The pandemic has hit some of us harder than others. If you’re one of those who have lost your job or found your hours cut back, you need ways to stretch what money you still have coming in as far as possible. When you find you have more month left at the end of your money rather than more money left at the end of your month, it’s time to start cutting back. Below are a few tips to help you save money and help you and your family financially weather this pandemic.
Meal Planning
This is a tip that can save you money and help you eat healthier. When grocery shopping, if you’re someone who goes into the store and buys whatever suits your fancy, get out of that habit right now. With coronavirus, we are all eating at home more. This is already a tremendous savings over all the eating out we typically do when working. You can make it even more so by planning your meals and going to the store with a shopping list in hand. This way, you’ll only buy what you need for the meals you plan to eat for the week.
Get a Prepaid Phone
Phone contracts can be a good deal if you regularly have a high volume of calls and internet usage. During the pandemic, however, you may find your phone usage has dropped a bit. If you are not working for now, your volume of work-related calls will drop to nothing. You should search for a better phone deal. You may find that a prepaid phone could be your best bet. If your phone usage is fluid right now, these enable you to pay for minutes and data only when you really need them.
Find Free Entertainment
Many of us are paying for subscriptions to multiple streaming services every month. Individually, they’re pretty reasonably priced, but if you subscribe to enough of them, it can add up. You might want to cut down on some of these, and check out all the free entertainment options available online.
Museums have virtual tours you can explore online. This includes the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC and London’s British Museum. There’s an incredible amount of free content you can check out on Archive.org. As it says on its own home page, “Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.”
Use Coupons and Coupon Codes
You may be used to a lifestyle where you’d rarely bother with coupons or coupon codes, but the pandemic may have you financially distressed. Whenever shopping online at a website, don’t check out through your shopping cart until you’ve Googled “[name of online store] coupon codes.” There may be free shipping if you ordered above a certain amount or who knows how many dollars off if you’ve placed a certain dollar value order. You’ll never know unless you check. Also, check for any weekly deals at your local store where you go grocery shopping.
Get an Expense Tracker App
It’s hard to save money when you’re not even sure how much money you’re spending in the first place. Achieving any goal, including saving money, requires being able to measure where you are relative to where you want to be. An expense tracking app can be invaluable in helping with this. There are a number of excellent apps to choose from. Some may be more for small businesses, but there are others that are good for simple consumer expense tracking.
