With consumer debt continuing to increase it becomes increasingly important for people to control their spending habits, and I’ll cover two easy ways you can try and curb spending.
One way is to identify a key area where you want to cut down spending and determine what you want your budget to be for that expense. Once you have that amount, withdraw cash totaling that budget and strictly use cash for that expense. Now this will work best if you don’t use cash for other purchases but you could also put the cash in an envelope to separate it out.
The advantage of using cash is it is a good way to control spending because you can visually see how much you have left in your budget without having to use an app or calculate how much you’ve spent. This is not a good approach for multiple expense categories, but it can allow you to focus on one problem area at a time.
The second way to control overspending is just by paying your bills (whether they are due yet or not) on payday. Especially if money is tight, this will give you an accurate picture of how much money you have available in your bank account after paying credit cards and any other bills. Not all your bills will likely be able to be paid on payday so if you just pay everything you can and pay the remaining bills on your next payday.
If you don’t get paid twice a month then you could make payments once a week or set two specific days of the month where you assign to paying bills. By making sure all your expenses are paid for early you avoid the danger of spending too much and finding out you don’t have enough to cover your bills.
