The Ways We Save 3

Being smart about how you spend can end up saving you a ton of money. Carmen used her wedding shopping to save:

Currently I'm planning my wedding for this June so my money saving strategies have revolved specifically around this event right now…

Our #1 goal for our wedding is to not go into debt over it and 2nd is to try to stay within a manageable budget of $15,000 for our 200 guest event, so I have been taking advantage of money saving opportunities as much as possible.

One way we trimmed costs was purchasing our honeymoon tickets to Victoria BC with the air miles that we have been accumulating while paying for our wedding. As we don't carry a balance on our credit cards we use an air miles rewards one, which makes the money we spend work for us since we travel at least once a year! I also used the air miles to pay for my ticket to my Bachelorette/girls weekend trip to NYC. This saved us approximately $1600 on our wedding budget.

We have used these points to pay for our domestic flights for our Portugal trip last year and the year before for our trip to Toronto. Saving us approximately $800/year. Next year we plan to fly to Seattle for a trip and we are well on our way to having enough points.

Money that we can now put towards our saving for our home renovations that we plan to do next year.

I've spoken and written about how you can adjust your bills so that your money is working harder for you, instead of your bills running you into debt. Here's Sheena's story:

I work for an educational institution that pays employees once a month.  It's been easy to impose habits for paying routine bills by moving their due dates to fall in the week following my pay period.  I get paid on the 16th, pay all bills on the 17th, determine what to set aside for savings or debt repayment, and do my best to make it through the month on the rest.

For many years, I either dipped into savings or over-spent with credit cards during that last week before payday.  After a lot of experimenting, I now budget a set amount for my week and a separate set amount for the weekend.  If I run out of money during the week, I pack my lunch and take the bus and still have pocket money for socializing on Friday and Saturday.  It's a lot easier to limit my choices on Thursdays and Sundays than it is to face the weekend with nothing in my pocket.  I now also set aside a set amount each month for extras.  This helps me make more careful choices on gifts, treats, or dinners out without getting on track to blow my whole budget for the month.

It's hard to pin down exactly how much I've actually saved with this strategy.  In 2001, I started putting a small amount away each month into pre-tax retirement savings; I slowly increased exactly how much that amount would be.  That extra account is now worth $90,000; it's almost equal to the amount in my official pension fund, which includes an 8% employer match.  This makes me extremely proud.

Setting a goal is an important step if you want to achieve a specific savings target. And keeping that target front and centre is the way to find the motivation to keep on keeping on. Daniela knows!

In order to save money my Husband and I created a goal list, which was to pay off our car loan, and save for a down payment for a home, and made a chart with increments: $1,000, $3,000, $6,000, and we check them off as we reach that goal. We made several copies of this chart and it is on our bathroom mirror for a reminder first thing and on our fridge, in our wallets with the credit cards, and by the front door. This keeps us reminded about our goals and makes up think about it before we go out in the world or pull that credit card out.

So far, with a little help from a healthy tax return, in 4 months we were able to pay off the remaining balance on our car loan ($6,000 and two years off ) and we have put almost $3,000 in savings towards a down payment.

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