Providing for a family on a budget can be challenging. For many people, this has meant hours spent cutting coupons or sacrificing the quality and quantity of the products their family purchases. Let us share a secret with you…it does not have to be this way! We have found buying on a budget is not about changing the products you purchase for your family, but rather about changing HOW and WHEN you buy them. You can still purchase the brands you want, you just need to be smarter about how you go about purchasing them.
It became our mission to dramatically lower our household discretionary spending. We spent months researching and testing out different strategies and ideas to see what worked for us and what did not. We have unlocked the secret code and implemented many different strategies that cut our household spending by more than fifty percent. This allowed our families to have extra money every month to put toward other things.
Changing the way you think about your household expenditures is essential to successfully implementing our plan. Think about what you would do with an extra $250 a month. You could pay off credit cards, make an extra car or house payment or maybe save up for a well-deserved vacation. Now, think about what you would have to do to earn this much money each month. How many hours would you have to work to earn $250? Would it involve time away from your family or other commitments? Saving money on your household budget is tax free income which can be spent or put away for more important things.
The amount of money you save is up to you. You can use all of the strategies we outline or only a few, but even a little bit can go a long way. If we were to only change the way we buy our top five focus items, we would save almost $900 a year!
Focus items are the items in your household budget which are the most expensive and/or most often purchased. For example, our families’ top five focus items are dog food, chicken, milk, cereal and diapers. If we purchased these items at regular price, we would pay just over $2200 per year! However, by changing the way we buy these products we pay only $1310 per year. This is a savings of 59% by ONLY changing the way we buy five items.
