Memorial Day weekend is a highly anticipated and well-deserved break for many of us. Millions of Americans will stick close to home with friends and family to fire up the grill, while others will hit the road for vacations or head to sea on cruises. And while it’s good to relax, the break from everyday life that Memorial Day gives us is also an opportunity to start the summer season on a solid financial footing.
With all the craziness of the holiday season, its financial aftermath and the slow recovery from our overspending, the first half of the year can easily slip by before we even take notice of it. Memorial Day weekend is a great opportunity to gather your thoughts and create a plan to make your money start working for you again – think retirement contributions, saving for a new car, or funding your kids’ college. And to help you reach your financial goals we’ve gathered our 9 favorite money-saving tips.
We’ve all had the experience of looking back at something we spent money on and wondering what we were thinking. With all the modern conveniences of online shopping and credit cards, it’s far too easy to let our whims rule us. One of the most important factors in effectively saving money is cultivating your impulse control so you only spend money on things you need or truly want.
One way to reduce your total expenses is to make a necessity like shopping earn money for you. How can you achieve that? Lucky for you, we wrote an entire blog on it. The simple version is that there are a lot of avenues that you can explore that will pay you for shopping: cash-back credit cards, rebate apps, mystery shopping, and couponing. While the savings may seem negligible, they could add up to big money over time.
This may sound counterintuitive on the surface, but trying to save money in the short-term can actually cost you more in the end if you compromise on quality or durability on certain items. Before you automatically buy the cheapest product at the store, think about how much you’re going to use it and how quickly it’s going to wear out.
Another counterintuitive way of saving money in the long-term is to learn to use loans strategically and to your advantage, not as an option of last resort. Auto title loans, for example, can be a great way of boosting your short-term finances or handling an unexpected cash emergency before it spirals into a larger expense.
There’s that old saying that knowledge is power, and when it comes to saving money there’s no truer statement. For example, in the point about not settling for poor quality products, how do you determine if an item you buy is going to last and perform well enough to justify the extra expense? You take the time to do your research. Even a quick Google search can save you more than you think.
If you don’t play the lotto you can skip this point, but if you do we have bad news: if you want to save money you need to shake this costly habit. Statistically, you have a better chance of being struck by lightning while being attacked by a shark, and with odds like that, you are much better off holding on to that money and allowing it to mature with compound interest.
While it’s not a new or innovative way of saving money, using coupons can actually shave off a pretty penny from your monthly grocery bill. And that’s just from maybe ten minutes of cutting a week. Not a bad return on your time investment.
You may spend more or less on eating out than the national average, but regardless of how often you eat out, you can always benefit from minimizing this unnecessary expenditure. Not only is it cheaper to pack your own lunch for work or school, but in the long run, it’ll positively impact your health, which means fewer doctor bills and medical expenses in the long run.
This is the last and most important point. All of the strategies listed above are useless if you’re not committed to saving money. Saving money is a mindset, and if you’re not willing to embrace it, then all the advice in the world can’t help. So, think about what you find important in life, and if saving money is what you need to do to achieve it, make the commitment.