Excellent Tips for Saving Money

Do you know where a lot of your money goes? Impulse buying can be the cause of spending way more money than you had ever intended. We have a new saying in our household that has been popular for a while. It is "Do we need this item?" The key here is do we need? People tend to convince themselves that they need such and such an item.

Just ask yourself if I didn't put this $20 dollar item in the cart today, would I survive without it tomorrow? Most people, if being really honest with themselves would answer yes I could do without it. Just think if you shop about once a week and didn't put four weeks of those extra items in your cart, you darn well may come out with an extra $80 dollars at the end of the month.

Where are some other places that you spend money that are just nickel and dimming you to death? Take a few minutes to study your daily routine during the work week. How many of you stop on your way to work and pick up an extra cup of coffee for anywhere from $1.00 to $3.50 a cup? Many offices provide you with a free cup of coffee at work. Waite the extra 15 minutes it takes to get your free cup at work.

Let's talk about going out for lunch during the work week. I bet there are a huge number of people that never give it much thought. Once upon a time when I worked for a big company, as in (I had a regular pay check), I didn't think anything of going out for lunch every day. It was just part of my routine.

Maybe it's time to seriously look at your routine with today's economy. I figured that I blew about $3.50 to $6.00 per day for lunch. That means during an average month I was shelling out $70.00 to $120.00.

What's funny about this is years ago when I was buying my lunch, I never once got out a calculator to see what I really did spend. You can save a lot on your work week lunches by allowing yourself ample time to pack a lunch. A sandwich and a piece of fruit can be made and packed up quickly and inexpensively.

How much have your heating and cooling bills been costing you? Plenty I'll bet. My suggestion to you is not to keep cranking the thermometer up on your heating system during the winter; it's costing you big bucks. Especially if your heater is running on propane. Our propane bill was just sky rocketing to where we could not afford it any more.

I went online and did a bunch of research on small economical floor heaters. We purchased a nice economical model that was light weight and could be moved from room to room as we needed it. We got even more mileage out of the heater by blocking the entrances to the living room with drapes to keep the heat sealed in the living room and not letting it escape to other parts of the house that were not in use..

So, let's talk about those cooling bills for your home. Some of you are probably fortunate enough not to have to cool your home during the summer months, but many of us our stuck having to pay for some sort of cooling. First off I would recommend some box fans to be used through out your home. They really get the air moving and you can direct them right at you if you have a room that you work in all the time.

If you have an air conditioner, resist the temptation to turn it down, it will run your bill up really fast in no time. Also dress appropriately for the summer heat. Make sure your wearing some cool shorts and light t-shirts. We are fortunate to have a swamp cooler, which is cheaper to run than an air conditioner.

A couple of years ago we began to only turn the swamp cooler on during the very hottest parts of the day to save what ever we could. Don't make the mistake of cranking it on ever morning out of habit, your just wasting money in the early morning when you don't really need it.

I hope my ideas have given you a new view point of some very simple common sense things that you can do to save money, such as putting a stop to impulse buying, packing your own lunch and being responsible for lowering your heating and cooling bills. You can even make a game out of it each month and keep track of how much you're saving each month. When you see the numbers you will feel that much better and feel that you're more in control of your purse strings.