Everyday Money

10 Places to Find Money
1. Stop spending coins. Collect them. Only pay with notes.
2. Supermarket coupons (don’t spend the $1 that you have just saved!)
3. Cancel SKY TV.
4. Take lunch to work.
5. Limit magazine subscriptions.
6. Increase your insurance deductibles.
7. Lower your thermostat.
8. Set up automatic bill paying (saves money on stamps) and timely payment can give you discounts.
9. Reduce or eliminate ATM and fee-charging credit cards.
10. Buy less coffee (Latte, Cappuccino).

The Latte Effect
Gina, who is 29, came to see me some months ago, she earned a salary of $53,000, and had paid off half of her mortgage, but claimed that she couldn’t save money. She said she hated budgeting although she wanted to save for her retirement. She “wanted to start enjoying life now”. After some discussion we decided that rather than doing a budget we would do an “analysis of her current spending patterns”; if we found areas we could comfortably prune she would focus on those and save the excess. This was our list of expenses we could attack and the monthly savings we could make:

Savings Per Month
Lattes (reduce by 50%) $75.00
Dining out (reduce by 50%) $100.00
Alcohol (reduce by 50%) $57.00
Cigarettes (stop smoking) $170.00
Total: $402.00
This adds up to $4,824 per annum.
Gina became quite excited by this, she had been wanting to quit smoking anyway and this analysis gave her an added incentive. She has stuck to her plan for seven months now, “Saving”, she said “is quite addictive, I have found that I am becoming much more aware of spending in other areas and I’m really enjoying looking for bargains. It’s quite funny – I used to think budgeting was repressive.”