6 expenses to audit If you need to save fast

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

If you need to save fast, whether you are wanting to seriously cut some household expenses, ASAP, maybe you’re wanting to build an emergency fund or simply save more money for some other reason. Today’s episode is for you. We’ll be uncovering some sneaky expenses that you might be able to save big by cutting back on.

All right, let’s dive in.

Just a quick note before we dive in. Everything I share on this podcast is general in nature and does not take your personal circumstances into account. I’m not a licensed financial advisor, and nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as personalized, financial, business, taxation or investment advice.

Before you make any financial decisions, please seek guidance from your accountant or a qualified licensed financial advisor who understands your specific situation.

And another little thing, if you wanna find $500 fast, if you are in proper saving mode, come and check out the $500 in two hours freebie that I’ve got.

If you click on the link in the show notes for today’s episode, take the challenge. You might be able to find $500 sitting right underneath your nose.

Okay, so if you are wanting to save some money fast, the first thing I want you to do is to have someone else sit with you and review your household expenses. You could work with a coach. I actually do one-to-one financial coaching. It could even be me sit down with a coach. Or even a friend in a similar life stage and swap budgets.

Get some external feedback on what is going on with your money, how much you’re spending in various categories. Because from my experience, a lot of people say, I live such a lean lifestyle. There’s nothing else left to cut, which really means this is the way that I’ve always done things. I’ve been looking at these expenses for years and I’m blind to it now.

It feels like there’s simply nothing else that I can cut back or other areas in which I can increase my income.

It’s only when someone else says, wait. You pay how much for that, that you have that aha moment and magic happens.

If someone else was to look at your bank account. What do you think would surprise them?

And maybe you need to get someone to do that. So let’s dive into some examples of some categories that you can cull if you are wanting to cut back. First one is groceries.

People treat groceries like they are a fixed cost.

I hear this a lot. People are like it is what it is. I’ve got teenage boys or whatever it might be.

They eat a lot. These costs, although they might feel like it, they’re not fixed. Now, this is not a comprehensive lease, but let me give you some ways that you can cut back without eating babies for dinner every night. Firstly, shop once a week, so my hubby and I sit down and we do a meal plan for the week.

We sit down and we say, okay, what nights are you at? What nights am I at? What other things have we got on? And then we plan out the food for the week. And what this means is that we are not doing those little dashes to the shop to do the top-ups. I know when I was single, I used to go through the grocery shop like every day or every second day.

And the thing is that happens every time you set foot in that supermarket, you will end up buying extra things you don’t need. They literally build supermarkets to get you to impulse buy things. They have discounts. They have things when you come through the checkouts, they’re trying to get you to put add-ons into your cart.

So the less times that you were in that shop, the better. So that’s my first tip. Do a once a week shop.

Something else you can try is try shopping at a cheaper supermarket. Just go and try it. I know that we still got our favorite shops that we like to go to, and sometimes we’ll see a new grocer or a new shop and we’re like, do you know what? Let’s give it a try. Sometimes you have a win, sometimes you don’t, but it’s worth trying it and seeing if it’s a fit for you. The next thing that we have found that has really saved us money as a household that you can try is to bulk cook. So what I mean by bulk cooking, we used to cook. My husband, I don’t cook.

My husband used to cook every single night, was a fresh meal. Washing dishes, all of the things, and what we’ve done is cut back the cooking to just a couple of times a week and we stretch the meals out.

Now, I know that might not sound that appealing for everyone, but trust me, this is a great way to save money and a great way to save a ton of time and dishes as well.

So what we do usually is we’ll cook something. When I say we, I mean him. He will cook something and then we usually spread it out by putting extra things in. So an example of this, he might make a big batch of spaghetti bolognese, and then we will have, I’ll have some salad with it, and with the kids, we’ll give them some garlic bread.

Garlic bread is such a low cost item. And so it’s something that we can bulk the meals out with to make it last longer. This has saved us as a household a lot of money, and I’m sure if you are able to do the same, you’ll be able to make some savings too. Then the next tip is to audit your food waste.

So most households throw away a lot of food. So actually be conscious and mindful what are the key things that we are throwing out regularly and how can we reduce our household waste? So something a little bit counterintuitive that we do in this space is that we actually shop at a lovely green grocer.

Now, when we first started shopping there, I was like, what is this all about? But what’s actually happened? It’s slightly more expensive. It’s not even that much more expensive than the mainstream supermarkets. But what we found is that because we are buying fruit and vegetables from there. It is actually lasting a lot longer and really reducing our waste.

It well and truly makes up for the extra costs of shopping at a grocer.

We are also very careful with how we store particularly fruits and vegetables. So as things are ripening up, they go into the fridge so that we’re not throwing them out. And with all of our food, we also strategically work out what we’re going to eat first in the week.

So this goes into the meal plan as well. So for example, if we buy something like fish that goes off pretty quickly, we will eat that straight away and keep some, of the vacuum sealed meats and things to eat later in the week to minimize the wastage.

When you start to be conscious about your grocery bill, you could save hundreds a month.

I’ve got lots of other tips too about saving money on your groceries, which I share inside the Intentional Money membership. This is just a bit of a high level overview. Alright, the next one here is mortgage or rent renegotiation. This one is really underused. A lot of people think my rent or my mortgage, it is what it is.

I’m stuck with it. You know what? Why not try calling your bank? I’ve actually got a script that you can use for it, but call ’em up and say, I’m reviewing my rates. What can you do? Can you offer me a better rate? You could also go back out to the market to a mortgage broker and ask them to find you a better deal at another bank.

Same with your rent. A lot of people just think that their rent is fixed. I used to work for big corporates. Even big companies that I would work for, we’d go back in and renegotiate our rents. You can also do things like ask for a longer lease. I know that tenants of ours have said this to us, Hey, if we sign a three month lease, can we get a discount on the rate? Gives you stability if you know that you’re not planning to go anywhere and it saves you money.

I think the key thing to take away here is just ask the questions.

People negotiate their salaries. When you’re buying a car, of course you’re gonna haggle over the price of a car. So do the same with your biggest expense. Why not? Okay, the next one is, bear with me here. Self-care and beauty proof. Okay, so to be clear, I am definitely not anti self-care.

I love to invest in health and beauty at this stage of life. But what I am saying is that you just don’t need to do these things on autopilot. So some questions to ask, like for example, if you are someone who gets your hair done every six weeks, could you stretch it out to every seven weeks or eight weeks?

Is it possible for you to think about coloring your hair yourself? Can you rotate beauty treatments? Do you need to be doing the same things on the regular with your self care? Do I actually value this membership or is it habit? I think I’ve shared this on the podcast before, I love my gym.

 I go to the gym all the time, but I had this aha moment where I went, it’s actually really challenging for me to get all the way to the gym. And so I bought weights and I do my training at home and I realised that my membership was just there out of habit, and it was actually, I was finding it a real challenge to actually get in and use it.

 It’s just worth reflecting on all of these things when it comes to your self-care.

If it’s something you love and adds a lot of value to life, amazing, keep it there. Or is it something that you’re just doing out of habit? What you need to be doing is aligning your spending to the current season of life that you’re in, and there’s no shame in pressing pause.

There is frustration in saying that you want financial freedom while maintaining every luxury that you had before, and then wondering why you’re not getting ahead. So sometimes you just have to make these decisions to not even stop it, but maybe it’s just can I trim it back a bit? All right. The next big area that a lot of people can experience overspending is inconvenient spending, ordering Uber Eats, catching Ubers, or taxis, paying extra for same day delivery.

Now I know what goes on because we all have moments like this. I deserve it. I need this now. I deserve these purchases. And look, convenience is sometimes worth it, but convenience is expensive. And often the reason that we are paying these things is just laziness. I know in the past I’ve had to pay the quick delivery fee and it’s just ’cause I hadn’t planned ahead for that birthday that was coming up.

So how can you try and get some resets in this area? If you were someone who is an Uber Eats addict, why don’t you try 30 days without any Uber Eats or whatever your takeaway. Sorry, this is not to bag out Uber Eats, by the way. But to take a 30 day break from ordering convenience, food delivery, or try a one week no convenience challenge.

So maybe you go right, I’m gonna catch the bus rather than just jump in a taxi and I’m gonna plan ahead.

Try the concept of meal planning, like I said, something we do in a household every week.

Another little tip that can really help is having emergency freezer meals ready. So again, when we do our big bulk cooks, they’ll often be a little bit left.

We freeze that and then on those nights where, I don’t know, we run late from work or something’s happened rather than have to order food delivery. We’ve got emergency meals, they’re in the freezer. So sometimes we’re like, let’s just grab one of those for tonight. ’cause here’s the thing. You budget blowouts?

I don’t know about your household, it’s very rare that we’re eating big, expensive $200 dinners. It’s mostly just the, like 17 times, $28. I can’t be bothered decisions. When I grew up, my parents would never grab a sushi roll war around the shop for us kids. We always had packed sandwiches and apples and snacks anywhere we went.

They were aware that all those little things add up. Okay. The next area to dive into is your phone plan. Are you still with the same provider that you signed up with many moons ago? Even go and check out the prepaid packages. I know that this is something that I am definitely looking into because I can’t believe how much my mobile bill is.

You really can save a lot of money by shopping around and getting back to basics in this area, and also have a look at your insurance. Now I am very pro insurance, but sometimes people are paying a lot of money to insure their phones. That might be really old, just worth having a revisit for. And then the last area that can really creep up in terms of your household costs is your family activities.

So I get time to do an audit if you have children, the kids extracurriculars, oh my goodness, can’t they add up quickly? It’s not just the cost of the activity, it’s also the driving them around and the uniforms and the boots and the shoes and all the things. So just keep reviewing them.

You can love your kids and still set boundaries.

So it’s worth checking in which activities genuinely light them up or do you really value, and which ones are just fomo or you still dragging them along to, and they don’t even really wanna do anymore.

The next thing is to actually have a look at your household spending in this area. Just because it’s a sport doesn’t mean that it’s like I have to spend the money here. I personally know people that have spent the cost of a car on bikes for triathlon competitions. And again, there’s no right or wrong.

If that’s your thing, that’s fine, but when you have a third party who sits down and looks at it and they say, you spent how much on that bike? It’s just something to observe, something to be aware of and does this feel in alignment for you? So some of the things in this episode, you might say, [00:16:00] nah, not for me, Clare, that’s totally fine.

And some of you might be like, do you know what? I’m gonna give it a try. But hopefully you’ve found some easy ways to save some dollars. And if you have, please come and drop me an email, Clare, admin@clarewood.com. And let me know if you’ve had some wins. I can’t wait to hear about them. Thanks again for listening to the Intentional Money Show, and here’s to be more intentional with your money. Have a Fab Week. Chat to you soon.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio