Frugal living is a practice many people aren’t comfortable with. They find it challenging to embrace the idea of pinching money, cutting down on expenses, and saving extra cash consistently. Truth be told, frugality is hard work. Nevertheless, it’s probably the safest and most guaranteed method for improving your finances, especially when you aren’t earning much money monthly.
You need to learn and practice the habits of frugal people if you want to be able to avoid common financial challenges like credit card debt, impulse buying, and living paycheck to paycheck.
Fortunately, there are numerous frugal living habits that can transform the state of your finances. By consistently exhibiting these good habits, it will be much easier to achieve your financial goals and avoid going bankrupt.
What Are Some Frugal Habits?
Frugal habits are simple practices that can help you live below your means, prevent overspending, and ultimately help you save lots of money. Limiting your credit card use, eating homemade food, and budgeting your income are some of the many frugal habits to live by.
Why Should You Have Frugal Habits?
Having frugal habits is essential if you must secure your finances. By living frugally, you will master how to manage your money efficiently, avoid debt, and hit your financial goals faster.
Moreover, even when you don’t know how to make extra money, living below your means by applying frugal living tips might help you survive during financial crises.
Benefits Of Having Frugal Habits
When you start practicing the habits of frugal people, it may be pretty difficult for you to keep up at first. But if you remain consistent, here are the main benefits you will enjoy:
- Saves You Money
This is obviously the essential benefit of doing the things frugal people do. When you live frugally by cutting your living cost, you will save a ton of money over time.
The logic behind this is straightforward: the more money you spend, the less cash you have to save. But if you can drastically limit your expenses, you can realize extra cash that can be deposited in your savings account. The next time you get discouraged from being frugal, think about how much you could save by spending less.
- Early Retirement
Have you ever thought about when and how to retire? Whether you have thought about it or not, there’s one thing you must know; you can’t retire without having more than enough money in your bank account. To retire successfully, you must have built wealth that can last for the rest of your life and still extend to your children.
When you maintain a frugal lifestyle years before retirement, saving enough money in your retirement fund is easier. You can even invest some of that money in assets, thereby increasing your income passively. Frugal living will help you get to this goal faster.
- Financial Contentment
Frugal living is all about learning to live on less, which improves your finances at the same time. When you are used to living below your means, you will no longer be pressured to pursue a lavish lifestyle. You’ll be contented with your financial state and you won’t have to compare yourself to others. Eventually, this gives you peace of mind and improves your mental health significantly.
- Less Financial Stress
Avoiding financial stress is one good reason you should learn to practice the habits of frugal people. Imagine having credit card debt, your children’s tuition, and housing to pay for. That’s a lot of financial stress that could mess up your mental health.
To avoid this, learn to be frugal. Don’t live in an expensive apartment or incur so much credit card debt that you will struggle to pay off. Live below your means and incur expenses you can conveniently handle without getting stressed out or frustrated.
- Improves Your Net Worth
Practicing daily frugal habits will also improve your net worth. You are indirectly growing your net worth by saving money consistently, investing, and living within your means.
For example, if you cut your grocery bill by $120 a month, and you invest that money in a savings account, your net worth will increase by $1,440 per year unfailingly. Apparently, you are gradually increasing your net worth.
10 Habits Of Highly Frugal People
There are numerous frugal living habits that will enable you to live below your means. Nonetheless, you can narrow your focus on these 10:
1. Regular Homemade Coffee
If you and Starbucks are a thing, you might want to break that relationship for your own good. If you consume Starbucks coffee every day, you would be spending over 100 dollars every month on just coffee.
As someone who wants to build a frugal lifestyle, this is something you should desist from doing. You should learn to prepare your coffee from home before heading out to work. Even a 10-year-old knows how to make coffee. It’s that easy.
If you can consistently prepare your coffee for at least 30 consecutive days, it will become a habit. You’d forget about wasting money on Starbucks and start consuming cheaper homemade cups of coffee every morning.
2. Hosting At-Home Family Date Nights
Do you know you can save money by establishing a weekly family date night? Contrary to popular belief, you don’t always have to leave your home as a couple to have good date nights. You don’t have to be too formal about a lot of things. You can organize a beautiful date night within the comfort of your home.
For example, during weekends, you can get food items on your way back from work and prepare a special meal for yourself and your partner.
To spice things up, you can watch an interesting movie as well. Both of you could watch the film together after eating the special dinner. Truth be told, your partner might love this more than a regular or formal date night. Apart from helping you save money, this will help to strengthen your bond as a couple.
3. Purchasing Ingredients In Bulk
Buying food ingredients in bulk may seem like you’re actually spending a lot of money. However, it’s one of the everyday habits of frugal people that can help you save extra money.
From gallons of milk to canned foods and even tomatoes, you should purchase these items in bulk. Here is why: some time ago, I used to buy half a gallon of vanilla-sweetened milk for $2.45 almost every week. Sometime later, a new brand introduced a full gallon of vanilla-sweetened milk for $4. I started buying this full gallon and saving $0.90 each time I make the purchase.
This is just one of the ways I saved money. There are so many items you can save money on when you buy them in bulk. Besides, buying ingredients in bulk will keep you away from the grocery store for a while, preventing you from making impulse purchases.
4. Repairing Broken Home Appliances
This is one of the frugal habits to save money. From time to time, home appliances could develop a fault or just get broken. Instead of purchasing a new item or handling the appliance to a professional for repairs, you can fix it yourself. The Internet has brought down a lot of blessings on us. You can literally learn how to fix almost any home appliance by watching tutorials online.
I once repaired my broken blender after watching a YouTube tutorial on how to do it. It worked properly and I used the blender for a whole additional year.
5. Moving To A Cheaper Apartment
Moving out of your exquisite fancy apartment may not seem like a fantastic decision, yet it is one of the best habits of frugal people.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average American spends more than 30% of his annual income on housing. That’s a ridiculous amount of money to splurge on an apartment that’s not even yours. Living in a much cheaper apartment could save you thousands of dollars monthly.
Remember, the goal here is to live below your means so that you can be in control of your finances. The moment housing is eating up 30% of your income, your finances aren’t safe anymore.
Moving into a less expensive apartment for the first time might make you a bit annoyed or irritated. However, when you spend a couple of months in the house, you would get comfortable and used to the new lifestyle. But more importantly, doing this will save a ton of money.
6. Building A Monthly Budget
Budgeting is one of the most important habits of frugal people. When adopting a frugal lifestyle, the major quality you should adopt is the ability to restrict your spending.
Budgeting appears to be the most logical way to limit your spending and make the most of what you have. Budgeting your money can help prevent things like impulse purchases and credit card debt.
Moreover, budgeting helps you track your spending and determine where your money goes. If you have never budgeted your income before, there’s nothing to be worried about.
Budgeting is pretty straightforward, as long as you follow the rules. To learn more about budgeting, here is an article that will give you insight into how to budget your money in 5 easy steps.
7. Repurposing Old Items Into New Materials
Of all the habits of frugal people, you shouldn’t forget this one. Repurposing things in your home for new and better use is a great way to save money and live frugally. This is actually what people who flip furniture do. They look for an old item that can be used for something else entirely, and then they fashion the furniture into a different item to serve that purpose.
For example, if there’s a table in your sitting room that you no longer like, you can get a professional Craftsman to transform that table into a different piece of furniture, perhaps a rocking chair. This will save you money, and it also shows that you are a creative and resourceful individual.
8. Canceling Unused Or Irrelevant Subscriptions
When you are accustomed to the daily habits of frugal people, you should see valid reasons why canceling unused or unimportant subscriptions will save you money. Paying for a service or product you rarely use is a waste of money. I used to have this subscription for a software that cost me $175 yearly. But unfortunately, I only used it a few times, maybe once in 3 months.
I eventually realized how much was wasted by renewing the subscription for this software that wasn’t instrumental to me. I canceled my subscription and found another alternative that was almost free.
You could be saving money as well if you painstakingly assess all your subscriptions to identify the ones that need to be cut off.
9. Preserving Leftovers
This is one of the most common habits of super frugal people. Wasting food is the same thing as wasting money. After all, you actually bought the food you wasted using money. If there are leftovers after dinner or breakfast, preserve them and make another meal out of the leftovers the following day.
That’s why you have a freezer. Don’t let your milk, sausages, meat, or pasta go bad. Please refrigerate them. This is also a brilliant method for saving on groceries. If you never waste food, you won’t have to regularly visit the grocery store trying to restock your house with food ingredients.
10. Embracing DIY Projects
If you keep calling the professionals to handle everything for you, you will continue to waste money. One of the habits of frugal people is their willingness to handle certain domestic projects all by themselves.
For example, if you need to repaint your bedroom, there’s no need to hire a painter. Painting is not that difficult. Just buy the right bucket of paint and a few painting brushes, and repaint your room yourself. It doesn’t have to be entirely professional. It’s just your bedroom, and you are probably the only person who sees the four falls of the room.
Getting used to Do-It-Yourself projects as one of the habits of highly frugal people will save you a lot of money. Besides, it will also enhance your skillset and improve your creativity.
Final Thought On Habits Of Frugal People
Reading about the habits of frugal people is not enough to make progress. You must consistently practice these habits to live below your means successfully. If you are just getting started with frugal living, it won’t be easy. You’d miss all the times you were able to spend uncontrollably.
However, don’t forget about the benefits of frugality. Think about the financial goals you could achieve quickly by being frugal. Think about your future, your retirement. This will put you in the right state of mind to practice these habits and be contented.
Pin this for later!
