Spend a little, save a lot!

Too often people who are trying to save money are looking for little things they can give up to save a few dollars here and there. We have the mindset that every penny saved counts, and that is a true statement, but there may be a better way of saving money than looking for pennies under the couch cushions. I was reading some articles over at wisebread.com and came across an article titled 3 Reasons Why Keeping Your “Latte Factor” Will Help You Save Money. The basic idea of the article is that if you save a few dollars giving up your daily latte, but you spend it on something else, have you really saved money?

Lower your deductible

Instead of looking for the $5 a week thing you can cut out of your budget, why not focus on ways to save $100 a month? The problem with constantly looking for the little things to cut out the budget, is that we often overlook the big things that could be real money savers. For example, increasing the deductible on your auto insurance can easily save you a $100 a month. The only negative part of increasing your deductible is that you will be increasing your out-of-pocket expenses if you need to file a claim. Before you call to change your deductible, make sure you have the deductible amount saved and stashed away in a savings account or a money market.

Good-bye movie channels

Another easy way to save serious money is by evaluating your cable package. Do you really watch all 3,214 channels? Ok, maybe you don’t have that many channels, but do you really need 5 movie packages? Take a look at what you are paying for each month and see if there isn’t something that you can get rid off. I would even challenge you to drop your cable package completely. Talk about being radical! If you do that, you will have a lot of people calling you all sorts of weird names. One word of caution. Before you cut ties with the cable or dish company, make sure you have worked out how you will watch football on Sundays. I’m serious. You have to keep your priorities in order. Also, you may want to subscribe to Netflix. We get movies through Netflix, which means we get to choose the quality of programming (Andy Griffith is one of our favorites) and with the one day turn around, we always have a movie in the queue.

Plan to BLOW some money

One more way of saving some considerable money is to plan on eating out once a month. If you don’t have a plan for your money, you will spend it on things that really don’t make any sense. Before we started budgeting our entertainment for the month, we would justify eating out a lot more often that we really needed to. By budgeting our entertainment dollars we find that we are a lot more careful on where we spend out ‘fun’ money. We also allocate a certain amount as Blow Money. We can spend our Blow Money however we want to, and no one can question it. What this does is gives us a way to reward ourselves without feeling guilty about where the money is coming from.