Ask anyone who has half an idea about finances and they will tell you that saving money is important. Wealth is keeping money and the ability to save money drastically increases your ability to hold on to money. Saving is unfortunately not easy. It never has been but we can argue that modern life and all its trappings make it a decidedly more difficult task. Difficult is, however not impossible. So there are some innovative or cool things we can do that help us save money. Let’s break them down below.

Use an Adblocker

It’s crazy how the internet has turned into an advertising beast. Ever just thought about something and all of a sudden every ad you see online is about that thing? Well, it’s more science than magic as internet advertisers are monitoring your activities, chats, searches and more to figure out which ads to put in front of you. The science here suggests that if they show you something enough times, you will eventually come around to buying it. How does this hurt our finances? Not every purchase we want to make should be made! Try using an ad blocker to reduce the stimuli from advertisers. Recently the advertising companies have had their wings clipped with regards to how much information they can gather about but this is something you must make an election for. Check how to control this on your devices and reduce the incidences of being tempted.

There’s food at home

We all eat. However, we don’t always eat in ways that are healthy for our pockets. We are bombarded by food opportunities all the time and while some of this food is really good, there are some choices that hurt your budget. It doesn’t make much sense to pay $15-$20 for the food we can make at home. Just to be clear, I’m not against eating out but let’s make sure when we do that first of all it’s within budget and secondly it is actually value for money. I value good food and having spent years working in a restaurant kitchen, I appreciate quality food. Just make sure what you are paying all that extra money for is not a lack of knowledge or ability on your part. A friend of mine often remarks that “you pay for what you don’t know”.

Meal prep

Well of course there’s food at home but perhaps you lack the time to make it. One thing you can borrow from the world of fitness and health is meal preparation. It seems like a simple thing but the results you get from it are ridiculously effective. The one big hurdle to making this work well is owning a microwave. The idea is to prepare food in bulk in advance simply. You can refrigerate or freeze the food depending on how soon you expect to eat it; I prefer to freeze cause you never know. You can get really smart and creative with this. My approach is to freeze individual meal elements in single serving sizes and then decide on the day what I will combine to make a meal. It makes a big difference on the tired days and there are many. Picking a meal combination from the freezer and heating, feels a lot easier than ordering fast food even for delivery. Try it.

Watch your Media Consumption

You are what you consume. Not quite, but it’s certain that what you consume will dominate your thoughts. This is about the media and messages we encounter on a daily basis rather than food but the principle is the same. So if your dominant messages are about spending money, sometimes recklessly, you are certainly at risk of doing the same. You need to be careful because those messages we take in with our conscious mind resonate in our subconscious minds long after. Social media is a breeding ground for such unhealthy messages. Watching your favourite influencer live their life is all good but it can get to a point where we want to emulate the same lives at the expense of our finances. Here’s something to think about; when you spend money like other people you are either spending with people who have their lives sorted out or don’t have their lives sorted out but spend still. Don’t burn all social media at my instruction but make sure you also consciously consume media that empowers your mind about finances.

Learn for free

I recently got on a phone call with a friend who needed some help with spreadsheets. Now you should know I love working with spreadsheets. My friend had a question and I helped him out in under a minute. We then got to talking about how he is currently taking a spreadsheet course. I’m all for learning things. I explained to him that when it comes to spreadsheets I am completely self-taught, taking advantage of free resources. There’s a lot we can learn for free that people usually pay for. Some of these things can end up helping our finances. Two examples I can think of immediately are cooking and managing finances. There are so many free resources out there for learning. Everything is not for everyone but learning things like DIY, car maintenance and more can save you a lot of money in the long run.

My passion for personal finance makes these articles run a little long and believe it, or not this is only half of the cool ways to save money I have. So I’ll definitely write a follow-up article to this one soon.