How would you like an extra paycheck every month without working? In these tough economic times, we seem to be faced with more choices every day. Choices of basic survival, not just which movie to see, or which restaurant to eat at, but choices of whether to put gas in the car so we can go to work, or put groceries in the house to feed our families. Most of us are wondering how to make extra money to help make ends meet. I have put together 5 tips to show you how to make money the easy way.
Tip #1: Take an inventory. Make a list of products and services you are paying monthly fees for, then identify those you can do without either permanently or temporarily. If you have a cell phone and a land-line phone, consider cancelling one of them. Take a look at your cell phone bill — do you really need that data package? If you have cable or satellite, consider changing to the lowest-priced package, or cancelling altogether and using an antenna. I can save about $200/month by cancelling non-essential subscriptions.
Tip #2: Eat at home. My wife and I can easily spend about $180/week or about $720/month by eating out every night. By eating at home, we cut that down to about $70-$100/week or about $400/month — over $300/month in savings. It is much healthier, too. Of course, it gets a bit boring eating at home all the time, but we try to eat out no more than twice a week.
Tip #3: Manage your environment: Our house is empty from about 7:30am until about 4:30pm. That is 9 hours each day, or 45 hours each week, that our house is unoccupied by anyone (but our 2 great danes). That is about 27% of the time our house does not need to be comfortable for humans. Invest in a programmable thermostat to manage your heating and cooling. This will allow you to set the temperature back 3-5 degrees when the house is unoccupied. This device has saved me about 20% in my heating and cooling bills.
Tip #4: Choose your transportation: Sometimes, there is no other option but to drive a car or truck. But, when there is, take advantage of it. When the weather is nice and the destination close by, walk. Not only is this free, but healthy. Another free and healthy mode is to dig that bicycle out of the garage and use pedal power. For longer trips, public transportation, if available, is less expensive than gasoline. If you have a motorcycle or scooter, then those are a good choice, too. Beware of the temptation to purchase a vehicle with better fuel economy as you can easily spend more money in payments and insurance than you would have spent in gasoline alone.
Tip #5: Choose your fuel: Use the lowest octane fuel available when you fuel up. Most cars are designed to run with 87 octane and do not need the more expensive premium fuels. If you have a flex-fuel vehicle that runs on ethanol, you will usually find this fuel about 30 cents cheaper/gallon than 100% gasoline. However, if economy is your goal, I have found that burning ethanol costs me about 1.5 cents per mile more than gasoline. This is because ethanol has less energy than gasoline. If environment is more important to you, then ethanol is your choice.
Of course, there are many more ways to economize in these times, but these are very simple methods that most of us can live with. When the economy bounces back, and it will, we can always add these luxuries back into our lives. I have shown you ways I saved $800-$1000/month, which is equivalent to an extra paycheck.
This article was written by Chris Corrigan and is used here with permission.
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Survival in the modern world 