8 Ways You Can Save Money during a Lockdown
When you are on lockdown, your movement is partially restricted, making it challenging to earn an extra income. Therefore, you want to ensure you use the little money you have the right way. Impulse buying during a lockdown can easily harm your pocket.
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Apply these eight tips if you want to ensure you save money when you spend most of your time indoors during a lockdown.
- Create a budget
A budget is an intention to spend. Therefore, when you create your household budget, you can spend your money on useful items. You will avoid impulse buying when working on a tight budget. With a strict budget, you can track your spending every day.
When the paycheck comes in, you should ensure you have a clear budget. You will stick for a month or a week. Only buy items like food and clothing based on your account. For food and other consumables, you can create a weekly budget and shop in bulk to save some money. Plan your meals in advance so that you track how much you spend on food.
If you don’t like writing, you can install budgeting apps on your phone and use them to draft your budget.
- Buy a coin jar
A coin jar can help you save a lot of money. You can keep all your loose coins from shopping on this jar and wait for the reaping time. Because most people hardly count coins after shopping, they are likely to ignore the value. Once you accumulate coins to the brim of the coin jar, you will be surprised by how much you’ve saved in just a month.
- Cut on junk and snacks
Eating snacks and junk food is the last thing you want to do when you spend most of the time indoors. Junk food costs you a lot of money and affects your health. Most people eat snacks when they are already full – recreational eating.
Junk food is expensive and less nutritious. If you want to save some bucks on quality food, you should start cooking your meals at home. Avoid eating at a fast-food joint and prepare your real meals. You can learn some online food recipes if cooking is not your thing.
- Maintain a cash flow
Most people lack basic financial literacy, which makes it challenging to plan and manage their income. However, it is easy to maintain the correct cash flow and ensure your money serve you well.
The rule of thumb is to ensure you don’t spend more than you earn – crazy, right? Well, most people budget more than they have, which leaves them broke before the next paycheck. If you want to ensure you don’t run broke, you should not plan to spend more than your income will be or spend on what you don’t need.
- Buy in bulk
Buy all non-perishable items like groceries in bulk. Do not hoard. Instead of buying a small tin of cottage cheese, you can go for a large one to save money and plastic. If you have a freezer at home, you can also shop for perishable items like fruits and vegetables for a weekly budget. Learn some food preservation hacks to avoid wastage.
- Cancel all active subscriptions
Before the lockdown, you probably subscribed to some premium utility tools. Now that you are no longer using some of this productivity tool since you are indoors most of the time, you should unsubscribe and save some bucks.
It is needless to subscribe to tools that are not adding value to your life during the lockdown. During the lockdown, the only subscription tools you need are your fitness app, budgetary tool, and TV streaming subscription.
- Create extra income
When things seem to be getting out of hand and you are running low of cash, you can think of doubling your hustle and income. During the lockdown, you can save money by creating extra income. Start by selling all the extra stuff in your house like clothes that you don’t wear anymore, dead electronics, and spoilt utensils.
Another simple way to make money is by renting your extra room through Airbnb or selling your parking spot if you live close to the city. You can also pet-sit for your neighbors and make some extra coins.
- Round up all payments
You can round up all your electronic payments to the next dollar and save the extra amount on your account. Some banks offer this type of feature on your current account. It is a simple way of saving money without realizing how much effort you make.
Final thoughts
Saving money involves a lot. It takes some level of discipline to save your money, and that means you must remain persistent. Suppress your urge to spend money during a lockdown by applying these five tips.