What are the biggest ways to save money for a family of 4?”
This is a hard question to answer because I don’t know your personal finances. First and foremost is don’t carry any credit card debt. Ever. Don’t buy anything with a credit card that you cannot pay for by the time the bill comes and then pay it off in full. This is the first way to save BIG. Interest on credit card debt is what keeps people from getting ahead. It is making the banks rich. Next you need to look at where all your money is going. What does it cost you to live? Write it all down, add it all up. Now write down all your income. Do you have enough income to cover your living expenses? If not, then check your expenditures again. What can you cut out? Things like having your nails done, going to the hairdressers too often, buying clothes you don’t need are all money wasters. I know you are looking at saving big money, but these little things add up to big money over time. What can you reduce? Are you buying a house? How much interest are you paying? Can you make the lender cut
In the last year we have gone from a young married couple to a couple of old parents with 3 children. We adopted 2 of buddies children after he died in Iraq. Also my wife and I had a daughter. We cut corners where ever we can. We started using coupons and eating all of our meals at home. Instead of eating at Fridays one evening my wife will make a pizza at home. We take all of the money that we save and put into a college fund for the girls. Secondly we use cash, leaving the credit and debit cards at home. I find that my wife is a lot more likely to spend money by swiping a card than actually going into her wallet and handing over cash. Finally we decided on a rule that neither one of us is spend over $20 dollars at one time without telling the other and having a good reason for it.
Right now I am drinking a large diet coke which I purchased at Hardees. It cost me $2.20 and I do this almost every day MOnday through Friday. That is $11.00 a week. If I drank water and put that $11.00 a week into the bank, at the end of the year I would have saved $572.00. There are all sorts of things you can do like that to save money but it requires budgeting and discipline…How about lunches. If you give your children money to buy lunch that costs more money. You could give them a boxed lunch for a whole lot less money and it would probably be better for them also! My Mom, who has lots of money, shops at the Goodwill. She has the time to do so, but she looks at clothes, shoes, other things and she saves bunches of money. I used to cut my sons’ hair instead of taking them to the Barber. I bought a book and the tools to do so, it is quite easy to cut boys hair…I did a pretty good job and it cost nothing but the costs of the book and the shears. If you go out to eat, buy one entr
…And the biggest expenses generally are taxes, housing, and cars. So if you really want to save money, you should: • Check with your employer(s) and see if you are using the maximum number of allowances on your W-4. Increasing the number of allowances will decrease the amount withheld from your paycheck each month, but it will also decrease the amount of tax refund you receive after the year-end, possibly to the point of having to pay additional taxes rather than receiving a refund. • Move to a smaller house/apartment in a less desirable part of town. (Yes, that means kids would have to share a room.) • Switch to a small, but reliable, car. But most of it is easier said than done…
…and for good reason: it’s the cause of many people’s problem. Basically, you’ve got a mortgage, a car payment (or two?), some credit card loans, and probably one or two other items you are paying in installment fashion. You’ve also got ongoing costs – food, new clothes, utilities, phone. There’s not much you can do with those. I mean, coupons, sales, etc, but you probably already do all of that. So I’ll focus on the Debt Cycle. The goal of lenders is to keep you paying the dollars you owe AND the interest on those dollars for as long as they can. YOUR goal has to be to shorten that length of time. This is how you do it: Take one of your credit cards, the one with the smallest amount current owed, and chop it up. Throw out the pieces. (You don’t need to cancel the account or anything, just remove the usage of the card.) When you next pay bills, put every single penny you can scrounge up into paying off that card. As you aren’t adding to the debt, and are paying it off very quickly, i
