I Know Where I am Spending, But I Need to Save!

So now that you have been keeping track of where you spend your money, have you come to the point now where you just are not sure where to cut back? Well some of the places you can cut back, but still have the items, are:

Instead of Buying your coffee at the local coffee shop, make it at home. What this does, is it allows you to still have your coffee, but instead of paying $1.50 for one medium coffee, you can have the entire pot for about the same price. I know that $1.50 a day really doesn’t seem like much, but it actually turns out to be $30 a month. That is just one coffee per day for four weeks, Monday to Friday. If you have more than the one cup, the price goes up from there. And I know you are thinking to yourself, $30 a month? Big whoop! But could that $30 be better spent in your gas tank / on your credit card or some other loan that you have? Probably it would.

Now that it has been brought up, the credit card you have in your wallet, does it provide you any rewards: Cash back or Points or Super low interest? If not, then the card you have in your wallet is simply putting a drain on your financial resources. I’ll even go one step further and say that if the rewards you are getting from your card are not quickly usable, and by quickly usable, I mean can you use the rewards for every day purchases, then the card is not the most beneficial to you. So if you have an Air Miles rewards or some other air plan, do you fly enough to make that worthwhile? If not, I would suggest dumping that card and getting one that provides a cash back or point system for the local grocery store where you can literally purchase anything in the store with the points. In Canada, PC Plus is a great example of store points that are very usable on a daily basis.

One more item to consider helping stretch the financial budget, is to look for apps that pay you to buy the items you would normally buy. An app such as Checkout51, available for both iOS and Android, can be downloaded and then used in the comfort of your home. You peruse the list prior to going shopping, make your list of ‘To Buy’ and then when you get home, you upload your receipt and claim the items you purchased. They still have some glitches every now and then, but sending an email regarding the issue usually gets it cleared up right away.  Doing a search for ‘Apps like checkout 51’ also provides a list of other apps that can also be used.

One thing I love to do is to compound my savings by using my rewards credit card to purchase the items and then using the app to get that extra cash back. And you might even be able to try this with multiple apps.

Lastly, when you are at the grocery store, you always want to compare the prices of the various sizes of items they sell. So if buying 2 of the 500ml is going to end up being cheaper than buying the 1L, you should consider doing so. Also buying the family size of everything is going to help reduce costs in the long run also. You just have to remember to buy the freezer bags to put the extra in the freezer.