Small Business Loans

If there is one thing that we have learned from the recent economic downturn it’s that the United States economy has long been built on consumer spending financed by credit. Prior to the crash, had forgotten about the importance of savings which was easy to do considering that everything we buy is not made to last. Fashion, electronics, and more are all made to be used for a period of time and discarded. So it’s no wonder that the U.S. economy is not built to save but rather to consume things.

Moreover, there is a definite need to change on both a national and a personal level. However, the change must begin with you. There is nothing wrong with learning to be frugal and thrifty. With that in mind, the following are some things you can do to reduce your expenses so that you can increase your savings during this tough economic time.

You can’t learn to save until you know what you’re spending. Do a realistic look at your monthly expenses. Keep receipts for everything you spent in a month or six weeks and tally up how much you spend on things like eating out, having a coffee at Starbucks and other non-essentials. If you smoke, look at how much you spend on cigarettes for a month. Then look at how much those items cost you in a year. For example, if eating lunch at a fast food place costs $7 per meal, and you do it every working day, that’s an average of 22 meals a month, times 12 months, or over 250 per year. Is spending $2,000 a year to eat at McDonalds worth the money to you?

In addition, eating at home can save you lots of money. You can cook a meal for less than $20 that will feed a family of 4, two or three times. Eating at home is also much healthier because: you can control what goes into the food yourself. In fact, that is one of the key elements to frugality: doing things yourself instead paying others to do them for you.

Similarly, when you’re dealing with the aftermath of credit binging, it’s worth your time to do things for yourself. Get copies of your credit reports and go over them at least once a year. Look for items that are incorrect; your credit rating influences how much you have to pay in interest rates and monthly payments. When you’re stretching paychecks to cover bills, having your minimum payment double on credit cards is a disaster.

You may have items in your home or at your house that need to be replace because they are old, outdated, your aren’t working as great as they used to. The key here is to not throw anything out or replace anything. See if you can fix whatever needs fixing, or re-use other items in some other way. Now is not the time to spend money. Now is a time to save so make do with what you have and worry about repairing your credit and your savings account.

Learning how to cook is an amazing way to save money, and there are plenty of public domain cookbooks from the 1920s and 1930s that were written when being frugal and thrifty was a matter of survival, when butter was a luxury, and being able to afford meat for the cookpot was a once a week thing.

Dorthy Weatherbush takes her personal finances very seriously. That’s why she uses Legal Zoom to make sure that her financial house is in order. She used Legal Zoom to make sure that her will was filed so that her kids would get all of her savings.