In our last post, we already addressed some creative ways for saving money with your family. Now we want to further address useful ways on how to effectively save money by just a few changes with your daily spending habits.
We, Quick Money Saver (QMS), do suggest the following 6 spending habit changes to make your money-saving dreams come true. These spending habit changes cover wide range of areas including transportation, health care, insurance, communication services, credit cards and so on.
Six Important Methods For Cutting Family Expenditures and Expenses
(i) Price Comparison.
Price discovery is the first step and perhaps the most important process for any money-saving tasks. Once start aiming at saving money, it is always important to act like an aggressive shopper and better develop it as a daily habit. Nowadays, the internet world makes it a lot easier to check product reviews and compare product prices, while you do not have to spend much time and money traveling from shop to shop. We, Quick Money Saver (QMS), do propose that big ticket items (such as health and beauty aids, cleaning consumable products, weekly groceries, etc) should deserve a more frequent check and a closer price comparison study.
(ii) Transportation Costs.
Transportation should no doubt be one of the key daily expenses for most families. Transportation costs include not just purchase of expensive vehicles, maintenance and operational costs with high gasoline prices are also great concerns. Is carpooling a good idea for any family member(s) on perhaps a part-time basis? Combining trips and errands can also reduce total travel frequency and thus save money. There are numerous ways to cut down gasoline costs as well. For example, you can take advantage of discounts or any special programs when buying gasoline. You must also take note on remaining vigilant for better gas prices. Furthermore, tiring inflation properly or following regular car maintenance schedule should also help you attain maximum gas mileage favorably for your own vehicle.
(iii) Insurance Costs.
Go tuning up your own insurance policies should also help you save more money. Run a serious check on no matter your medical insurance, life insurance, home insurance, or car(auto) insurance plans. Do you remember when did you lastly compare insurance rates for yourself, your vehicles or home? Other useful methods to cut insurance costs are to use the same company intentionally for multiple insurance coverage (eg.: for your vehicles and home), or to raise your overall insurance deductible level. Once you start searching around, do make sure to alert your current insurance company too. Sometimes insurance company may offer a better rate for keeping current customers.
(iv) Credit Card Costs.
Reducing credit card costs should be another critical money-saving and debt-cutting technique. That said, you have to find out the best possible credit card issuer with low (or even zero) annual fee, low late payment fee, low interest rate, low cash advance fee as well as low overlimit fee etc. Search around until you make a perfect choice, and then cancel any rejected credit cards issued by greedy banks. Without proper control of credit card usage, one will never succeed in saving money because credit card related financial charges can be very costly for any late payment.
(v) Communication Costs.
Another important expense for most families should be the daily communication costs, including smart phones, internet access, satellite television or cable TV, local call or long distance telephone service etc. Review thoughtfully your total communication expenditures and then cut out the redundant services that you may not need. Should a few of these communication expenses be bundled to save some money? Should there be better service plans available for your real needs? Carefully answer such questions will help bring more smart ideas for cutting expensive communication costs and achieving final money-saving goals.
(vi) Health Care Costs.
Healthcare is definitely not the best area where you shall consider cutting expenses, but still you may save money by just taking advantage of discount programs or special offers. For instance, many employers can offer a FSA (Flexible Spending Account) where you may save money before taxes effectively from out-of-pocket medical expenditures such as eye care, dental expenses, prescription or nonprescription drugs etc.
We, Quick Money Saver (QMS), do recommend you to start taking time reviewing your total family expenditures and expenses in each of above 6 areas. These spending habit changes and money-saving methods are indeed neither crazy nor highly exceptional. In fact, just very little alterations with spending habits should soon make a real difference for your future household budget. At the end of the day, you can improve your whole family's quality of life just by applying a few reasonable changes in monthly household budget.
