Learn how to save money on a small salary with these seven creative ideas. Cut expenses, create a budget, shop smart, cook at home.
You can record your expenses in a notebook or Excel spreadsheet. It’s even easier to install an app that will help you track your expenses by category, save money, and plan major purchases. There are free ones among them.
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Zen-money — syncs with your banking apps and categorizes your expenses. It will tell you how much to put aside for essential expenses and how much you can spend on entertainment. It will remind you to pay off your loan and help you plan your mortgage. You can create a family account.
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Money Flow — helps control income and expenses, save money. Supports more than 170 currencies and their rates. You can export transactions to other programs. Make interactive reports and attach images to transactions (photos of receipts, for example).
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It’s a bit heavy — it helps you manage your spare money. The simple interface resembles a calculator. Enter the amount you have for the month. And the amount you plan to spend. The app will calculate how much you can spend per day. If you save, it will praise you. If you spend too much today, it will reduce the amount for tomorrow.
Create a separate piggy bank account
If you open a replenishable savings account, the money will not just accumulate — a small percentage will be accrued to the account. Usually, the longer the term of the deposit, the higher the percentage. In case of force majeure, you will be able to get your money back. Just carefully read the terms of opening and closing a savings account in your bank. Due to early closure of the account, the bank may withhold interest or accrue at a minimum rate.
A savings account is one of the types of demand deposits. Therefore, the law “On insurance of deposits in banks of the Russian Federation” applies to all savings accounts . If the bank goes bankrupt, the Deposit Insurance Agency will pay you the amount of your deposit. But no more than 1.4 million rubles.
Set goals
For each goal, you can open your own virtual account. Almost all banking applications have this option. You can set the amount and time for which you want to save up for the goal. The application itself will recommend the amount that is best to transfer each month to save up for your goal on time. Some banks can also accrue interest on such accounts.
No one forbids you to take money from this account, but psychologically it will be more difficult to do. You will see how with each withdrawal your goal moves away from you.
Stop buying unnecessary things
We don’t always make purchases out of necessity. Sometimes shopping replaces rest and entertainment. And it’s not always the rich who suffer from this, who have nowhere to put their money.
To stimulate buyers to make impulsive purchases, marketers come up with promotions, sales, discount cards with points and play on the FoMo syndrome (missing out). For example, in 2020, Russians spent 19 billion rubles in one day on the Aliexpress 11.11 sale. For comparison: Wildberries’ entire annual income is 220 billion rubles. On the day of the sale, people mainly bought not essential goods, but electronics, home decor, clothing and accessories.
To avoid impulse purchases, try to make a list of what you need in advance and strictly follow it while shopping. You can even open a calculator and enter the prices of what you put in the basket. This way, you will see the final amount of purchases – this is sobering in situations where “I went for one thing, but ended up buying more.”