Keep Financial Records

If at all possible, yes, keep records of every single cent that comes in and every single penny that you spend. It’s much easier these days with the likes of budgeting apps available for your smartphone, but otherwise this is very important because it can open your eyes up to much better ways of handling your finances.

Analyze Your Financial Records

You can only analyze financial records which you’ve documented, in which case the more data you have to work with, the better. The analysis of your financial records doesn’t have to be an in-depth one right from the get-go. Start out small, perhaps just by glancing over things.

This is how you uncover unnecessary money-handling habits which can then be ironed out, such as for example how you might find it cheaper and easier to make one big payment to a service provider you use regularly instead of the many small payments you might be currently making throughout the month. That’s where it all starts in terms of handling your finances better.

Make Payments Manually

Yes, it’ll take a bit more of your time every month, but ultimately making your payments manually will save you quite a bit of money – money which adds up to a very significant total figure if you consider these savings over a longer period of time. Automatic debit orders cost money you know, and that money is partially reclaimed from you as the customer.

In addition to saving a few dollars by making payments manually instead of setting up auto deductions, you also give yourself the opportunity to weave your way out of a sticky situation should the need arise. For example, if you know you’re not going to make all the money needed to pay off something you’ve committed to paying off monthly, it will only cost you more by way of service fees for a debit order on that commitment to bounce due to insufficient funds.

If these payments aren’t automatic on the other hand, you can make arrangements with the appropriate parties to make a later payment while you run around trying to organize the required funds. I mean it happens very often where all you might have needed to put all the money together is perhaps just an extra day or two.

Hold on to Your Money as Long as You Can

Take a leaf out of the books of some of those platforms which people use to make a bit of extra money on the side. Some of these platforms insist on paying out what they owe their micro-workers by check, particularly those in the like of online paid survey sites. Additionally, they also have a fixed payout period which succeeds the date of your earnings withdrawal request, often amounting to at least 30 days.

Why do they do this?

They do this so that they can take advantage of the money which sits in their bank accounts, by way of the interest it earns. You should do the same – keep money in your bank account for as long as you can and in the meantime put it to work, however little the interest is which you’ll be earning.