Pressure purchase

Using a cell phone plan that does not suit your needs, or paying for extra services that you do not use can be costing you money each month.

Soft drinks have one of the highest markups of any restaurant item and thus provide lower value for your money.

You do not need a professional mechanic to sort out many of the simpler car problems.

There are all sorts of easy and helpful instruction videos available to repair or maintain your car for cheap.

We are more susceptible to buying stuff we don’t need when we are hungry. The same goes for a leisurely grocery trip. 

Make your shopping trip when you have other errands to do and a limited time to do them. You will be less likely to spend time exploring and picking up items that you did not originally plan to purchase.

Carpool to work if you can to significantly reduce wear and tear on your car, save on gas, and take advantage of carpool lanes that might make it easier to get to work.

Check at least once a month to keep the tires on your vehicle properly inflated. Doing so can improve your gas mileage.

Refinance your home or automobile at a lower rate to save money over the life of the loan and lower your monthly payment.

If your student loans are locked in at a high-interest rate, figure out whether it makes sense to consolidate all or some of them.

Write it down when you’ve gone over your budget. The negativity you feel will help prevent you from overspending more or doing it again. Just think of this step as damage control.

If you try to deprive yourself too much, you’ll binge later and throw all your hard work out the window. 

A spending binge can set you back far more than treating yourself occasionally, so go for the occasional minor splurge. Just keep your treats within your spending limits and you’ll be fine.

1. Gather Some Financial Information: gather a detailed list of your income and expenses.
2. Select a Budgeting Method: figure out how you’ll budget your money to meet your most pressing financial goals.
3. Create Your Budget: tally up all your expenses and income to see where you stand and allocate expenses.
4. Execute Your Plan: you can use a notebook, pen and paper, a spreadsheet or an online software.
5. Reward Yourself: you can work a small percentage into your budget to treat yourself each month.

This method suggests that you allocate 70 percent of your income to expenses, 20 percent to savings, and the remaining 10 percent to debt.

70:20:10 may work for someone with a healthy emergency fund and minimal debt.

Popcorn is a great, healthy snack.

Instead of buying popcorn in microwave bags, one can also pop corn at home for much less than the bagged kind.

Bottled water drinkers give 3 main reasons for their choice: 

• Taste: Many claim their tap water tastes bad, but a simple pitcher filter can probably fix it.
• Safety: Bottled water is not necessarily safer than public water sources. A high-end filter can remove impurities from tap water.
• Convenience. A decent filter and a reusable bottle or stainless-steel flask can replace bottled water.

• Use tools like financial books, podcasts, and online savings groups.
• Avoid indulging in unnecessary expenses daily, reducing them or finding healthier and more affordable alternatives.
• Cultivate a healthier attitude and the right mindset towards your finances.
• Know that small, practical, money-saving actions can compound into better living for you in the long run.

There are plenty of financial and budgeting tools and apps that can help us manage our funds, keep track of our expenses, and trigger us when we are off-track.

Simple hacks like carrying a debit card or cash instead of a credit card, or deleting our card details from shopping sites can help us avoid spending impulsively.

A Reverse Budget looks at your current lifestyle and makes slow improvements over time until things are sufficiently better.

We look at how much we are spending eating out, commuting and daily indulgences and see the past quarter trends using your credit card and bank account spending.

When you look at our past spending patterns and trends, you can select one or two categories to focus and use one of these two approaches:

1. Tackle the high-dollar impact areas like housing, fuel, food, or healthcare, and see if those can be cut down to some extent.
2. Focus first on your 'disposable money' expenses like eating out, and entertainment and curbing those, gradually.

We all have habits ingrained in our lives. Most of our good habits (if any) take us to eventual long-term success, and our bad habits take our time, health, happiness and money. Make a list of what all you do as a habit daily and see which ones are good and which ones are not.

Habits like spending hours on social media, binge shopping, and lying on the couch are a few examples of bad habits.

Life is unpredictable, but planning is still important. Use your phone's calendar and to-do list, or install an app to create daily and weekly plans:

• Plan even for small errands.
• Keep in mind that things take longer than you expect.
• Block chunks of time, or an entire day for a task.