
If you keep a track of all your incidentals, you’ll save yourself getting that feeling that you just don’t know where all the money went. I drink two coffees a day at work, and if i really need to save money I’ll drink instant coffee from the break room. But if you are going to buy coffee 網站設計 , write it down in a budget. $3.50 for a large takeaway cappuccino just seems like the change in your pocket, but two a day is 7 dollars. If you’re working 5 days a week that 140 dollars a month or $1680 a year. If you write down incidentals you’ll realise what they cost in the long run, and this stop you getting the disappearing money feeling. Also, if you can equate going without certain incidentals with working towards something big, then it’s easier to give them up. Not drinking cappuccinos at work for the rest of the year might seem bad, but $1680 could register and insure your car for that same year. Makes you think what you really want to spend money on when you put it that way doesn’t it…
Buy long duration pubic transport tickets
Most public transport authorities will give discounted fares if you buy tickets that last for longer periods of time. If you take the same train or bus to work every day, why not buy a monthly or even quarterly ticket. It may seem like a big outlay to but a 400 dollar train ticket, but saving 15% of a cost you can’t go without is worth the initial outlay. Also, if you’re worried about losing the ticket like i was initially, for high value tickets the transit authorities issue a receipt allowing you to cancel the old ticket and have a replacement reprinted if you lose it.
Make a written budget
In concert with keeping track of your incidentals as you pay for them, write a budget in advance of what you plan to spend your money on for the month. Allocate yourself a budget for nights out entertainment, but only after the bills are spoken for; and there’s an easy way to plan for your bills. Take all your bills like phone plan, gas, power, water, rates that you’ve paid for the twelve months. Add them all up and divide by how many months to give yourself an average of what ALL your bills are costing you per month. Give your bank a quick call and set up another account and have them take a part of your pay into this second account each month and pay your bills out of that. This way you can mentally distinguish “money i can spend” from “money that is spoken for by current and future bills.” If you don’t like the pen and paper stuff like me, use any one of the free iPhone budget apps in concert with an up to date spreadsheet on your computer and you’ll be budgeted in no time.