Savings Tips from our Accountants

By Bottrell Group on January 20, 2017 in Interesting Articles

Our Top Savings Tips

Our accountants share how you can save an extra dollar with their top savings tips.

Make your lunch for work

This one is easily our most popular savings tips! The average daily cost for lunch per week is $10, which is $50 dollars a week and approximately $2500 for a full working year. Just by creating an extra meal at dinner and bringing it to work the next day, or bulk cooking to prepare for the week ahead can save you a lot of money over the whole year.
Use Cash

Spending money to save money might sound like a strange option in our list of savings tips, but hear us out! Withdrawing a certain amount of money for the week and vowing to spend it and only it, you automatically become a more conscious spender. Rather than blindly purchasing with a card and only seeing the full effects when your statement comes in, having the cold hard cash on you, and seeing it dwindle as you spend, causes you reconsider whether that second espresso coffee is really worth it.

To make this tip truly perform, utilise the Envelope System. Allocating the money you have budgeted to spend on each day into separate envelopes and only spend what’s in it on the consecutive day of the week.
Get a good old fashion money box

Following along with the tip above, you may begin to see you have some spare coins floating around at the end of the day or week. Instead of watching it fall down the back of the car seat or getting lost under furniture, vow to place them in a box regularly and utilise the genius of ‘blind saving.’

The best selection of containers are those that you cannot gain access to until you physically break them. Knowing the level of sacrifice it would take to get that 2 dollars for a bottle of water may just be the thing that halts you, and gets you one step closer to filling that tin right to the top. Then, and only then can you open it and count the final figures of your dedicated saving efforts.
Invest in an app you like

As they say, ‘Ignorance is bliss,’ and this might just apply to your spending habits. For the sake of quotes, they also say ‘Knowledge is power,’ and that’s where a spending or budgeting app may be able to help. Getting to know where you want to spend money verses where you are, may just be the education you need to begin saving those precious pennies. The habit of tracking your hard earned money eventually fosters an unconscious consideration in the back of your mind that awakens each time you contemplate making a purchase on something you don’t really want. The dollars you spend really begin to matter when you remember that you have to enter them into your tracking app each time.
Share your saving goals

We all have dreams and goals that require a little or a lot of finance, and this is inclusive of all of our closest friends and family. An idea to help hold everyone accountable is to have a conversation about these dreams and generate a round figure that you would need to save to actually be able to live them out. Having this conversation and creating a plan with others generates not only a spike in motivation, but also credibility. Having just vocalised your plan, you may find yourself more inclined to start and maintain more conscious saving decisions in order to reach this goal faster. You can even have competitions with those also saving to see who can reach their goal the quickest, creating a sense of fun and urgency to be that dedicated winner. Who knows, you might be driving that Ferrari sooner than you thought.

We hope you can put this savings tips to good use!