5 tips to cutting back on your home expenses

1. Create a budget

The biggest cause of overspending is the lack of a budget. Without a budget, you go out and buy items without much consideration and more often than not you end up spending too much, resulting in debt. To prevent this, you need to create a budget that you abide by faithfully. In your budget, highlight all your income streams, and then make an estimate of how much money you should spend on each of your expenses. This will help you eliminate any items that seem to be taking too much of your income helping you to save a little more.

2. Prioritise

Another good way to make savings on your home expenses is to prioritize. Ensure that when you go out shopping, you only buy the items that are necessary. Use a shopping list to reduce impulse buying, and this will help you save a few coins. Also, instead of paying high cable and internet bills every month, choose to keep one and get rid of the other. Instead of paying for cable, use the internet to stream your favourite shows and news instead and save the cable money.

3. Reduce electricity and water use

These two are very essential for our day to day survival and therefore cannot be gotten rid of. However, you can regulate how you use the electricity and water in your home to help you save up on the bills. Use energy saving bulbs which use less electricity and turn off the lights to a room when it is not occupied. Additionally, unplug any electrical appliances which are not being used so that you can reduce wastage. Additionally, during the day, instead of turning on the air conditioning system, consider opening the windows to let in fresh air. Turn off the lawn sprinklers when not necessary and keep all taps tightly closed to prevent dripping.

4. Look for alternatives

Some of the expenses we have in our homes can be solved by looking for cheaper alternatives. For example, instead of getting farm produce at the market where it is expensive, you can get it from an actual farmer. If this is not possible, you can grow your own produce in your backyard, which is not only cheaper but also healthier since you are the one in charge of the produce. The added advantage is that you can sell the excess produce, thus making some money in the process. Additionally, you can also replace some household items for cheaper alternatives, like r22 refrigerant alternatives which are cheaper, this will help you save some money.

5. Cancel unnecessary subscriptions

Having a large number of prescriptions be they for online shows or monthly magazines tends to eat up a lot of income when they are supposed to be paid off. This can be prevented by cancelling some of these subscriptions since most of the time you are not even using these services that you have subscribed to.  Look for free alternatives for the services whose subscriptions you have cancelled, even though it means that you take a longer time to take delivery of what you want.