The Elemental Approach to Saving Money
Naturally there are some rather obvious places one would start looking if they were looking to save some money, whether this desire to cut down on your expenditure is being applied to your personal life or professionally to your business. All good and well, but the problem is that the popularly touted approaches to saving money aren’t really designed to wean you completely off your dependency on credit.
It’s just how the financial sector works and I’m not one to be entertaining conspiracy theories here, but the logic of it is clear for anyone to see if only they took the time to look at what’s right in front of their eyes. How does a bank make money?
Anyway, now that you know that the advice received from a bank should be taken with a pinch of salt, we need to discuss a much more effective way of saving money.
I’m talking about the elemental approach, which basically entails looking at how you spend your money at the elemental level and often that’s all it takes to uncover ways of spending it better to save more. If you look at your habits on things like your grocery spending, for example, you’ll be surprised at what a simple thing as resolving to buy in bulk can do to save you a few dollars, which adds up to substantial savings over time. Imagine how much you could save if you purchased something essential to your household, like heating oil, in bulk. It might not only prevent running out of oil but could also save you money by reducing your monthly fuel expenditure. The same holds true for anything you have to buy frequently.
In fact, it’s in the little things – like how buying an extra litre of milk perhaps means that you get more of that milk per penny, which in conjunction with the implied fact that you’d have to make fewer trips to the grocery store means that you’re also saving on fuel. Again, these things all add up over time and when it becomes habitual a few thousand dollars can be saved within a matter of a year.
Of course that’s not the whole equation. Another very important part of the equation is that of actually holding on to the money that gets freed up. It’s very easy to spend more in other areas after realising that you have a few extra hundred dollars freed up every month and that would defeat the whole purpose. Get into the habit of first actually holding on to the newly freed up money and then you can start to think of the next logical phase of the mission, which is to put that money to work and invest it so that it can grow.
It can be hard to try and implement some actionable steps in line with this discussed approach to saving money so it’s perhaps pertinent to walk through an example.
Take anything you spend your money on and go through a range of questions which may formulate around it, after which time the answers you come up with may hold the key to saving money, perhaps with the best solution available. For example, going through a full complement of FAQs about Ticks may lead you to a pest control solution that works out much cheaper for you and thus saves you money in just one of many areas in which you spend money.
