Living Life Like It’s Golden
We get one glorious life to live, one opportunity to be the greatest expression of who we were designed to be. That equals one chance to seize all that life has to offer. However, the large majority never get to live their life like it’s golden because of debt’s nasty grip.
Queue up my Jill Scott music once again! It is absolutely possible to live life like it’s golden, and it starts with making small, consistent steps with how you handle your money. Consider those day-to-day decisions that seem inconsequential but collectively equal financial success.
Below I have given you expense reduction teasers. These steps are more like dipping your toes in the water for your first summer swim. You get them wet ever so slightly, and before you know it, you are waist deep, contemplating whether you should get your hair wet and positioning yourself to go all in. Let’s take a look…
Ways to Reduce Expenses
Reduce How Often You Eat Out
When I first met my husband, he was eating out every-single-meal! He goes to work early, so he ate his first two meals at the job, and dinner was a quick stop at a fast-food joint before heading home. Now mind you, this spending doesn’t even include snacks. On average, he would spend $22.00 per day on food–food! After five days, he’d rack up a food bill of over $110.00. By the time the weekend was over, he could easily spend more than $200.00 on eating out. As a single man, my love muffin was spending at least $800.00 a month to feed his belly!
Let me break down how easy it is to spend that amount of money on food. Your brain compartmentalizes spending. If you are not tracking, you have spent 30-40% more than you thought you did by the end of the week.
Breakfast is only $5.47. Your brain processes it like, you are doing good, you only spent a little over $5.00 this morning. You buy a sandwich, chips, and drink from the store for lunch, and you spend $7.56. Your brain under-calculates the total, $12.00, that is pretty good for breakfast and lunch. Finally, it’s time to round off the day for dinner, and your two earlier food purchases are distant thoughts, so it’s only logical you swing through a drive-through and grab a quick bite to eat. Now, your grand total for the day is $23.13.
The solution to this quandary is to keep your gorgeous self at home and cook. If you are someone who will have withdrawals and give up if you go cold turkey, make it a gradual transition. Instead of eating out five days, only eat out two until you can become so disciplined that you rather your own cooking than someone else’s. As your hunger to become debt-free grows, your appetite for eating out will shrink.
Say Goodbye to Bath & Body Works
Say “HI!” to refillable hand soap. Trust me, I know, it is hard to resist a good BBW sale. You are sent coupons in the mail, you walk in the store and smell every scent that had to be created in heaven and FedExed to earth for all the female humans to enjoy. You walk in empty-handed and walk out with at least 2-3 of those nifty totes full of lotions, body sprays, and hand soap. If you combined your coupons correctly, you only spent $82.00 on a good sale. Wait, correction, $82.00 you really couldn’t afford to spend on a good sale.
Okay, moving on…
Now let me ask you, have you ever seen those 56oz bottles of soap for $3.49? It appears to be for commercial use only. Well, guess what? Dismiss the idea that those large containers of soap are not meant for your purchase, and the next time you go to the grocery store, pick up one, return home and fill your empty 12oz bottles. When you do, do me a favor, keep a mental note of just how long that 56oz bottle lasted. I promise you won’t buy hand soap for at least 3-4 months.
Name Brand Items Are Not Your Friends
I remember the first time I went to the dollar store to make an intentional off-brand, less expensive purchase of trash bags for my kitchen. Friends, to be frank, I never wanted to appear cheap by purchasing something that didn’t have a name I recognized.
On this day, I marched my happy behind down the paper goods aisle, took my time, and perused the already discounted trash bags for bags that would give me the biggest deal on top of the discounted price. I charged the register carrying my purchase like a first-place gold medal. The doors slowly parted for my exit, and I left with a few more coins in my wallet. That moment may have only put me a nano step closer to my debt freedom goal in terms of coins in my wallet, but it was a giant leap for my money mindset.
Look, all I’m saying is who said it was mandatory to purchase name brand items? Even if it is subliminal, don’t let anyone dictate how you should spend your money. You are the holder of your money. You make a plan for it. You make the strategies!
Make your money work how it needs to for you and your wealth journey.
Shop Before You Shop
How many times have you gone to the grocery store with a mental budget?
You: “I am only going to spend $75.00. That’s it.”
You (returning from the grocery store): Let me check this receipt; she must have charged me extra for something”, as you look at your $143.00 bill.
Unless you closed your eyes as each item was scanned, I am pretty sure your bill is accurate. So what happened? There are a few things I can point out, but let’s start here. How many items did you pick up while shopping grocery listless because you were unsure whether that item was chilling in the back of the fridge (no pun intended) or in the corner of your pantry? The last thing you want is to spend an hour and a half at the store and forget something, so better to have extra than none at all, right?
Well, I’m afraid I have to disagree. Every item in the store is up for grabs when you shop devoid of intention. Just make it a rule, when going to the store, I don’t care if it is the grocery store, hardware, or beauty supply store. Go with a list! Only purchase the items on that list. Even if that list only has one thing on it. I know it sounds extreme, but what you are doing is establishing discipline. If it were needed badly enough, it would have been in writing.
How to Avoid Buying Unnecessary Items
- Create a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meal plan (decide what works best for your lifestyle).
- Shop your fridge, pantry, and cabinets. Decide what meals can be made from the items you still have at home before making your grocery list.
- Create a list of items needed to be purchased from the store.
- Make a complete grocery list within your established budget.
- Stick to the amount allocated for your grocery trip.
- Again, only purchase items on your list!
- Reduce the number of times you shop per week. Every time you enter a store, you increase the chances of spending more than you budgeted for.
Pro-Tips, Hacks or Whatever You Want to Call Them…
- If you are not confident about staying within your budget, shop online with a store that offers free services. This way, you will know how much money is being spent before checking out.
- If you like shopping for yourself, as I do, still use the shop online feature. I did this a lot in the beginning. I would create a list as if to purchase online to get a rough total of how much I would spend on needed items. However, I would physically visit that same store to shop, confident that if I only picked up what was on my list, I would stay within my predetermined budget.
- Only take cash to the grocery store. If you budgeted $80 per week, and this is your weekly shopping trip, only take that amount to the store.
Become Knowledge-Wealthy
I’m sure you thought this tip would be yet again another thing from which to put yourself on restriction, nope, not this time. But, oh my sister, I think this is the golden nugget for reducing your expenses.
As you grow your knowledge and understanding of finances, the moves you make with your money will be more intentional. You will start looking in your finances’ nooks and crannies to find ways to reduce your costs. You will become fed up with paying a fraction of a cent more than you have to for anything.
For example, let’s look at taking out a $250,000 mortgage with a 4.78% interest rate to purchase your first home. You get approved for your loan, and now you have a 30-year mortgage. Why do we have a 30-year mortgage, anyway? Did you know by the time you receive your “PAID IN FULL receipt,” you would have paid almost the same amount in interest as you did for your home. Essentially, you pay back double what was borrowed.
Okay, here is another example, credit card debt. If you owed $2,000.00 on a credit card, how long would it take you to pay it back if you only paid the minimum monthly payment (2-3% of the total balance) at an interest rate of 20%? Let’s just say it would take you long enough to see a child graduate high school, college and give you a grandbaby.
Keep in mind, most credit card issuers allow cardholders to carry a balance month-to-month; however, it’s not to be kind and sympathetic to the cardholder; it is for the issuer to benefit from interest charges.
Take On The Challenge
Today, I challenge you to pick one of the five ways YOU feel comfortable implementing and incorporate it into handling your money. Once you’ve made a decision, adjust for one full week. At the end of the week, record the notable differences in your thinking or how much money you saved or you could potentially save. If you are feeling froggy, take on the challenge for a consistent month. I want to hear how you come out. Let me tell you something; you never lose when you focus on your finances. So at the end of the day, you should come out on top.
