Tips for a More Frugal Life

Living a more frugal life doesn’t mean having to do without any of your usual creature comforts – it simply means putting a little more forethought and planning into the decisions you make to ensure you always get the best possible value for money and keep wastage to an absolute minimum. The following tips will help get you started.

Food The average American family throws away an astonishing $2,200 worth of food each year. If you want to make sure your food budget goes as far as possible, you need to do everything possible to reduce this amount within your own household. There are obvious steps, such as making sure your storage containers are fully air-tight and that your refrigerator is set to the right temperature to keep everything fresh for as long as possible, but there are a few other tricks you can use to extend the life of a few other items.

For example, you can extend the shelf life of both shop-bought and homemade cake by storing them in the fridge with half an apple placed on top. The fruit will help lock in moisture and prevent the cake from drying out. If you want your fresh herbs to last as long as possible, treat them like fresh flowers. Snip the stems with scissors and then place them in a glass of water. Ideally, don’t wash them until just before you need to use them. This will keep your herbs fresh for 24 hours, but you can extend the life by up to a week by wrapping the glass and the herbs inside a tied off plastic bag.

If you want your hard cheese to last as long as possible, wrap it in parchment paper rather than plastic. Cheese needs to breathe and wrapping it in plastic is the equivalent of suffocating it. Wrap the cheese in parchment or waxed paper and then place it in loose plastic wrap or a plastic bag. This allows the cheese to breathe but prevents it from drying out too quickly, reducing the risk that you end up throwing it away.

Household items

Toothpaste tubes may be hugely convenient, but they are far from efficient. When you have extracted all that you can through squeezing, cut the tube in half to access the remainder. If you cut from the top and fold it down after you use it, securing it with a clip, the contents will last for enough days for you to be sure you have used every last drop. You can use the same hack on anything that comes in a tube, such as make-up, sunscreen or hair gel.

Making your razor blades last a little longer is a great way to save money as they can be expensive to purchase. The simple trick is to dry them on a towel after each use. One reason blades become dull is due to the effect of oxidation and rusting, and this is accelerated when water sits on the blades. Some claim they can extend the life of their blades from days to months with this technique but there is no need to go that far. Even if you simply double the life of your razor blades, you’ll be making worthwhile savings.

Medical marijuana

The general ethos of the medical profession is that you should never take more of any drug than you need to deal with the symptoms you have, an amount referred to as the minimum effective dose. One of the problems many users of medical marijuana face is that they start building up tolerance and experiencing diminishing benefits, increasing the amount they have to spend. Most people see similar effects with coffee or alcohol. Abstain for either for a month and you’ll notice a far more powerful effect the next time you have a glass of wine or cappuccino.

Many users are now experimenting with something called microdosing where only tiny amounts of the drug are used. By keeping their medical marijuana doses to absolute minimum levels, many people are finding they get all the health benefits without ever feeling stoned, becoming paranoid or experiencing the lethargy that is often associated with marijuana use. And for them, they’ve found it even better knowing that they can smoke weed no pipe. Better still, using smaller amounts dramatically reduces the amount they have to spend, leading to big savings in the long run.

If you’re looking to cut down on the cost of your medical marijuana even more, consider making the switch from vaping to dabbing – a process in which tiny amounts of marijuana concentrate are vaporized by direct contact to very high heat. Although the concentrate costs more to purchase than marijuana leaf, this is balanced out by the fact that far smaller amounts are needed to achieve the same effect. Combining dabbing with microdosing can help you control your pain on a day-to-day basis with minimal disruption to the rest of your life. Click here to find out more about dabbing.

Money

If you want to make sure you never run out of month before you run out of money, you need to set yourself a budget and stick to it. When shopping for essentials such as food and clothes, remember that even the best bargains still have to be paid for, and a great deal is only really a great deal if it is for something you were planning to purchase in the first place. Planning out meals in advance and taking a list when you shop can stop you falling victim to unnecessary impulse purchases.

You can even make a game out of being frugal. Millionaire couple Bob Weidner and Angela Marchi may have plenty of money in the bank but they hate to pay full price for their clothes and are always searching for deals. When they go out shopping, Bob likes to play a game of finding the maximum number of items he can purchase for less than $100. His current record is seven.

You can do the same thing with your monthly shopping budget by gathering coupons and searching out other bargains to see how many high-quality meals you can create or how much more you can save each time. Consider putting your savings into a special fund to buy yourself a prize once or twice a year to give you an even greater incentive to play the game.

Thanks to Carol Trehearn