Living frugally is partly to do with knowing how much money and resources you have at any one time. The other side of it is understanding how best to utilize these resources. Think about living frugally like baking a cake. You will have a certain amount of ingredients, but it will only give you the right result if you put them in the right quantities. And living frugally is not necessarily about cutting back on every aspect of your life. It is about having the balance just right so you are able to live the life you want without feeling like you are depriving yourself. So with this in mind, what are the essential ingredients to living frugally?
Maximizing the Use of Your Home
Your home is the biggest expense, which means you’ve got to maximize the use of it effectively. You can switch off the light every time you leave a room, but this can foster a cheapskate mindset. You want to enjoy your life, and so you’ve got to think about other ways to reduce the cost of your home. One of the first things to address is your mortgage. If you are paying more than you think, you’ve got to see if you can refinance your mortgage. You can click here to see if refinancing your mortgage is worthwhile for your situation.
But also using items like smart meters can help you keep track of your expenditure around your home. Because we don’t realize how much we are paying for utilities until the bill comes around, this becomes one of those habits that we need to break swiftly. Learning to keep track of your expenditure in your home is the best way to start conserving your finances, or putting them in more useful areas. When you start to realize how much you are spending on your home, it can be a massive eye-opener but this can be the best way for you to start living frugally.
Cutting Back on Your Heating (without Feeling Worse for It)
One of the biggest cliches is, when we’re trying to save money at home, but it’s freezing, we know hear echoes of our parent, usually our father, saying the immortal words, “put a sweater on.” But it’s important that the concept of being warm is relatively new. When you think back 200 years, we didn’t have heating like we do now, nor did we have insulation. And so if we think that the best way to keep our home warm is by investing in insulation, and having an extra layer on, it can make a massive difference to the quality of our life, and our bills.
Investing in insulation is important, but also realizing that there are things you can do to save money on the heating in your home. There is a little trick where you can light a candle, and, provided the space is small enough, it can heat a space. Think about your science class, and the idea of a convection current, where the heat will gradually go around the room, as long as the windows and doors are shut. And when you are insulating your home properly, you are not using as many utilities, which means that you are cutting down on your bills.
Heating is a luxury we didn’t have a long time ago, and it’s also important to remember that there are benefits to being cold. Of course, it’s important to get the balance right, but if you are a little bit cold, put a sweater on!
Making Sure You Are Being Frugal With Your Food
To do this properly, you’ve got to look at two areas: the foods you eat, but also your mindset towards impulse buying. If you buy things on impulse when you are out in the supermarket, this is why your food bills are so high. But if you start to go into your local store with a list of items you need to make meals, and you stick to this rigidly, you are going to be well within your budget.
It’s important to think about nutrition as something that’s not necessarily expensive, although you can buy organic fruits and vegetables, it’s important to make your food go longer, by filling it out with things like rice, which is an incredibly cheap and healthy ingredient. Also, batch cooking is one of the best practices you can ever undertake. Batch cooking means you start to use every single piece of food in your fridge, make meals that are full of vegetables and goodness, but then you are freezing them, nothing goes to waste.
When you start to think about the cheap meals that go further, you will be incredibly surprised as to how much flavor you can put into them. The key to eating frugal meals that taste good is all about the seasoning. Always have your spice cupboard fully stocked, because this will make a massive difference.
Getting Into the Habit of Using Less Gradually
This is very difficult, especially when we need to have a long relaxing shower, but when we start to get into the mindset of using a little bit less, this will help us in the long run. Take the simple practice of brushing your teeth. Do you need to use as much toothpaste as you do? Dentists say we only need to use a pea-sized amount, so if you completely load your toothbrush with toothpaste, you are being particularly wasteful.
So instead, think about using 10% less than what you normally do, and remember that habits take at least 21 days to embed. So when you start to do this one little bit, you can move on to others, such as showering for 10% less time. When you start to get into habits like this, it will make a massive difference. And the great thing is that you won’t even notice it!
Living frugally is about cutting back on your expenses, but it’s also about mindset as well. If you really want to live frugally, but without feeling like you are cutting back on the essentials, these are some of the best approaches to save money on household bills and save your sanity!
