Spring is knocking on your door and your cupboards and garage are not the only areas of your life where you need to take an ‘out with the old, in with the new’ approach. It is the ideal time to review your finances and give wasteful spending the boot.
“While it is important to relook your bank accounts, investments, policies and debts regularly to make sure your finances are on track, you should also consider spring cleaning usual spending routines and shopping habits,” says Eunice Sibiya, Head of FNB Consumer Education.
As with your general spring cleaning and garage sales, reducing wasteful spending can be a fun activity for the whole family. In fact, Sibiya suggests that the more buy-in you get from all the family members, the easier it will be to instil new habits and thinking about spending in the household.
Eunice Sibiya says you should yourself these questions to establish where you could be wasting money and adjust your behaviour accordingly:
Q1: Are you a forgetful shopper?
It happens to everyone: we visit the shops, forget whether we have a certain item at home, buy the item, only to find it in the cupboard. Some items such as spices can be kept for quite some time, but buying more than what we need results in wastage.
If you’re throwing products away because you are not using them or you have no need for them, you are wasting money. Solve this problem by drawing up your shopping list at home before you head to the shops. If you can’t remember whether you have an item, wait till your next grocery shopping outing before you just throw it into the trolley.
Q2: Are you buying brands out of habit?
We get so used to using a certain brand that we seldom consider that there might be alternative options that are of the same quality and at a cheaper price.
There are often more reasonably priced alternatives of equal quality on the shelves. Take some time to sit with the weekly supermarket catalogue and compare the prices. Make the most of the specials and try out different brands. You might find that you prefer another brand to the one you always used and save a buck in the process.
Family activity: Ask the kids to circle the cheapest items in the weekly supermarket catalogue or whilst you are busy in one aisle, ask them to bring you your normal brand, the cheapest and most expensive of a certain item. That saves you the time of screening the shelves and serves as an educational price comparison exercise for the kids.
Q3: Do you need the full satellite subscription?
It might be relaxing to unwind in front of the television after a long day’s work or over the weekend but the amount of time that we actually spend watching television does not always warrant the expense or subscribing to the full bouquet.
Establish what you watch most of and opt for alternatives. If it is movies, why not consider taking out DVD’s when you are planning to have a movie night. If you watch sport – you might be able to watch the major sports games on free-to-air television. Alternatively, subscribe to a cheaper monthly offer which will save you money and you might be pleasantly surprised at how this increases the quality of time that the family spends together.
Q4: Are you checking your slips?
Not checking your till slips, whether at a garage, restaurant or shop is one of the worst shopping habits that a lot of us have. You could be paying for items that aren’t in your basket. Train yourself to have a quick look at your slips every time you receive it in order to avoid wasting time and the additional travelling costs of having to go back to the store. Also, checking your slips will make you cognisant of how much you spend each time and may help you curb purchasing nonessential items.
Q5: Are you using water and electricity sparingly?
Becoming a household that works sparingly with water and electricity has a positive impact on the environment and saves household money.
The amount of water and electricity saving tips are numerous yet we seem to so easily forget the ease of driving down our water and electricity bill. Read up on a few of these tips online and incorporate fun games in the household to motivate positive water and electricity usage behaviour.
Family activity: Place a tin in the kitchen and incorporate some rules that discourage negligent habits, for example if you leave lights on unnecessarily, you get fined and have to put money into the household savings tin. These funds can be used to contribute to additional expenses in and around the house like when an appliance breaks.
Q7: Are you buying all your items at one store?
Not shopping around can hurt your wallet. One store might be better to shop at for perishables whilst that exact store might charge you more for household cleaning goods. Avoid this type of wasteful spending by shopping at strip malls where you have a variety of stores available to choose from without having to drive around.
Spring is a great time to take a fresh approach to your daily financial activity. Don’t let this time come and go without checking in on your spending habits.
