Saving Money in Down Economic 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 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?
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.
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.
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