Can you fix your finances in this age of soaring expenses such as education and healthcare cost?Increasingly, the answer is yes; you can stay ahead with the following expert tips on cutting personal expenses;
Track your spending
Maintaining a budget, though not a glamorous task, is the key to financial stability. It helps you know you get financially conscious: know what you have, what to prioritize, and what to do away without. There’re several apps you can download and obtain the templates where you can keep your budget, set alerts, and more. The key to budgeting is:
•Know how much money you net in (after deducting taxes, planned contributions and more) every month
•Know your fixed and variable expenses – fixed expenses could be student loans and mortgage repayments while variables are the usual flexible popups like groceries and property tax.
•Set aside some cash for savings – usually 8-10 percent of your post-tax income.
•Keep all your receipts detailing how much you spend per month. You can use 3-months receipt to find average monthly expenditure and decide what to cut back.
•Have goals (both immediate and long-term) if you have a goal like paying off an outstanding debt at a certain time and work towards it, you will free up some cash for other uses.
Look for innovative ways in cutting personal expenses
There’re several creative ways to cut down the ever-increasing expenditures such as prices of goods and cost of services such as education. Here’re some few tips:
•Cut down on education costs
Online colleges are proving to be more cost-effective and viable alternatives to traditional colleges. Providers of online education incur fewer expenses as they don’t require huge staff or brick-and-mortar structures. They, therefore, offer affordable tuition rates. If you convince your kids to take up some thoroughly researched online college offering accredited programs, you end up cutting personal expenses such as commuter and accommodation fees.
Books too can make a dent on your budget. Learning materials are getting pricy by the day; reports indicate that the average cost of college textbooks per student is now $1200 and it’s only going to get higher – a rate thrice that of inflation. But thanks to the internet, there’re ways you can get free eBooks and cut down on costs; sites such as Imagination Library, Craigslist, and Amazon Free Books are providing access to a wide variety of reading materials for free.
•Make use of smart apps to watch Tv shows for free
Cutting down on your TV subscription is also a way to free up extra cash on your budget. As Cable subscriptions rise while the quality of the content takes a nosedive, it’s high time you cancel some subscriptions and opt for content from free streaming services such as Crackle, plutoTv or TubiTv.
•Make use of coupons
In the tv show 2 Broke Girls, Max introduces Caroline to the art of shopping for more at less price using coupons; and once Caroline gets the gist of it, she turns into a coupon monster, flipping through newspapers and magazines in search for coupons.
Well, unlike in the tv show, extreme couponing is not seen much in real life; so many of us are afraid of standing on the queue with coupon clippings, talking to the cashier for some extra seconds in an attempt to knock some cents off the budget. But in doing so, we end up losing the opportunity to shop more for less.
Coupons help save money by earning discounts or rewards such as free shipping in case of online shopping. If you’re not the type who’s afraid to use coupons, you can make use of sites such as Pillsbury, Seventh Generation, RetailMeNot, Coupon Cabin, and Dealspl.us to get coupons and knock some dollars off your total expenses
Try earning some extra part-time cash
Part-time income is the key to financial freedom – the little extra money you make can help you make ends meet. A lot of people have been able to attain financial freedom by just monetizing their hobbies, whether through the internet or in person. Here’re some avenues to make extra cash:
•Monetizing your blog or vlog: If you can publish great content to engage audiences on some particular subjects, you can start a blog or vlog to turn the audience’s interest into traffic then monetize the traffic through affiliate marketing where you allow advertisers to posts their ads alongside your blog content and earn revenues for every ad request.
•Rent the extra space you have: platforms like Airbnb allow owners to put out extra space for rent and make some cash.
•Work as a mystery shopper for companies like Best Mark, Intelli-Shop and Market Force that pay you to pretend; you’re a regular shopper by posing in their stores and availing feedback, e.g., on the interaction, experience, cleanliness of the place to the management.
There’re several other ways to make extra revenues. Most of us are usually cynical when it comes to such avenues. My advice therefore is, always check them out.
