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Saving Money / Cutting spending
jeddy lee
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
ECONOMY ECONOMY ECONOMY
In light of the fact that the world is blowing up around us, inflation is bound to happen all around, how is everyone saving money? I'm sure I am not the only one cutting corners.
I lead a somewhat less then frugal life. I spend a decent amount on fresh fruits, veggies and meats, I am making payments on a brand new 2009 Ford Fusion, I have a 3 bedroom apartment for myself, my wife and our 2 dogs, and I buy entertainment as I want it.
I have started to make little shifts though, for pretty noticable savings. They may not be huge, but they net a decent saving each month:
1) I cut out getting coffee in the morning for making coffee at home, and we now only get coffee on the weekends, and those have shifted from latte's to americanos. This is saving us like $120.00 per month.
2) I stopped buying every damned comic book I want to buy, and to get my comic fix I buy omnibuss's (usually one a month or so) rather than 6-8 graphic novels a month.
3) I limit myself to one console game and 1 portable game per month at most
4) I am consulting my friend from my home town into coming down and rooming with me
5) we sold our second care and are now carpooling
6) Stopped going out to eat for special dinners, and focussed more on learning more extravegant cooking techniques.
7) Got a netflix membership and stopped buying/renting so many damn movies. This also allowed us to get rid of cable, as we have access to so much free media online now.
How are you saving money these days? Do you have questions on how else to cut down on your spending?
In light of the fact that the world is blowing up around us, inflation is bound to happen all around, how is everyone saving money? I'm sure I am not the only one cutting corners.
I lead a somewhat less then frugal life. I spend a decent amount on fresh fruits, veggies and meats, I am making payments on a brand new 2009 Ford Fusion, I have a 3 bedroom apartment for myself, my wife and our 2 dogs, and I buy entertainment as I want it.
I have started to make little shifts though, for pretty noticable savings. They may not be huge, but they net a decent saving each month:
1) I cut out getting coffee in the morning for making coffee at home, and we now only get coffee on the weekends, and those have shifted from latte's to americanos. This is saving us like $120.00 per month.
2) I stopped buying every damned comic book I want to buy, and to get my comic fix I buy omnibuss's (usually one a month or so) rather than 6-8 graphic novels a month.
3) I limit myself to one console game and 1 portable game per month at most
4) I am consulting my friend from my home town into coming down and rooming with me
5) we sold our second care and are now carpooling
6) Stopped going out to eat for special dinners, and focussed more on learning more extravegant cooking techniques.
7) Got a netflix membership and stopped buying/renting so many damn movies. This also allowed us to get rid of cable, as we have access to so much free media online now.
How are you saving money these days? Do you have questions on how else to cut down on your spending?
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PS2
FF X replay
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God of War 1&2 HD
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PS2
FF X replay
PS3
God of War 1&2 HD
Rachet and Clank Future
MGS 4
Prince of Persia
360
Bayonetta
Fable 3
DS
FF: 4 heroes of light
jeddy lee on
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I pack my own lunch for work. I've ate out the last 2 days and spent about $15. If I pack my lunch (a salad), I can eat for about $3.50/day.
Shop around for cheaper car insurance - you could be saving a large wad of cash. For example, Geico looks at the past 5 years of your driving history, while Progressive looks at the past 35 months - if you have a violation that is older than 3 years, you could be getting screwed. I saved about $300/6 months because I have a violation older than 3 years.
If you drive back and forth to work everyday, develop better throttle control. No, you do not need to floor it from every fucking stoplight. I can gain an extra 2 MPG in my Wrangler just by paying more attention to my driving and being lighter on the throttle.
Learn accounting, run charts and graphs. Set the graphs up, run them and give a 30 second glance. Spend 20 minutes a week keeping your double-entry book keeping system (recommend: GnuCash for Windows or Linux) up to date with your bank accounts and a rough estimate of cash in and out of your wallet (it gets there somehow, it goes somewhere, it can be rough but don't be sloppy).
Trust me it helps.
EDIT: lol. I just noticed my bank account numbers and branch are in those screen shots. Note to self, fix this later.
I only have basic cable instead of going for the big package
Hopefully I will be able to sell some random stuff soon - records, books
We're also dropping cable. We'll keep broadband, but we're going to build a HTPC for Hulu and maybe Netflix streaming. We'll be saving about $60 per month, unless we throw Netflix in. And we've cut down the games we buy... we're buying portable games ok, but waiting for console games to drop in price before we buy. It's a huge difference.
We've set ourselves a budget for food weekly, and cut down our spending on meals by cooking larger meals and having leftovers later in the week. It's not so hard for me to keep my cost of meals down since I work in a grocery store, but getting the wife off of the fast food/Panera sandwiches every day saves us a ton.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
-Craigslist is your friend. Buy used, sell when its time to upgrade.
-Ditch cable. Nothing good is ever on, so just take that old PC and $12 worth of parts from Monoprice and set up your Hulu and maybe Netflix accounts. If there's not enough between them to cover you, then you're watching too much fucking TV.
Also realize you can get a pretty nice tax break if you're a first time home buyer right now. I think 8k?
he's gonna miss one
Which will save him money in the long run, I imagine.
DAMMIT THIS ISN"T THE CHAT THREAD
also I agree with leftovers, making sure you actually eat them is a good start
Bake my own bread using high-price King-Arthur bread flour ($5 for 5 pounds), it takes me a while to go through bread. I bake sourdough bread, using a sourdough starter I made. Since it's quite acidic, mold doesn't seem to take hold on it... a known advantage if you don't manage to consume a whole loaf in a month. Keep bread bags around to put this stuff in so it doesn't dry out. Also mice love the shit and will tar the fuck out of a loaf you leave on the counter (I've made bread that doesn't go stale, ever. This was the result after 2 weeks).
I'm just learning to cook though.
Pancakes. Eggs. Bread. Home made biscuits. Seriously, think about this. You eat breakfast, you need about 1000kcal to start out your day (have you eaten in the last 15 hours?). Starches will give you the kick you need, hence the bread/biscuits/pancakes/cereal. Have it with some fruit juice. You know what? Your body won't go nuts looking for food later in the day, you'll eat normal smaller meals around 500kcal or less, you'll be healthier. Mind you, just about everything that goes into breakfast is dirt cheap, and a $1 carton of eggs from the Farmer's market plus whatever pancake mix and home made bread or whatnot is going to leave you with breakfast for under a dollar every day.
If I can't bring good food, I hit the dollar menu. Once in a while I'll grab a pizza or Panera, usually it's Burger King or McDonalds cheap stuff for lunch.
As for pizza, make the crust (bread flour), and the sauce. Tomatoes are expensive, but if you check out a farmer's market you get 'em cheap.
For that matter, fruits and vegetables wtf? $2 FOR A GREEN BELL PEPPER? Farmer's market.
Spend $100 or so on a good pressure cooker (I'm looking at $80 ones), labeled as a pressure canner. Read up on how to can fruit, it's good to do it right so you don't poison yourself (it's dismally simple to do it right, baking bread is a lot harder, for the most part you just gotta get it hot enough and keep it there long enough). Get to the farmer's market and get yourself some fruits, and some sugar, and use the sugar to gelatinize ground up fruit particles and you have jam.
Learn to shave. Double-edge razor cost you $30, or $15 off eBay. Don't skimp on the blades; get yourself some nice 40 cent Merkur blades that last 3 uses (use 2 a week) or some Gillette Platinum blades (70 cents each if you buy 50 at a time). Get a $15 badger hair brush, a $20 shave bowl, and $3 puck of shave soap (Col. Conk's bay rum is good). No paying $2.50 a piece for Mach 3 or Fusion blades that'll last you 4 days; those lavishly expensive Gillette Platinums cost me a good $1.40 a week but I shave every other day and cut that in half.
A good straight razor will cost you a good $100 (do you WANT your razor to shred your face?), plus you'll need a $20 strop and a $80 Norton 4k/8k honing stone (don't use a knife stone, it'll eat your razor and you're screwed). Really, I think you can avoid the double edge blades; I like straight razors.
Get yourself a set of rags to use in the kitchen, and enough of them to last a good 2 laundry days. Stop buying paper towels.
When my truck broke I had $500. My parents would not cosign a $2000 loan and I wound up with a $14000 car loan and a brand new car with my insurance payment doubled because OMG NEW CAR NEW RISK.
I just bought a 1995 Cavalier. I'm gonna spend about $200 giving it a tune-up, down to replacing brake lines and hoses and shit probably, rebuilding calipers. It needs a catalytic converter (the guy turned it into a race car, you know, pull the shit out of the exhaust and it gets more power), $80. I need to spend $120 on an inspection. It'll be a $2000 car with $1000 of work in it. $3000, top condition.
When it's in awesome condition, I'm selling my current brand-new-car for "clear my loan." I can do that because I got a GM employee discount and got a $15000 car for $11000. I have to learn to drive stick first of course lol....
That takes a $239 car payment off my monthly expenses. The used car actually lowered my insurance from $215/mo to $170/mo, and by itself it'd be around $100/mo. Yes, this is a win.
Perhaps. There are already a couple banks in our area that are offering 4.75-4.65% mortgages... we're going to talk to them tomorrow. It really all depends on whether we can get a mortgage. My credit is excellent, my wife's is... fair, I guess. We'll see what happens. We've also found some great deals on homes in our area. I know we can wait longer, and maybe get a better deal. At the same time, there's only so long you can wait before taking a risk of an upturn. Considering a lot of the single family/starter homes in the area are finally dropping below $100k, this seems like a good time for us.
The taxes on those homes being up around $4k still hurts, though... fucking New England.
This is playing into it. It's not a tax break, it's a tax credit, meaning that when we file next year, we'll get another $8k refund. That'll go directly into my student loans and our savings.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
There is something to be said for cable. My wife and I will miss it quite a bit. I mean, yes, we can get quite a bit from Hulu and the like. However, TruTV (my wife's a huge Forensic Files fan), Discovery, and History channels are all being extremely slow on the uptake of online streaming. That is most of what we watch, so we would be missing out.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
money saving technique = dump girlfriend
Steam
XBOX
Or have her pay for lunch a couple times.
B&E is my 401k
Or become friends with benefits and split everything 50/50 :winky:
3DS FC: 5343-7720-0490
It does a good job of taking all your debit/credit transactions and categorizing them automatically, using your online banking login. Great tool for finding out where you're really spending your money and you don't have to put any effort in yourself.
When I cook for myself, I cook from scratch as often as I can; ready meals are far too expensive when you can buy stupid amounts of cheap pasta and rice.
Rather than buying regular meat, I buy liver, which is 87p for two meals' worth, if I really have a hankering for protein. For day to day cheap and cheerful meals, I buy those crappy sausages which work out at sixpence each.
I don't buy drinks for when I'm at home; water is good enough, and I have bulk tea and coffee for special occasions. I don't buy milk or bread, as I only end up wasting it by leaving it until it goes off; I have powdered milk for cooking, and the aforementioned meal vouchers buy my sandwiches.
I haven't bought new clothes since the summer, apart from a bulk pack of underwear, and I buy toiletries in bulk. I borrow books if I want to read them, as well as DVDs and music, and I watch all of my TV on BBC iPlayer.
I walk everywhere I can, as well, which at university is damn near everywhere.