Saving Money & Wasting Less

Lesson 1: Starting out

Taking control

In later lessons you will learn many practical ways of saving money in many areas of life, and you will learn how to budget, reduce your debt, and so on. For now, starting where you are, here are a few practical suggestions for saving money and the Earth this week. Many of them are simple ideas, and you will have heard some of them before, but that's because they WORK!

• Make a list of what you want before you go grocery shopping, and STICK TO IT!
• Eat before you go shopping. If you shop when you're hungry you'll be tempted by food items you don't have on your list, and you will be seduced especially by the sweet or fatty foods, and junk food you smell as you shop.
• Try to THINK before you buy any product (particularly an expensive, or heavily advertised one) and if there is no compelling reason to buy it, then don't buy it yet, even if everybody else you know has one (you can always buy it later if you really need to).
• If you feel tempted to buy something on impulse, wait at least fifteen minutes before you buy it (if it's in the supermarket, get the rest of your list before going back for the impulse item - nine times out of ten, you won't go back). If you still want to buy it, ask yourself why you hadn't thought of buying it before you left home? What has made you want it?
• If you pay by card and are asked if you want cash out, say NO (unless and only unless you had already decided as part of your shopping game plan that you needed to get cash out). If you get cash out you hadn't planned to get, you'll be tempted to spend it.
• Try turning the TV off this week for at least one day, and do something else instead.
• If you work and regularly buy lunch, take lunch to work instead of buying it for at least one day.
• If it's feasible where you live, take public transport this week (or at least part of it) instead of taking the car.
• Look around your house. Is it cluttered with things you never use? (We'll look at clutter in a later lesson, but for now just start to look around.)
• Think about your financial situation. Is it under control? If not, try to identify what your most urgent priorities are.
• If you have the book Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin, please read the Introduction and Chapter One. What would it mean to you to live in a more voluntary way (deliberately, purposefully, rather than drifting along endlessly distracted). Can you identify where your life is currently excessively complicated? What can you begin to simplify?
• Memorise my grandfather's motto (translating it into your own currency):

  "If you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves."

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