5 Simple Steps to Stop Spending Money

Takeaways

• Why it requires no effort

• 2 steps you should automatically be doing

• An alternative approach!

1. Have a budget

When you get paid each month, do you split your money into different pots? If you do not, you are missing out on the easiest step. For example, you should split what you need for rent, monthly living (food, shopping, going out) any bills as well as save a little for an upcoming holiday.

Then any extra is free to be able to spend on any new piece of clothing or tech item you want. A trick here is to limit yourself to buying one new item a month. Try it. Learning to live within your budget and within yourself is hard. Once you start, watch you ability to say no - and stop spending money - increase.

2. Save instead of spend

Instead of spending your money, why not save it. If you want to stop spending money, you need an aim. How about growing you wealth? Saving when you are used to spending is not easy, so start small. Start saving £10 a month before increasing as you get more comfortable and above all more disciplined. Before long you will be saving £100 a month or more.

Over time your saving account will grow and may end up impressing you. Before long you may even have enough to put a deposit on a flat or house. As with many of our suggestions, a small step in the right direction often ends up being a large jump into improving your future.

3. Join a gym

Sometimes spending money will help you stop spending money. For those who are already member of an (expensive) gym, why not look to join a cheaper one. A gym membership is a fixed fee, the more you go the cheaper it gets. Let's say you are paying £35 per month. Let's say you got 10 times a month or approx 2.5 times a week, the cost will be low: £3.5 per time. How many activities do you know which are that cheap?

Indeed doing sports often creates a disciplined mindset. Once out of the gym you are less likely to spend on an expensive takeaway. Indeed, you are more likely to focus on fruit and vegetables and avoid sugar-based products. For your information, sugar is the most expensive part of your weekly shopping.

4. Change your friends

This may sound rather ruthless and drastic but are your friends spending money they cannot afford? Maybe they come from wealthy families where their parents give them handouts. How are you going to stop spending money if you are trying to keep up? This is not a level playing field.

Maybe you need to find friends who will understand that you cannot spend money. Or you can limit how much time you spend with them so as to reduce how much you spend.

5. Get another job

This is similar to our 3rd point about going to the gym. If you are doing something, you will not have time to spend money. A flexible job where you can work whenever you want in the week and takes 5-10 hours of your time is ideal. These jobs are worth their weight in gold and rarely come around often. Typically it is through a friend.

Apart from having to spend at least 2 nights in working, you will be earning money at the same time. This is double win: you stop spending money and you increase your savings at the same time!

Conclusion

We hope that one of these suggestions will appeal to you. Realistically the first two should already be part of your daily routine. If they are not then focus on them first. Once they become the norm for you, then look to the others. This may take months so do not put yourself under any pressure.

One of the hardest parts when learning to stop spending money is to face oneself. This means adapting your habits and your approach to money. This is hard because we rarely face up to things in our life. This means something as important as money is harder for us to face up despite the potential for messing up our life.

It could be that only one of these suggestions work for you. Whatever your preference, you may find one leads to another. As a result we would suggest that you try at least one and stick to it!