20 Frugal & Money Saving Tips 💰 These Changed My Life

everything is crazy expensive right now like it's nuts out there so I wanted to share with you some real life tips to not only save thousands of dollars but to change your mindset about money I feel the need to start by saying I was broke for a long time like I not great with money and I was homeless as a teen up until the age of 19 and then even when I did have an apartment I worked three jobs I worked anywhere from 60 to 70 hours a week going from one job right to the next like I wake woke up worked all day worked till bed woke up and did it again even worked weekends and I was always broke I lived paycheck to paycheck I was in debt up to my eyeballs and I had to claimed bankruptcy at 24 and I didn't even own a car or have school debt I completely transformed my finances and the truth is it had nothing to do with earning more money that's what I always thought like you have to earn more money to have more money but that was totally a financial lie so I want to talk about the truth like what is really the difference between people who have Financial Freedom and people who are living paycheck to paycheck so the first and most important thing that I did to transform my financial situation was change my mindset about money I always thought money was something that you earned to buy stuff and you do have to do that you got to pay rent buy food but I I didn't think money was good for anything else except to get stuff so anytime I got extra money I would just buy extra stuff until I realized that money is a tool to make you more money we're going to talk more about what I mean by that in a second but that mindset shift to look at a dollar as the potential for that being a $150 or $2 or $2.50 instead of what I could buy for a dollar that changed everything the second thing that transformed my financial future was I got really mad about paying interest I was in debt because I had credit card debt and Consumer Debt and I was paying a monthly payment which wasn't even covering the interest I could never get ahead they would just increase my you know credit card amount that I could spend and I was never catching up and then before I knew it my payments my minimum monthly payments were what I made a month I was paying every month for stuff I had bought a year ago and I was paying 10 times more than I actually bought the thing for because I was given the big fat Bankers interest and it's disgusting and it should be illegal and when I really saw it and got mad about it I refused to ever pay interest again now I'm not counting a mortgage into that but no credit card debt everything's paid off I will not give a dime to a fat billionaire who's like tricking me with credit cards ever again and you shouldn't either probably the most important thing that I ever did was pay myself first 10% of my paycheck and I didn't have a lot there was a point where I was making $45 a day babysitting and I put $10 away into a savings account I was broke broke I needed that $10 but I would just go without and I would eat ramen or craft dinner or whatever it was and Joe was putting away 10% of all of his paychecks and we did did not have it okay we didn't have it but it was a priority and it was gone immediately into a savings account that we couldn't touch unless we went to the bank so for emergencies it was there but there was no impulse being able to touch it and there was times I cried and I wanted it and I was like let's just please can we just go on a vacation or please can I just buy this one thing and I'm so glad that the answer was no because that 10% turned into $5,000 and then $10,000 and then a Year's worth of money it turned into safety saving 10% of your money off the bat is something you have to do to change your financial status the next thing we did now we only did this for a short amount of time so don't cringe but any bonus money we got we put into savings I remember one year Joe got $5,000 bonus check from his job we were like newly parents we were broke we had no furniture we had like a beat up old minivan we had one vehicle and I was like $5,000 we're going to do like this could change our lives and Joe was like we are putting this in the bank we are not spending one dime and I was crushed but honestly we didn't anticipate we were going to have it like it was like bonus money it's not like we were going without by not spending it cuz we didn't know we were going to get it in the first first place so saving that just jumped us crazy far ahead and I'm so freaking thankful for having the self-discipline that he had the self-discipline to do that because saving the bonus money lifechanging so here's where the magic really happens once you have a little bit of a nest egg now you can invest that money and your money starts making you money and we're not talking gambling here and mutual funds I'm not loving those I'm talking about a high interest savings account where you can get like 5% right now that's amazing or like an index linked account something super safe that you can take your little nest egg and put it in so your money starts making you money because compound interest is your friend man just like before I was paying interest on interest on interest and always broke to credit card companies now those guys are paying me interest on interest on interest so you just sit it there and let it grow and keep adding to it and it's Amaze balls how fast it grows how your money starts making you money it's crazy pants so those are the most important things other things that you can do obviously make a budget if you don't have a budget so know exactly what's coming in versus What expenses are going out that's important but what I like having is an app on my phone that kind of tracks my spending and alerts me when I'm spending too much I use TD bank and they have TD spend it it's with my bank it's a free thing and I get an alert anytime I spend money or if I'm going over certain budgets super handy to keep you on track and make sure you're not overspending you can also live off cash which is something a lot of people do so you know don't even use your cards and just give yourself so much money for food and fun and maybe clothing each week have the cash and when it's gone it's gone and something I definitely recommend that you try is reading Finance books listening to finance podcast watching Finance YouTube videos it shifts something in your brain it helps you break that scarcity cycle and it helps you just be educated about money which I was not at all which is why I was struggling because I didn't think about money like people who have money think about money and just shifting that changed the game and the final like mindset shift when it comes to stuff is looking at buying bigger purchases or even smaller purchases secondhand do you know like as soon as you drive a brand new car off the lot you lose like $55,000 like bye that money is gone so we always buy vehicles that are maybe coming off a year or a twoyear lease we're saving so much money anything that's like even clothes I shop a Goodwill still to this day even though I can afford not to because why not anytime you can buy secondhand and not look at it as like oh I have to buy secondhand but look at it like I'm saving so much money like that mindset shift puts money in your pocket I rambled a lot so I'm going to jump right into the tips 10 tips to save you thousands of dollars starting with a 7-Day no spend challenge this is fun we can all say we want to do better and save more money but doing a no spend like you are not allowed to spend money for 7 days will instantly save you a ton of cash so go grocery shopping like on a Sunday and then Monday to the next Sunday you are not allowed to spend even one dime make sure you fill up your car with gas before but this is like fun and challenging and if you do this one week out of every month you will save thousands of dollars this year the next thing you can do is really look at your food budget because over 25% of your income goes to food it's like $6 for a loaf of bread here in Canada it's bonka donks so meal planning just writing out your meals for the week making sure you're not getting fast food or like over buying and have things rot that saves you a ton of money and eat from your freezer I do this thing where I go to the grocery store and I buy a bunch of meat on sale and then I stick it in the freezer to die pulling that out and meal planning around your frozen food will save you a ton of money also just having meatless Mondays will save you $10 every Monday just cutting out meat so having pasta or having beans just not eating meat that's like 40 or 50 bucks a month you're going to save having one day of no meat I have an 11-year-old boy so I was noticing the biggest thing on my grocery list was school snacks taking one day week to make Rice Krispie squares to make cookies like to make kids snacks will save you hundreds of dollars on your monthly grocery bill I recently like evaluated my subscription so I went into my Apple Store to see what I was buying every month and it was like all these stupid apps I didn't know that I had signed up for or I had signed up for a trial and not realized also had two Disney plus subscriptions for some reason for like a really long time you're you'd be surprised like I want you to evaluate your subscriptions you may be secretly spending money that you don't even know that you are and did you know you could ask your service providers to save you money we called our cell phone company we were adding a cell phone to it and I was just like is there anything you can do like this seems really high and they were like yeah we can drop you down to a a lower plan and nothing you still have the same amount of gigabytes or whatever and I was like why didn't you just do this from day one friend but calling and being nice to your service providers and just asking if there's any way that they could help you save a little bit of money you're going to be shocked at how many of them are like yeah here let's lower your plan or let's do this for you or let's help you out people are nice you just got to ask you can instantly lower your electricity bill just by washing all your clothes on cold that is where most of the energy goes it's like heating the water people get like ragy when I say this you wash your towels on cold that's disgusting haven't died yet friends and I'm saving mad cash so give it a try also washing your clothes less often you can use the same towel for like days wear the same pajamas for days hoodies jeans all of those type of things you don't have to wash them you can wear them multiple times especially kids my kids will like have a shower and just leave the towel on the floor installing Hooks and telling them that they have to use that towel for days has saved us so much money on the washer and the dryer at my old house my dishwasher would stop draining and be broken like all the time instead of calling a plumber I just Googled it and I fixed that myself friends myself I've taken apart and learned how to fix roombas and vacuums and the dryer wasn't drying and I found that there was like a reset button on the side super easy took Me 3 minutes to fix the dryer and it's never broke since and I did all of this myself so if I can do it you can do it to YouTube University you will learn to do things that you would otherwise have to pay thousands of dollars for and I promise you it's easier than you think I should probably say YouTube University isn't actually a thing it's just it's just YouTube videos I call it you don't Google YouTube University just watch YouTube videos okay this is it that's what I got I wanted to share these tips with you because they change my life honestly like they changed everything and I'm hoping that you find this helpful I know what it's like to be struggling financially I know the fear and the just the depression that comes with never ever having enough money but here's what I'm going to say if you try these things and it's not going to be easy it's it's going to take willpower and discipline and it's going to suck a little bit but if you can stick with this for a month for two months for a year you're going to look back and be amazed at how far you've come you will change your financial situation you will have money that will start making you money and that is what Financial Freedom is all about so thank you guys so much and I'll see you next time thank you guys so much for those of you who have stayed to the end so this is ironic except that's not the right definition but um I'm talking about saving money but the end story I want to share with you is I just went to a concert with Abby I went to an Olivia Rodrigo concert that wasn't saving money but let me tell you stuff got crazy there so we got pit tickets which means you stand in a pit at the front the Pit's only so big so you have to show up really early right to wait in line for your chance to get close to the front of the pit so we showed up at just after noon and there was already probably 50 people in line some people had been there since 7 a.m. we did not get inside until 700 p.m. they let us in little sections at a time whoever was first got to go in first they get to be right up front they deserve it they waited all day and then the next row and the next row we were second row and it was amazing we were tired because at this point we had been waiting hours and hours and hours and hours but worth it right right before the concert started a lot of people just showed up without waiting in line and literally pushed in front pushed people out of the way to get to be in the front some were teenagers which I'm like okay some were grownups okay grownup parents with their children shoving people out of the way because they wanted to be at the very front so I hate confrontation listen if you if you butt in front of me in line I will say nothing if I'm at a restaurant they bring me the wrong food I'm going to eat it with my with a smile on my face I will never say anything to anyone because it is my worst nightmare but I felt a need to protect not only like ourselves but those other people who had waited 12 hours you can't let the bullies just because you're meaner and Ruder doesn't mean you get to just you know get the best seat that's not how life works man stop being rude so I was like excuse me you got to go to you got to go to the back because they were there first and that's not nice we all were like getting a little confidence like no friend get to the back we let some of the children but in front of us then this mom came up literally shoved to get past me she had her daughter with her and she's like excuse me I paid a lot of money to be here excuse me I want to be in the front and I was like I also So Paid we all paid the same to be here and some of these people have been waiting 12 hours we've been waiting 7 hours you can't just push your way past that's not nice and she's like and I quote shoving and pushing is how this works get out of my way so then I was like well I'm not moving and I locked arms with this other lady beside me and this other lady beside me and we became the pit police and we started elbow get back get back protecting all the people in front of us which most of them were children from these rabid crazy people who were just going to Chuck them out of the way so they could have the front lesson here is if you get pit tickets you wait in line it's a first come first serve thing second lesson is sometimes it's okay to stand up for yourself it felt uncomfortable I'll tell you I did not want to be the pit police and shoving and making Children Cry and being like nobody's budding don't be rude but I did it and everybody had a better time and it was safer because of it so high five for standing up for yourself let's all try it maybe next time I'm at a restaurant and they bring me the wrong meal I might say excuse me I didn't I didn't didn't actually I didn't actually order this I probably will never do that but you never know this was step one see you guys next time

Channel: Clutterbug

Views: 320,925

Keywords: how to organize, clutterbug, organizing tips, ideas, home organization, organize, how to declutter, simplify life, clutter free, frugal living, frugal living tips, how to save money, save money, frugal hacks, frugal living tips and ideas, frugal living hacks, money saving tips, money saving hacks, saving money, on a budget, day-to-day savings, how to save money fast, living on a budget, money-saving hacks, daily savings, frugal fit mom, how to stop shopping, frugal tips

Id: BIibwcA48jg

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024