5 surprising ways to save money

January 10th 2019 | Categories: Budgeting & Goals |

We’ve all heard the basic tips like, forgo your daily coffee and you can save more than $1000! Or pack your lunch. Buy in bulk. Take a stay-cation. Earn more. All good ideas. But as we look ahead, are there any new ideas out there? Is there another way to look at our money-in money-out equation that will leave us with more in than out? Here are a few tips that might help you save some cash:

1. Mindfulness

Yep – take a Zen approach to your dollars and you might be surprised what you find. We make 95% of our decisions using mental short-cuts or rules of thumb. That is, we act without thinking too much about it. When that translates to spending that can mean bad habits hitting our hip pockets. For example, consider your weekly food shop. How often do you grab the same set of food items and have you ever thought of why? Could there be a cheaper way to eat well each week?

2. Go cold turkey

If you are a business owner, you know the power and stability of a subscription revenue model. Literally, cash rolling in every month, reliably. Where does it all come from? Our wallets! In today’s economy it is very easy to rack up quite a hit list of subscriptions, and unless you follow your accounts regularly, it can also be easy to forget what you are paying for. Think Netflix, Stan, Spotify, iTunes, Foxtel, online news, health clubs, data storage, etc.…. Try going cold turkey – quit them all and see what you are missing. Better yet – do some digging and see what you can find for free.

3. Let go of FOMO and do you

One of the biggest areas we help our clients is in helping them to prioritise their goals. Sure, it would be nice to take a great holiday every year, upgrade the car, renovate that daggy bathroom, pay for the kids or grandies education or extra activities, go on that great night out, watch the Aussies smash the opposition (we can hope, can’t we?) and put some money aside for a rainy day. But can you do it all? And do you even want to? With so much choice out there, it can be hard to be clear about what matters most to us. If you could paint your ideal future what would that look like. What would you choose? And what would you let go of. If that trip is more important, then postpone the bathroom reno for a later time. If that’s you, then do it.

4. Get talking.

The more you know about money, the more likely you are to make better decisions with it. Talking money can be hard, but there are definitely times and places where it can save you dollars – either in finding better prices or in avoiding bad decisions. Grow your money crowd (and include a financial adviser of course!)

5. Bring it all in together.

Use tech. Knowledge is power. One of the big challenges of staying in control of our financial situation is monitoring several different accounts. There are loads of great tools available now that help you monitor your spending. At Invest Blue we recommend Money Brilliant – it is an easy-to-use app that allows you to roll all your finances into one spot. You can see where your money is coming and going in near-real time no matter which account you are using. So, if you go overboard today, you can rein things in tomorrow and stay on track. If you are a client of ours, we offer this tool for free. Get in touch with your adviser for more information.

The best way to save money is to know what you are saving it for. Forgoing an expense (maybe even that daily coffee) becomes a lot easier to do when you remember you are an adventurist and that next flight is more important to you. Come in and chat with one of our advisers so you can learn more about what is important to you.

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What you need to know

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