Frugal Tips

Tips - Frugal Living

With more people moving towards a more prudent lifestyle, understanding frugal tips for being thrifty is key when it comes to living a cheap quality lifestyle.

What's exciting is you'll find these tips for being frugal can be put to use immediately to reduce your daily expenses.

Our family uses these cash saving techniques and lives a great lifestyle. We're confident that you can too.

Automotive Frugal Tips

• Avoid putting the petal to the metal. If you drive steadily, you’ll save fuel and wear and tear on your car.
• Fill up with regular fuel. Buying premium does not provide additional benefits to your engine over regular gas. In fact, cars are designed to run well on regular gas.
• BRRR - a cold engine. You'll take much better care of your car by giving it time to warm up. We know, you may be in a hurry to get somewhere, but especially for that first start of the day, or when the weather is extremely cold, your engine will thank you for the warm-up.

  By driving your car cold, it wears harder on the engine and also consumes more fuel.

• Get maximum use out of your car. We drive our cars into the ground and save thousands of dollars doing so. We don't need a new car every 2 to 3 years, nor do we need those hefty car payments. In fact, we haven't had car payments in years.

  If you regularly maintain your car, you'd be surprised how long it will last. Basic maintenance includes the following: change oil regularly, change air filter annually, rotate tires every other oil change, change your transmission fluid, spark plugs, and radiator fluid per manufacturers specs.

• Go with a reliable, fuel-efficient car. You'll see big savings in gas and repairs.
• Car pool or take the bus.
• You can save a “great deal” of money when purchasing a vehicle by following these frugal tips on used car shopping.

Frugal Tips - Shopping

Frugal Tips - Entertainment

• Board Games. Especially in the winter, our family plays a lot of board games and cards. It's a great way to interact with your significant other and the kids.

  For example, we play Monopoly, Sorry, Trouble, Clue, Stratego and a whole host of other board games. We also play Texas Holdem, Go Fish, Crazy 8's, Backgammon, Scrabble and Chess.

• You can have an enjoyable vacation without breaking the bank. Please see travel budgeting.
  
  
• Reading. Reading is not only enjoyable, but by reading more books you'll learn something, improve your reading ability and it's a cheap hobby.

  We rarely buy books or magazines because we get them for free at our local library. They pretty much have everything there; and if they don't, you can place an order to get the book sent to your library from another library.

  Our family visits the library weekly. Most libraries also have a kids section with entertaining educational books and DVD's.

• Parks & Recreation. You can also check out what your town's parks and recreation has to offer. Our township has many nice parks, basketball and tennis courts, disc golf courses and discounts on joining various city sports activities.

Other Frugal Tips

• Hair Cut. We do cut our own hair using and electronic clipper and a good pair of scissors. We just put a newspaper over the sink and cut away.

  It's not as hard as you may think. Just remember how your stylist or barber pulls the hair with the comb and cuts the ends even. This saves a great deal of money.

• Drinking More Water. Water will save you on juice and pop bills and its good for you.
• Errands. Running most or all of your errands in one day will save you time and gas.
• Home Improvement & Repairs. If time permits, you can save substantial cash by doing projects around the home yourself. You can even make it into a family affair.

  You can go to your local library where you’ll find several do-it-yourself books you can grab.

• Preventive Maintenance. Maintaining things you own will prolong their life and save you money in repair costs. Changing the furnace filter, basic car maintenance, lawn mower, snow blower, etc.

  We put together a maintenance schedule for each item to keep the maintenance organized.

Don't forget about appliance maintenance. You can wipe off and vacuum the dust off the coils beneath and behind your refrigerator. The same can be also be done with your furnace and washer and dryer. Less dust will enable these units to run more efficiently and last longer.

• Purchase Quality Appliances. You can do some research on the net and library. We use Consumer Reports to research an appliance before buying it. We don't want to buy an appliance they may price cheap, but is not reliable.

  We'd rather spend a little more for a quality, energy efficient unit that saves us money in energy and lasts for several years.

• Babysitting. You can save on babysitting costs by swapping babysitting nights with your neighbors.