3 Important Ways to Save Money Fast & Reduce Expenses Now
I will explain ways to save money fast, even when eggs are three times as expensive as they were a few years ago and gas is twice as expensive as just a few months ago. I'm helping our family reduce our expenses without sacrificing quality. With a few changes, you can save money painlessly.
I'm unapologetically a massive fan of Costco. We go almost every week, so we're one of those typical millennial families that will grab two massive carts because we know we will fill them up. Even so, we stay within our budget month in and month out. We spend less at Costco because we know how much we intend to spend.
Grocery budgets
The average cost of monthly groceries for one adult on a thrifty typical budget plan ranges from $215 to $308. This is a typical example and the average from studies. When it comes to a family of four, this is where it gets important for you.
The average monthly grocery bill is $968 is the average for a family of four. The average means people are on the extremely high and low side. These are vital statistics to help get in perspective as we dive into these examples.
As promised, here are three examples of how to reduce the expense side of your budget and how to save money fast.
1. Scorched earth approach
This is done by reducing expenses and treating it as an all-in game. You may use this if you're in a dire situation or have never formed these habits. The most significant impact on your spending will probably be from the environment you grew up in.
Look at where you come from and where you want to be going, and learn from that. The first thing will probably be to take an extreme approach. This is a minimalist stance, and it will take looking at many different ways to hone in on your budget.
2. Alpha mob approach
An alpha mob approach is your person who shows up to the store with a book. It is full of coupons, buying in bulk, going to those big box stores and making the most of it, and buying and selling used items on Facebook Marketplace.
This is a sweet spot for a lot of millennial parents. I think anyone can live like this, and most millennials get comfortable in this space.
The number one trap is going to be overbuying. If you find yourself on Instagram saying, wow, that gadget will save me so much money because it will do X, Y, or Z for me in the kitchen, and you don't start thinking about it, how much money is it saving?
If you save $0.10 every other time you use it and use it twice a year, but it costs $30, it will take you a lifetime to make that money back. We tend to be sold this idea of convenience disguised as efficiency being marketed directly towards a modern sensibility of being thrifty. That's not what we're looking for.
What we're looking for is trimming. Not necessarily hacking the bush to the ground like the minimalist approach, and not scorched earth but trimming back the foliage.
3. Maximalist approach
Option number three is my favorite, which I would call a maximalist approach. This is what many would consider the bootstrap, hard work, grind mentality of growing your income to feed your expenses. It's the best way to save money fast.
It's an exciting way to be, especially if you want to work and get out there and build something so you can have a balanced lifestyle. The problem is that most people are prone to trying to figure out how much they can make to spend elsewhere. That second part of the equation is the trap, and the trap is the lifestyle creep.
Lifestyle creep
I know you've heard about this, especially when you think of people who get a raise, and somehow that 5%, 10%, 20% more than they're making disappears into their budget. It's suddenly gone with a bigger house, a new car, nicer clothes, and more toys for the kids. Travel is a huge part of this, don't get me wrong, I think it's great.
However, I will get there by combining all three of these, especially a maximalist approach to getting the income to serve that goal. If you're looking for income for income's sake and you don't have a goal, then that income will disappear into the ether of your typical spending habits.
To summarize, here are three steps that we use to decrease our expenses month to month and our family budget.
Number one is we measure what matters.
Our budget is a ruler, and it guides us month to month on our spending and income to set better goals. Doing all of these things has helped us to save money fast.
That takes us to number two which is smart goals. I'm not talking about New Year's resolutions or aspirational goals in your next decade or your next life. I'm talking about specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals.
Those are smart goals you can see happen in your life in a realistic time span. The third is never to stop learning.
There are so many resources out there: Instagram accounts, YouTube channels, Facebook groups, and different groups of people with many different hacks, tips, and wisdom for reducing your expenses and teaching you how to save money in ways you never thought possible.
The only thing holding you back is your investment and your initiative to get in there and see how one of those three examples we discussed can be part of your future.
Ways to save money fast
Saving money fast can be done if you make the commitment to do it. How are you working on saving money? Share your strategies in the comments below.
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