(Sorry in advance for grammatical errors, English isn't my first language)
My SO and I live very frugally. I thought I could share some tips with you guys.
My SO is still studying full time. Thus we live on my income alone. I work 4 days a week as a software developer (~5000 bucks a month). We have two cars, and live in a pretty expensive (for our standards) appartment. We manage to save ~1680 bucks each month for our house we want to buy in the future.
Monthly costs are:
- ~2000 bucks rent
- 50 bucks electricity
- 50 bucks for our two mobile contracts (25 per person)
- 800 bucks taxes
- ~100 bucks fuel
- ~320 bucks food (~80 bucks a week)
I get paid in 13 payments, which means in December I get double the monthly salary. With a part of that we pay for yearly insurances and stuff like that.
How we save money:
- We completely turned off the heating and just heat up the appartment with the little wood stove when needed. Wood, blankets and warm teas are cheaper than oil heating :)
- I can get super cheap mobile contracts from work. 25 bucks with everything unlimited included. Thus we don't need a seperate internet bill, we just bought a used 4g router, got a second data sim card on my mobile contract, and voila, "free" internet.
- We invest a lot of money in our local version of a 401k, which we can deduct from the taxes, thus saving ~1800 bucks a year in taxes
- We cook everything we eat. We eat out like 3 times a year. We like cooking with chickens, since you can easily make 3-4 different meals (in 8-12 portions) from one chicken. We heavily subsidize the expensive meat with cheap beans, since they're filling and high in protein. We mealprep everything. We make a bread every 2-3 days, so we have something to snack on. Oatmeal, rice, pasta or potatoes are the base for almost every meal we cook.
- We have a home gym in the garage where we work out 2 times a week. We save ~800 bucks a year on gym fees like that. (The home gym cost us ~800 bucks to set up, so after 1 year it already paid for itself).
- We cut our own hair. I cut the tips from my GFs hair every 3 months, so they grow healthy without splitting. Then we got a cheap buzzer with which we cut my hair every 3-4 weeks. She hast gotten really good at giving me a nice fade! 25 bucks a month saved for me and ~80 bucks every 3 months saved for her.
- We set up a little garden. Our goal is to eat only produce from the garden during the main growing season, thus saving even more on food
- We do the groceries once a week, and we ALWAYS make a plan on what we will cook in the following week, and what we need to buy. We save ~30 bucks a week compared to when we didn't make a plan.
- We sometimes try to stretch out the weekly groceries for 1-3 more days. This forces us to use up stuff in the pantry that gets forgotten otherwise.
- Dates cost (almost) nothing for us; when it's bad weather, we play some board games (we buy used ones every couple of months), Mario Kart on our very old Nintendo Wii, movie night, learning magic tricks and showing each other, planning upcoming projects etc. When it's good weather: walking the dog, hiking (sometimes combined with geocaching), picnic, camping, grilling, laying in the garden and reading, badminton, volley, gardening...
- We don't drink alcohol, smoke, or do any other drugs, which saves a ton
- Instead of paying for vacations, we bought a very old van for 1800 bucks, invested 500 bucks to build a camper (a fun project, which entertained us for many weeks), and now we can go on vacations whenever we want and where ever we want. Also a very good solution, since our dog can come with us.
- We live a very low waste life. We fill 1 17 liter (3.7 gallons) trash bag every 2-3 weeks. Produce scraps we either freeze to make free broth, or we compost it. Cardboard and paper also gets composted (free fertilizer for the garden, yay!). Plastic gets reused as much as possible.
- We have bought an automatic coffee machine. It was expensive (~400 bucks) but when we calculate the saved time, electricity and cost per cup (cheap Lidl beans are surprisingly good!), it has paid for itself over and over. I also do the regular maintenance (deep cleaning, lubing and replacing o-rings) myself, which will make it last much longer.
- We bought a slowcooker. In the winter we make soup with it. It's absolutely delicious, healthy, cheap and you can use a lot of left overs and produce scraps (essentially free flavor)
- We like building stuff. We built a lot of our furniture out of wood, for a fraction of the price of new furniture. We also get to build it exactly the way (color, size) we want it to be
- We drive older, easy to maintain cars. We do the regular services and repairs together ourselves. Last year the turbo on my car broke. I replaced it for ~150 bucks. Garage would've cost me over 2500 bucks just for the pieces! All just with some YouTube tutorials.
- Though our cars are older, we still made sure that they have great MPEG
- I get a new iPhone every 3 years from my company. So every three years I get the newest, and my GF uses my 3 year old one. This works great for us, since we're not really that active on our phones except for taking pictures and some texting.
I think having a clear goal what you want to do with your left over money is probably the most important thing. We always dream about buying a house, and what characteristics it should have etc. This makes it very easy to resist buying stupid things now.
I hope you found this list useful :) What are your frugal tips?
Edit.
I just realized that the title sounds a little cocky. This wasn't my intention!
June 07, 2021 at 08:55AM
