You may be wasting money in extremely common but often overlooked ways. Below, there are 10 things that you should stop wasting your money on them.
1. Buying Brand Name Products
Store and generic brands have to be one of the most underused ways to save money across a range of products. From food to skincare, to over-the-counter medicine, chances are your local grocery or drug store has a store brand for them or sells a generic version. Check the labels; in most cases, the ingredients are pretty much identical, but you don’t have to spend money on the big brand names.
Also, if you have prescriptions, you can sometimes ask your pharmacist for the generic version of your medications. They work just the same as the brand name and can save you quite a bit of cash if your co-pay is high.
2. Paying Someone Else for Simple Car Repairs
Basic car maintenance is something fewer and fewer of us learn, perhaps due to our increasingly busy lives and the preference for someone else to do maintenance work. But, assuming you own a car, money is flying out of your wallet if you take your car to a shop for every little complication.
Several of the simpler car problems don’t take a professional mechanic to fix, and even routine maintenance tasks can be performed at home. The great thing about the Internet age for car-owners is that there are all sorts of easy and helpful instruction videos out there.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can just start whacking at your engine with a socket wrench, but you definitely have more ability to tune up your car for cheap than you think you do. Start here.
3. Grocery Shopping When You’re Hungry
Or when you have all the time in the world. Avoid these two scenarios when taking a trip to the grocery store at all costs. If you shop for groceries when you’re hungry, even just kind of hungry, you’re more susceptible to buying extra stuff you don’t need or that you’ll waste later.
The same goes for a leisurely grocery trip. If you make your trip when you have other errands to do and only a certain amount of time to do them, you’re less likely to spend time exploring all the isles and picking up more food than you originally planned on buying.
4. Buying a Snack at The Gas Station “Every Now and Then”
The quotation marks are there because “every now and then” usually means you just don’t keep track of all the little snack purchases you make on the go. All those bottles of soda and chip bags you pick up when you’re filling up the tank or making a stop at the drug store add up. Make a rule that you have to track all of those little snack purchases and you only get a small allowance of them per month.
Get in the habit of bringing plenty of fluids and a snack or two with you whenever you go do errands or anything else that might bring you near convenient snack-filled temptations.
5. Taking Expiration Dates as Law
For some of the more perishable foods, expiration dates hold more authority, but you can usually tell this by the funky smells or colors that develop when they start to go bad. But an expiration date on a food item isn’t the be-all-end-all, assuming they have been stored in a cool, dry area. The most obvious case of this is pretty much any dried good, such as cereal, uncooked pasta, and dried beans.
Several foods that usually go bad when their labels say they will, such as raw meat or bread, can be stored in the freezer before their expiration date if you don’t think you’ll make it in time and be perfectly fine when you thaw them again. You can also use online databases to look up the actual shelf-life of certain foods and compare it to what the label says.
6. Only Using Credit/Debit Cards
If you almost exclusively use your card to pay for things, it’s a lot easier to spend more than you intend to because you aren’t seeing the money. You just press some buttons and boom, purchase made. You might not be so liberal with your funds if you had to watch the cash leave your wallet.
If you use mobile banking or money management apps to keep on top of your finances while still using your card, and it’s working, keep doing your thing. For the rest of you, you might want to consider weekly or bi-weekly trips to your bank or ATM and withdrawing a fixed amount of cash for your spending.
7. A Drafty Living Space
If you pay heating and cooling bills, you might be paying more than you need to due to inadequate insulation. If you can afford it, you can install more airtight windows and maybe a door or two as well. But effective insulation can be achieved without entirely replacing your windows in most cases. Start here and here.
8. Couponing (irresponsibly)
Coupons save you a little money, yes, but if you’re couponing just for the sake of it, or convincing yourself you were totally going to buy those things on that discount site, you’re still wasting money. Don’t use coupons as an excuse to buy things you normally wouldn’t, even if it’s just an extra $5 to your usual purchase. You’ll end up doing it a lot more frequently than you intended when you could be focusing on coupons and discounts when you actually need them.
Stick to coupons for the things you already buy. The exception to this is if you’re making an expensive but necessary purchase that you don’t regularly have to make, such as a car repair you absolutely can’t fix yourself, and you’re able to find a special coupon or discount for it.
9. Skimping on Health and Hygiene habits
You think it won’t happen to you, but it will. Your dentist isn’t just having a power trip, you really do need to maintain your teeth’ health or you’ll be paying for dental work in the not too distant future, and that can get painfully expensive. Not washing your hands, alcohol and junk food habits, and just not taking proper care of yourself, in general, will all come back to bite you, no matter how invincible you think you are. Weigh the potential medical bills against the temporary inconvenience of adjusting to new habits and make the smart choice.
10. Unnecessary Laundry Junk
Dryer sheets? Toss ’em. Fabric softener? Throw it out. You need neither; in fact, you might not even need that toxic goop you put in your washing machine either. Plenty of cheap and easy homemade laundry detergent recipes can be found online, as well as replacements for dryer sheets such as reusable dryer balls. Or better yet, skip the dryer as much as possible, line-drying works just fine.
