Need More Cash? Try These 4 Tricks to Slash Daily Expenses

Use these tips to add wiggle room to your budget and slash daily expenses.

This year’s prices for gas, groceries, prescriptions, and more continue to climb, and the cost of living is making it really hard to live. And now with inflation and interest rates on the rise, we really seem to have less and less money.

But there are ways to reduce daily expenses, as long as you pay a little more attention to understanding your brain and adopting a few key practices to stay on track.

Here are the money-saving tips and secrets that will help you save cash.

Add the Right Cue to Slash daily expenses

We humans think we’re in total control of what we do, but almost half of our behavior takes place in the same location every day, writes Wendy Wood in Good Habits Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick. 

Many exceptional savers, consistent exercisers, and studious students don’t have to struggle to curb impulsive behavior because they add or remove cues from their environments.

If you wanna stop doing something you have to make it harder to do. By making something inconvenient you can change negative behaviors into more positive ones. 

Adding difficulty to a habit is called adding “friction”.

Here are 5 ways to put a little friction into your financial routine:

1. Remove shopping apps from your phone
2. Unsubscribe from retailer newsletters
3. Unfollow influencers to reduce social media FOMO
4. Delete credit card info from shopping apps
5. Stop walking past stores with enticing window displays

Doing all at once may be a shock to your system, so set a deadline in your calendar to add more friction to your life.

Prevent Food Waste

Pick one day per week to make a ‘Use-Up’ meal. Perhaps it’s the day before your next grocery haul, maybe it’s the beginning of the week. 

Use the ‘3+1 Approach’, where you bring together ingredients from three categories: a base (bread, rice, pasta), vegetable or fruit (pick one or a few), a protein of choice (chicken, eggs, tofu, beans), plus a ‘magic touch’ in the form of spices or sauce to bring the dish together and add flavor.

Grab a bowl, choose a ‘Use-Up Day’, and try the ‘3+1 Approach’ for a meal. Making these simple switches could reduce your food waste by 30% (or more!) plus save you hundreds, even $1,000 per year in garbaged groceries.

Keep an Eye on Auto-Payments

Auto payments have a sneaky way of going unnoticed. Between Netflix, magazines, bike shares, and Amazon Prime, it’s easy to lose track of the hundreds of dollars every month that automatically come out of your account. So, review your credit card statements from the last year for any regular payments, and think carefully about which services you really need (and which you could live without).

Check Coupon and Sales Sites

Couponing and price match is a tried-and-true method for cutting down costs. You don’t have to go off the deep end and spend hours every day collecting every snippet you can find. But if you aren’t looking for coupons at all, then you’re missing out on a lot of savings.

Browse thousands of flyers digitally with the Flipp app, and find deals from over 2000 stores including Walmart, Shoppers, Canadian Tire, and more.

Banking Fees

If your checking account charges a fee and you can’t get out of it, it’s time to look elsewhere. I use EQ bank which has no monthly fees or minimum balance restrictions along with 2.50% interest.

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