5 ways to save money this year

The hardest thing about saving money is getting started. While it isn’t wrong to spend whenever you’ve spare change, don’t relapse and overlook your long-term financial objectives like saving for a rainy day or retirement. It’s quite arduous to figure a roadmap to saving money; consequently, we’ve drawn up money-saving routines to help you work-out a prudent savings plan.

1. Record your expenditure

The first step towards saving money entails figuring out your expenses. Document all your expenses – each snack, newspaper or coffee you purchase. Ideally, you may account for every cent. Once your data is sorted, categorize the numbers, for instance, some may fall under mortgage, groceries, and gas and aggregate the various amounts. Your bank or credit card statement will assist here. If you receive online reports, you may filter your statements to break down your spending.

2. Design a financial routine

Drawing up a financial routine gives you control over your money and avert unnecessary expenses like late charges on loan and bill payments and bank overdraft fees. For the most part, we don’t intend to overdraw your bank accounts or make late payments, but simple money management may fall through the cracks whenever we lose focus or get too busy.

A money management system allows you to remain on top of personal finances and never get hit with needless late charges. Setup a weekly personal finance day, without fail, and review matters to do with validating debit and credit card receipts, create a bill payment system and reconciling bank accounts.

Sticking to routine aids you to accomplish more financially; like monitoring your investments, saving additional money and keeping an eye on a budget. Also, it’s a smart way to catch a potential identity thief who may mess up your finances.

3. Automate your savings

Virtually all banks offer automated money transfers between checking and savings accounts. Banks allow you to know how much, where and how much to transfer money or even split your deposit between your savings and checking accounts.

The beauty of automated transfer is that you never think about them and greatly reduce the urge to spend the money.

4. Fixate on the cost of time before spending

A perfect way to curb spending is considering what an item costs in time rather than dollars.

Let’s use Becky as an illustration. Becky works as an administrator in a merchant bank and earns $14 an hour. Whenever Becky contemplates buying anything, she divides her wage (hourly) into the price of the item to compute how much working hours it costs her.

For instance, if a striking dress that catches her attention costs $140, she divides $10 by $14, which equals ten working hours. Becky then decides whether the dress is worth the ten working hours.

5. Scour for online discounts

All online shoppers have at some point come across boxes at the checkout that asks you to key in a discount code. Once you enter the right numbers, the cost of items drops by 10% or more.

You can now save money next time you go internet shopping for holidays deals, eat out deals, fashion bargains, grocery and even cinema. Find the best discount codes here by visiting https://www.vouchercodespro.co.uk/.

Disclosure: I was compensated for this sponsored post.