5 Easy Strategies to Save Your Family Money Right Away

It’s empowering to save for your family’s dream life. However, if the budget is tight, here are five easy strategies to save your family money right away.

Moms Crushing It with CanCan Quick Steps

Are these common family money pits draining your budget? Here’s how to defeat them:

1.      Clean out your fridge so you avoid wasting food.

2.      Review your family’s monthly subscriptions and drop the ones you rarely (if ever) use.

3.      Commit to decluttering your home.

4.      Buy secondhand!

5.      Perform an energy audit and create an energy-smart home.

Show Me the Money!

Setting financial goals for your family can be exciting and overwhelming. It’s empowering to work towards saving for your family’s dream vacation or eliminating debt, but finding ways to improve your finances can seem daunting when your family budget is already tight.

Good news! There are everyday ways that can help you save money. Here are a few easy strategies that will prove fruitful for both your home and your bank account:

Tip 1: Clean Out Your Fridge and Freezer Each Week

Before you roll your eyes at this suggestion, let me explain. Research shows that US households toss out a staggering 150,000 tons of food daily! The average American family of four spends $14,424 per year on food! A considerable amount of waste could be prevented if we committed to monitoring foods like produce, dairy, and meat and using them before they go bad.

Make this a weekly habit, and you will be able to serve your family tasty dishes and put the money you save toward something meaningful for your family.

Tip 2: Review Your Family’s Monthly Subscriptions

It’s the little things in life that can truly make a difference! That goes for those small, innocent payments you make each month for family entertainment—Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, gym memberships, music streaming services, Dollar Shave Club, and so many more.

Tip 3: Commit to Decluttering Your Surroundings

A home filled with paper piled on countertops, loose laundry, a gaggle of knickknacks and tchotchkes, and drawers stuffed with gadgets and items with no real purpose can be one of the biggest money drains of all.

Look around your entryway, kitchen, family room, and even your garage. Are things neat and orderly, or do you have to dig every time you need to find your tennis shoes, the dog’s leash, and your car keys?

Clutter robs you of the following:

•        Time. How much time do you waste constantly searching for everyday items?

•        Space. Clutter can hog valuable counter and drawer space that should belong to items you use all the time. (What happens when you can’t find your car keys or—say it ain’t so!—reach the coffeepot?)

•        Money. Just when you give up and buy a new duster, that’s when the old one shows up. Am I right? And if you misplace your bills, that could result in late fees.

•        Peace of mind. When your family lives amid chaos, you’re constantly stressed about finding items, or you feel guilty that your home isn’t in better order.

When your living space is organized and functional, it sets the tone for everything else in your family’s life.

There are dozens of recommended decluttering methods, but my favorite is inspired by organizing guru Marie Kondo. In her best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, she goes about getting her clients organized in a multi-step process that involves sorting by item category than by room. The KonMari method mandates that you only keep the items that bring you joy. (Remember, throwing out your bills because they don’t bring you joy is a bad idea.)

Tip 4: Buy Secondhand

Shopping secondhand is a parenting trend. Besides local thrift shops and consignment stores, there are plenty of opportunities to shop online. E-Bay, Swap.com, ThreadUp (my favorite!), and Facebook marketplace are a few of the many online choices that offer a variety of top-notch styles for less.

Tip 5: Create an Energy-Smart Home

Be mindful of turning the lights off when you leave a room or keeping your thermostat set at 68 degrees during the winter. To some, those types of things are already habits. But conserving energy isn’t necessarily top of their lists for many others. The average monthly electricity spent in a household is $ 122; studies show that 35 percent of the power used is wasted.

You can perform a do-it-yourself energy audit, and many local energy companies will also assist with a professional energy audit. Energy Sage also offers some helpful tips in 15 ways to conserve energy and save on your electric bill.

Now Get Creative!

With a money-saving mindset, you’ll soon find other creative ways to spend less and save more, resulting in valuable time with your loved ones—and more money to lower debt payments or afford a car or vacation.

Do you have a smart money-saving hack that puts money back in your pocket? Please share here in the comment section.