Gain and Lose Pounds!
Here are another three money saving ideas and one money making one. I practice what I preach here, I’m a guitar teacher!
1. Cancel your gym membership
If you pay your £40 a month by direct debit and you use the gym three times a week, great. If not, cancel your membership immediately. You’ll soon save enough to buy your own bike and, if you’re so inclined, a rowing machine. Consider running home from work three times a week. It’s free.
Here are 3 more money saving tips I have picked up recently. The first two have a bit of a pyschological edge to them; how much stuff do we really need? why are we spending? The third is a little bit of common sense…
1. Ask yourself: do I really need this?
Imagine this. It’s lunchtime and you’ve got an hour to kill. You find yourself in a department store and there’s a sale on. You pick up a beautifully packaged selection of barbecue tools and associated garden paraphernalia. And it’s half price. Now, stop! Ask yourself: Do I really need this? Exactly. Now, put it down and walk away.
A couple of posts ago I was talking about sourcing cheap CDs online, using Amazon or Ebay. The plan being, to rip the contents onto your ipod or mp3 player (for personal use of course, I’m not advocating piracy here).
An even more cost effective route would be utilise the facilities provided by your local council, and join the library. Most libraries these days have a large range of CDs available for lending out, for a small nominal fee.
Continuing on from the last post, here are three more thrifty tips, this time related to food.
Our parents and grandparents had loads of sayings, like “A penny saved is a penny earned” or “If the wind changes you’ll stay like that”.
They also had a lot less debt (sorry, credit) as the older generation tended to save up for things, rather than whip out the VISA.
So the concept of saving up for something you want is pretty much out of fashion, or has been until the recent meltdown in the (sorry, debt) industry. However, thrift as a state of mind is worth persuing as saving money really is the same as earning more, whether you use it for life’s luxuries or to pay off already accumulated debt.
A few posts ago I suggested a quick way to raise money was to sell unwanted stuff on Ebay.
If you use Ebay on a regular basis you soon find that fees begin to mount on stuff that doesn’t sell. One way around this is to set up your own shop. FOR FREE.
This option works best if you have many similar items to sell, such as clothes, toys, hobby items, or whatever. I have been experimenting with this for a few months now, as I wanted to test out an online website package from Terapad (this is not an affiliate link, just a genuine tip!).
This third suggestion is a little out of the ordinary, and really only applies to readers in the UK (as far as I know).
If you live in a house with a driveway, why not rent out your parking space?
A company called Cheap and Easy Parking sell parking online (at the minute just around the London area) using private driveways and car parks. The parkers pay £10 per day and the company takes 30% leaving the driveway owner with £7 a day. This may not sound like a lot, but if you think about it, you have a product that you can sell again and again, every day, and if your house is near a tube station, or location of interest you could earn a decent regular income.
