For the last 6 months I have been working incredibly hard on trying tisane as much money each month as I possibly could and I am finally starting to see some success. In the past, I was similar to my buddy and roommate Ram Chary in that I would just think that the answer was to make more money in order to afford the life that I was living, unfortunately this is not always the best way of thinking and I decided instead that I would do both, aim to make more and spend less each and every month. If you want to learn how to save money each month, here are some tips for you to follow that worked well for me.
Ten Second Rule
The 10 second rule may sound silly but I cannot tell you how much money I have saved through this simple technique. Basically, whenever you want to buy something in a grocery store or a clothing outlet, any store for that matter, stop for 10 seconds with the item in your hand, during these ten seconds you should ask yourself how much you actually need this item. I actually did this for 20 seconds instead of 10 and I would say that I probably put 9 out of 10 items back on the shelf after thinking about it for a while.
Tracking Spends
I started using a phone application to track my spends and I put every single cent that I spent into my application each day. At the end of the month I reviewed what I had spent and I was horrified, I had no idea how much money I frittered away on things that were not needed or things that I didn’t even realize I was spending money on. This only happened for one month because the following month I was aware of every dollar that I was spending.
Renegotiating
The first step that I took when it came to reducing my monthly spending was to analyze my bank accounts and see all of the direct debits which were coming out. After making a list, I called up all of the companies to get a better deal or to switch providers altogether for things like gas and electric and my mobile phone provider. I spent around 3 hours in total doing this and within that time I had managed to save $120 each and every month going forward.
Savings Challenge
Instead of frittering my money away on insignificant items, I decided to set myself a saying challenge of $2000 in 6 months, after the 6 months I could spend that $2000 on anything that I wanted to. This became a bit of an obsession for me and I was looking for any opportunity that I could to get that money. At the end of the 6 months I booked a vacation for myself as a way of reward that I had managed to get my spending under control.