While losing a little in the waistline is always a good goal to work on throughout the year, even starting early before beach season, it’s your finances in shape that will not only help in the short-term, but help to secure a nest egg that will last a lifetime, providing sufficient income to replace the need to work and finalizing retirement. By making a few tweaks, you can trim down monthly expenses and watch your hard-earned savings really start to pile up.
Join the Meal Prep Trend
By spending a little time on Sunday’s, you can really get your lunches and dinners in order for the week, but that does take grocery shopping to stock your refrigerator, freezer, and pantry with the needed ingredients. While it takes extra time compared to stopping at your favorite restaurant to pick up carryout, you will begin to eat healthier and watch the scale move in a positive direction, but more importantly to your wallet, it’s much cheaper to go grocery shopping and make many meals over a few ingredients than going out to eat. Starting now you can join the meal prepping trend.
The Nicer Weather is Coming
As we are finally getting some lift from the gloomy winter and seeing the sun pop out and finally temperatures getting above freezing, there is now extra motivation to get outside. By even taking the dog for a long walk daily, you can get some moving around, for free I might add, and can finally ditch the gym membership that you’re paying for that, if you’re lucky to even be going, and save that monthly expense going forward. If you can increase the walks to runs, you’ll really start to notice your clothes start to get a little baggier right as summer hits.
Finally Cut the Cord
As you are beginning to spend more time outside in addition to exercise, you can give the yard an updated landscape to improve curb appeal, which if you’ve probably notice that by the time you look at things you can do, the list can add up pretty quickly, so much in fact that you find yourself not having any extra time to watch TV and wondering why you’re still paying a cable bill for channels you don’t even watch. By cutting the cable cord and at least sticking to a streaming service, it’s there if you want to pop on a show or a movie and gone are the days laying on the couch and surfing channels.
Earn Free Money by Charging
While the expenses are continuing to decrease and you find yourself with extra money leftover each month, you can focus on earning free money on the necessary purchases that you continue to make. By using a rewards credit card, you can earn points or cashback that can add up to hundreds of dollars over the course of the year, just by swiping with that card on the purchases you were going to make anyways. It’s not often that free money comes your way so you want to be sure you don’t miss out.