Gas prices are up again… because apparently our wallets needed another challenge.
If you’ve noticed your usual trips to the grocery store, gas station, or coffee shop costing a little more lately, take a quick look at your spending this week.
Check your last few transactions and see if there’s one thing you can cut back on, swap for a cheaper option, or skip altogether.
And if you’re spending anyway, don’t forget to rack up some cashback with your Neo card where you can. Every little bit helps!
I keep a Budget excel sheet. Try to look at it often to stay on track. I use to use mint.com…loved it but it was discontinued a couple years ago. Ive created a spreadsheet in a similar fashion though with mint logic.
That’s a good question and sort of hit home in a lot of ways. We have two kids under 3, so we feel the pinch and the existential stress. In brief and mentioning more everyday changes to shrink our everyday expenses include:
Developed a good financial dataset and tracker. What are the biggest money sinks and cut those before you do anything else. Excel works best because it’s infinity customizable.
Use a solid inventory tracker of what consumables you have so you understand your own needs, and therefore your spending, better
Baking my own breads
Planted vegetable, herb, frut gardens
I switched to biking to work
Set up a very old laptop into a server to run jellyfin. No more Netflix or other subscriptions
Take as much advantage of library books and community events as we are able to as low cost entertainment
Turn learning something new and/or fixing/making something useful into a hobby
Ask yourself hard questions on if every space is used as efficiently as you can to fit your current and future needs. If not, how can it be improved, even slightly
In short, we’ve been doing all we can to learn new skills so we don’t have to pay for the service. You’ll start out bad at whatever you try but you will only get better.
