How to Cut Down on Your Expenses from Home

There are so many ways you can save money in your day to day life if you just know how.

Of these ways, there are many things you can do to cut down on your expenses from home. Just follow these handy tips and you’ll be saving money in no time.

Saving money is a process that can start with even the smallest task.

This could be not buying that daily morning coffee, or taking public transport and not paying that parking fee.

These are all great ways to save money in everyday life, but how do you save money while you’re sitting in the comfort of your own home?

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In the Kitchen

Eat in for Dinner

Just by staying in for dinner instead of going out to eat for one night, you’re saving money. If you eat out often, staying in and cooking your own meals can significantly reduce your spending costs over a period of time.

This is because when you go out to eat, you’re not only paying for the food but mostly for the service. If you don’t enjoy grocery shopping, you can consider buying in bulk at places like Costco, provided it’s not fresh produce.

It’s also a lot healthier to cook your own meals as you know the exact ingredients used. This may improve your health long-term and prevent some long-term ill effects.

Prepare Your Own Lunch

Just like eating out for dinner a few times a week can add up to a hefty amount, eating lunch outside (while generally cheaper than dinner) can also add up significantly.

If you don’t have time to prepare your lunch for each day in the mornings, you could try meal prepping for a few days at a time.

All you have to do is make a large enough batch of something that can be eaten within a few days and separate the portions into containers.

This way, all you have to do is grab and go in the mornings where you don’t have enough time. While the food may not be 100% fresh, at least you have peace of mind knowing the exact ingredients of the food you’re ingesting.

Make Your Own Coffee at Home

If you’re an avid coffee drinker and purchase one every morning, then you may want to invest in a coffee machine and make your own.

The cost of buying coffee one or multiple times every day can add up to a larger amount that you could be putting into your savings instead.

While a coffee machine may seem like a large purchase at the time, it will have paid for itself before long if you continue to use it consistently.

On Your Laptop

Make a spreadsheet of your expenses

Keeping track of your expenses can help you with identifying the areas where you may be spending too much.

If you can recognise and isolate the specific things that you are either spending too much on or they are unnecessary expenses, you can learn to reduce those spendings and save that bit of money.

This will help you understand the differences between necessary and unnecessary spending and help cut down your future expenses in specific areas.

Plan your spending of the week

Once you’ve recorded your expenses onto a spreadsheet and figured out the areas where you’re spending too much money, you can go on to planning your spending for the following weeks.

It’s a lot easier to overspend on things like groceries if you don’t have a budget in mind and a lot of the time, you may end up purchasing items that you never needed or wanted to buy originally.

Having a budget and a set amount of money allocated to particular weekly expenses can help to prevent impulse buys.

Cancel Any Old Subscriptions

If you spend a lot of your time online, chances are that you’ve signed up for some subscription that you’ve forgotten about.

Whether it’s a subscription for an online newspaper or a paid newsletter for curated content, maybe you used to visit it often but now it’s been long forgotten.

If you want to cut down on your spending, now’s a great time to go through your bank statements and find out what those random monthly payments are for.

You may just find out that you signed up for a few subscription services a few years ago, only to have forgotten them by now.

They can be very costly in the long run, so try to only keep those that you really love and actually use or read.

At Your Desk

Use a Planner

Often, if you keep your goals to yourself and in your head, there’s nothing pushing you to achieve them, especially when it comes to something like controlling your expenses.

Just the act of writing your spending goals down on paper will help you achieve them.

Make sure that you’re writing down achievable goals (handy tip: use my productivity planner down below to help you break down your goals, all you have to do it sign up for my mailing list and you’ll get an email with the free download!)

Read more about the different types of planners at How to Get Organised for School with Planners.

Make Lists

Making lists of the things that you need or want can be a great way of controlling and managing your spending.

You should only list items and services that are necessities on your ‘need’ list such as food and on your ‘want’ list, write down things that you would want once you’re comfortable with your financial situation.

This can also serve as a source of motivation to save up your money so you can treat yourself once in a while.

In Your Living Room

Use Online Workout Classes or Apps that are Available for Free

If you ever find yourself wondering why you have that monthly fee in your credit card statement when you rarely even go to the gym, it’s probably time to cancel that membership and save yourself that bit of money.

Even if you do wake up one day feeling inspired and decide to workout or exercise, you could be doing it for free in the comfort of your own home.

With the widespread popularity of Youtube and various app stores on mobile devices, you could be doing a new workout each day, not having spent a single dime.

The great thing about the abundance of online workout videos is that you can try out new types of workouts whenever you see fit.

Perhaps you want to do a dance workout one day, a boxing-inspired workout the next and yoga the following day.

You can even slow down the videos to a speed you find acceptable if the pace is too high, giving you complete control over your workouts.

Reassess Your Television Habits and Pay TV

If you subscribe to pay television services such as Foxtel and you realise that you aren’t watching it much, you may want to consider cancelling the service and entertain yourself with something free such as free channels on tv or online video services such as YouTube.

A lot of people watch most of their entertainment via the internet on their laptops now, so if you haven’t switched on the television for a month, then it’s probably time to let go of pay tv.

Consider Switching From Printed Books to Ebooks

Books are in a way, an investment. They can either appreciate or depreciate in value depending on the copy you purchase.

If you’re an avid reader and you read many books per month, then it can get very expensive to keep buying printed copies of the books on your to-read list.

If you’re not sure if you will even like the book you want to read, then it may be worth it to purchase and read the ebook first and then decide if you want a physical copy of it.

Ebooks are usually a lot cheaper than printed copies, so you get to save money by not buying those books that you have no interest in reading again.

Read more at Paperbacks vs Ebooks | Which One is Worth Your Money?