Easy Money-Saving Tips You Can Use in 2020

Worried about your cash situation for 2020? You’re not alone.

The truth is that while most of us desperately want to spend less and save more money, finding a reliable way to keep our financial situation under wraps isn’t easy. Every year, it seems like the prices of the essentials that we rely on go up, and the amount that we earn from our jobs go down.

Fortunately, now that we’re in a brand new year, there are endless opportunities to try new techniques and strategies that will improve your spending and saving habits. If you’re ready to make a genuine change in 2020, the following tips will help.

1. Spread out Big Costs

So, not technically a saving strategy in some respects, but spreading out your big costs can make them feel a lot more overwhelming. If you have to buy something significant, like a new washing machine, and you need it immediately, you have two options. You can either take all of the money out of your emergency savings account and hope that no other problems will crop up, or you can take out a personal loan.

While using your emergency savings might seem like the better option at first, it actually means that you’ll be left with nothing to turn to if any additional problems happen in your home. For a lot of people who won’t be able to replace their savings immediately, a guaranteed loan can be a less stressful alternative.

2. Try Cashback Sites

In the past, cashback sites got a bad reputation because people used to use them to buy items that they didn’t need, in order to ramp up tiny rewards. However, that’s not the way that these services are intended to be accessed. If you want to make the most of cashback sites, you need to make sure that you’re not purchasing anything that you wouldn’t have bought anyway.

Learn how to use cashback websites correctly, and you’ll ensure that you’re getting paid to buy the items you always need. You won’t earn a fortune this way, but you will gradually make some extra money to put into your savings account.

3. Be More Social

There are a lot of benefits to being social in today’s digital world. If you have an account on some of the most popular social media accounts, you’ll be able to follow some of your favourite brands on their channels and be the first to know when competitions are running for a chance at getting some free products. You can also use your social accounts to keep track of any sales or discounts that might be coming down the line.

As well as following your preferred brands on social media, don’t forget to join groups on Facebook and other channels too. These groups can help you to track down free things to do with the family, as well as giving you a place to purchase second-hand items for low prices.

4. Stop Paying Full Price

Why pay full price when you’re living in a world where there are countless ways to save money? You don’t need to clip coupons out of a newspaper to save money these days. You can find discount vouchers and coupons on countless websites online. There are even plugins that you can download onto your Google browser that will automatically apply discount codes to your basket whenever you’re visiting a website that you want to buy from.

If you don’t mind getting some extra clutter in your inbox, you can even consider signing up for email newsletters to be sent to you from your favourite brands with offers and sale information.

5. Unlock Your Phone

Finally, if you get your phone on contract, it’s locked to a specific network, which means that you end up having to spend a fortune on a package that generally doesn’t suit your needs. Instead, it could be a much better idea to get your phone unlocked. Doing this will allow you to pay for a pay-as-you-go sim card, instead of a full contract.

Pay-as-you-go deals are often a lot less expensive. You can also save some money on new phones when you want to update your technology by looking for refurbished and second-hand phones too. Refurbished phones or often excellent in quality, as they’ve been spruced up so that they’re back to ‘brand new’ status. You just have to deal with the fact that someone else may have owned your phone before you did.