Getting Started Budgeting: Don’t Be Afraid to Start Somewhere

Budgeting doesn’t need to be hard! Truly, anyone can learn how to budget and live a more frugal lifestyle. You don’t need to be a pro at saving money and frugal buying to get started, either. Don’t let tales of extreme couponing or crazy stock market investments scare you off. There are tons of ways you can start saving today without breaking a sweat!

Here are some of the top ways you can get started budgeting and saving. Remember, a penny saved is a penny earned, so the sooner you start, the better! These are our introductory tips to the practice of saving and living a more frugal lifestyle. To help illustrate how simple it can really be, we’ll keep it simple today with just two easy tips.

Just Save!

The simplest way to save money is to just throw it back in a savings account. Seriously! It doesn’t need to be any deeper than that if you don’t want it to be. All you need to do is set an amount you’d like to save from each paycheck.

Maybe you can afford to set ten percent of each check back in a savings account. Maybe you can only do five percent. Or, maybe you can save as much as twenty or twenty-five percent! Either way, saving money is a good thing.

A savings account will slowly accrue interest for you. In this way, it’s doing something with your money. This makes a savings account a strictly better way to save than, say, stuffing cash under your mattress. That money under your mattress isn’t making you any money on its own!

Shopping for Deals

Don’t let sales trick you into thinking they’re savings. If you go out of your way to buy something because it’s on sale, then you haven’t saved any money. True savings come from getting discounts on items you already purchase.

Let’s say you’ve got your weekly groceries, and you know you spend around $100 to feed yourself for the week. Then, you see one of your grocery items is on sale for half off, but at a different store. It might be worth it to shop there this week to save a few bucks!

Meanwhile, if you’re going out of your way to purchase items you normally wouldn’t, just because they’re on sale, you might not be saving. This is doubly true if you’re simply adding these sale items to your normal spending!