One way to help reduce the amount of money you spend is to have no spending days. These are simply days on which you don’t spend any money. Some will complicate the concept and state that you are always spending money since you use electricity and eat every day then you are spending. Or they will say you could just put everything on your credit card and then you aren’t spending any money until you pay the card. That is just being difficult and I think anyone should be able to grasp the idea of what a no spend day is without one having to go into details about what counts and doesn’t count.
A more valid argument against no spend days is that they simply delay spending from one day to another. To a certain extent that is true but I find that having no spend days does cut down on my optional expenses. I haven’t been using no spend days much lately because I do pretty well with my budget anyway but I’m going to start tracking my no spend days and then set a goal to have more of them to bring my spending down even more.
In the early 90’s I had a job that paid $350 every two weeks. One paycheck went to pay my rent of $225 and the other paycheck went to my car payment of $260. What was left over went to my $50 student loan payment,food, gas,insurance and everything else. I used a budgeting book back then and when I looked at it there would be lots of days with a $0 in the expense category. I’m not likely to get back to the amount of zero days I had then but there is plenty of room for improvement.
I find no-driving days work well with no-spending days.