By Dr. Kavita
Budgeting money needs some special skills, but sadly not everyone has these skills to perfection. But as the old saying goes,” Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention” and when you are faced with acute money crunch, you automatically become an expert at creating some terrific strategies to budget money.
Here are some budgeting strategies that could work:
Don’t always buy new
Buying new or first hand is no more the trend nowadays. With majority of households facing a cash crunch, thanks to our economic policies and the recessions, I guess every one now values the current inclination of sharing, re-using and using “pre-owned items”. This not only helps you save money but also will help the environment by cutting back on wastage and reducing the usage of fresh raw materials in creating new products.
Avoid expensive entertainment plans
Entertainment is one activity out of the numerous activities in your life where you can freely cut back on spending money, without going over the guilt trip. It won’t kill you if you cut back on entertainment all together. But if you feel that you cannot go to that extreme, and actually qualify to be entertained at least once in a month, then adjust to getting entertained at cheaper places and locales.
There are so many amusement parks that offer entry free for children, and it really does not make a great difference between the paid and the free ones as far as kids are concerned (they only want to have fun). Adult entertainment can also be found cheap at second run movie theaters, where the ticket prices are down by almost 90%. So go and enjoy a second run flick over there.
Reduce your shopping trips
No matter how hard you want to argue with me on this point, but the more you visit the mall or the stores, more will be your tendency to spend and splurge. This holds good even if you think you will rush to the store to get just one item, because then you inevitably end up buying three more and taking many such unplanned trips to the store or mall each month is a definite recipe for budget failure.
Discipline yourself to do a mega shopping trip only once or twice in a month and before your trip, sit down and prepare a detailed list of all the necessities and provisions that you will need, taking care not to forget even a single item.
Collect coupons
Finally, there are the coupons that we all so dearly love. What would we do without them, right? Collecting coupons and getting discounts from them is a method to save money on your shopping that I usually recommend very highly to everyone.
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