How to Avoid Living Beyond Your Means

While penny stocks to watch may be a way to nickel and dime a little extra money into your account, it’s actually your entire spending behaviors that can have the most impact to your spending and saving.  While we may want to keep up the lifestyle of friends and family that are seemingly well off, you never know what goes on behind closed doors, so all you can do is focus on what is best for you and your family’s financial goals and avoid living beyond your means.

Build Up an Emergency Fund

You never know what life will throw at you, so it’s a good idea to be as prepared as you can.  You can be plugging along with life and then all of a sudden, a huge auto repair, vet bill, or new appliance need gets dropped on you and can throw your bank account out of whack and set you back.  If you don’t have the available money on hand, it will go on a credit card and you can enjoy paying interest until the balance is finally gone, which could take months, even years.  If you can keep a few months’ worth of expenses in an account as a cushion, you can protect yourself for the unexpected.

Use Cash Instead of Credit

The days of cash continue to be phased out and in the form of debit and credit cards, but what if you want to curb spending and give yourself an exact amount to use that month, or at least until the next paycheck?  Using cash instead of credit could, even for spending money, help overspending and once it’s gone, it’s gone.  You would be leaving any free money on the table that credit card rewards provide, but if by using a card increases your chances of not being able to pay off the statement balance, then cash could be the way to go.

Prepare Meals at Home

Sure, it’s nice to go out for dinner, even picking up carryout for lunch, but that quickly adds up if you do more than a few times a week.  For a fraction of the cost of going out you can prepare your meals at home, and probably even notice the pounds start to drop off as well as you start to eat some healthier ingredients.  It may be impossible to completely cut out going out, but even limited to once a week and you could still save hundreds per month.

Create a Budget

It may not be the easiest to keep up with but setting a budget may be what you need in order to allocate funds to bills, food, gas, spending, in order to free up any extra money at the end of the month by staying within your limits.  If you are unsure on how much to set aside, take a look at last month’s debit or credit card statement to see all of your purchases, and then come up with a good starting point of what you think you should be spending in each and go from there.