Thinking About Cost vs. Benefit When Saving Money

“One-size fits all” does not work when identifying ways to save money in your home. What works for me right now may never work for you, and vice versa. When you and your family are looking for ways to cut back in your household expenses, it is important to factor in the time, money and energy you would have to spend to make it work. You are setting yourself up for failure if you think that just using a few coupons each week will be your key to quickly and easily saving thousands. It doesn’t quite work that way.

As you are researching ways to save (by factoring in the time, money and energy you will need), you should be asking yourself questions like “Do I have the time in my schedule to do this consistently?” and “Do we have the extra money right now to invest in this?”

For example, let’s say you want to start making homemade snacks for your children, and you calculate that this will save you approximately $25 per week. You anticipate that initially, this will take about 3-4 hours per week. The benefits are of course homemade is much cheaper, and the snacks are much healthier as well.

In another example, let’s say that you plan to use coupons for every single food item. You determine that this will save about $50 per week. You determine that it will take about 8 hours per to research deals, gather and clip coupons, and spend the extra time it will take to shop at multiple stores for specific items. The benefit could potentially be thousands of dollars of savings over the course of a year.

For both of these examples, you MUST determine whether the benefits are greater than the costs. Time and money are very precious, so it’s important that one doesn’t just blindly jump into something in anticipation of great rewards. If you have this mindset, you will quickly become frustrated and will likely give up trying to save money at all. Be wise, plan, and then implement the strategies that fit into your lifestyle.

BEING FRUGAL SHOULD NOT BE STRESSFUL!!!!

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