H-DOT 101: Living On a Budget.

 

Only a handful of people on this planet has access to immeasurable wealth. The rest have to count their coins at least thrice a day. A fraction of these people doesn’t even have enough coins to do that.

This is the sad reality of our world. Tons and heaps of money belong to the 1% of the world that forms the elite class. The rest is distributed among the remaining 99%. What’s more troubling is that even in this 99%, wealth distribution is not equal. As a result, many people have to live below the acceptable living standards just to make it through.

With that being said, the state of the world economy is not going to improve overnight. Neither is this blog post going to help you do that. What this blog can & will help you with is to deal your circumstances better.

Living on a budget is perhaps the hardest thing you will ever have to do. It’s exhausting, both physically and mentally.

If you’re like me, you know how it’s like wanting something you just saw and waiting a few months before you can finally afford to get it. That’s the misery of a person living on a budget. People like you and I don’t wait for fresh release, we wait long enough for the fresh release to be old enough so that we can finally afford it.

However, with a few tricks and tips and a really sharp intuition, this process does not have to be a complete hellhole! Here are my five tips to help you lead a successful “on-a-budget” time period:

 

1) Learn the art of recycling.

step 1: learn to recycle     

Being on a budget means that you have to be super careful of what you throw out! This goes for everything, literally everything! Food, clothes, perishables, and even something as trivial as stationary. Make a habit of checking everything for what I like to call a “left over value”.

Left over value is when an object has served the purpose you bought it for, but it’s not quite done yet. For example, fruits make for a wonderful healthy snack. You bring a fresh produce home, cut them up, and make some smoothies. The fruits have served the purpose you intended for them. However, they can still provide so much value. For starters, you can plant the seeds again to start your own self-sustaining smoothie fuel!

If you are checking every object, that has presumably fulfilled its purpose, for its left over value; you are also propagating an excellent habit of recycling. Things are already bad for the planet. Let us not make it worse shall we?

2) Wasting food is NOT an option.

step 2: dont waste food

Alright, let’s make one thing absolutely clear. Wasting any commodity is not an option when on a budget. Even though it’s pretty obvious, sometimes sticking to a rigorous routine can be difficult and most of us go overboard. However, whatever you do, wasting food is never an option when on a budget.

Why is that, you ask? Well, because it has a major psychological impact on your brain.

Wasting absolute life necessities can lead to the development of general apathy that can affect your ability to preserve a lot of other things in your life as well. This means that when you are on a budget, the last thing you want to do is to switch off your compassion for saving things. So no, wasting food is not an option!  

3) Lead a non-disposable life.

step 3: live non disposable

Disposable lifestyle may be easy, but it is also much more expensive than you can imagine. Furthermore, it can quite easily switch off your compassion for saving things as well! This is troublesome because that is literally the last thing you want to do when you are trying to get by on the bare minimum.

Buying disposable items can seem like a cheap option in the start, like for example when you buy the Styrofoam Tupperware to replace the dishes. This disposable millennial excuse for crockery can save you money initially, but think about how many times you set out to buy it every month.

Disposable life always hurts in the long run because you don’t see the bigger picture altogether. All that’s visible to you is the short discount episodes one after the other, when you don’t even realize that there is no need for these repeated purchases!

4) Nature is your entertainment!

step 4: nature is your entertainment

One of the many perks of being on a budget is that you get an excuse to finally go out! And while that can serve both as an added advantage, or a sorry to attempt to ease the pain with humor; there is a clear silver lining.

Being on a budget means that you have to avoid going out a lot, right? Not quite! T depends on what you mean by going out. Last I checked, leaving your doorstep to go out and wander was still free of tax. While that might not sound too appealing at first, there are some solid scientific indications for why you should use this stage of your life to get more natural outdoorsy experience!

The best part all this is that you don’t even have to go to a natural habitat that is far away from where you live and will probably cost you a lot of money to travel to. That family park right around the corner would do just fine. Go out and take a walk on the grass barefooted. Maybe you will grow a liking for it.

5) Credit-less life

step 5: credit less life

If you can’t buy it with cash, it is probably not a really good idea.

Credit sounds extremely nice, but it’s not for you. Not right now at least. Remember why you started living on a budget in the first place. Whether it was a choice because you wanted to save some money or you didn’t have a choice, what matters is that credit is bad! Why would you want to pile up on credit debt when you can’t even pay your current bills properly.

Granted that when taking credit you don’t have to pay it back immediately. You might think that by the time you will have to pay off the loan you’d be up on your feet again. But that’s not really how things work. Taking a loan when on a budget is a bad idea and I will not tell you otherwise.