Us moms know better than most how tight money can get once children are involved, they seem to just vacuum the money out of your pocket don’t they? Not their fault of course but I can honestly say that I had never felt the financial pinch quite the way I did when my little ones came along. Over the past 6 months or so, my husband and I have been on a money saving mission, we’ve reviewed all aspects of our lives and tried religiously to cut down on our costs, with great success, I estimate that we currently spend around $400 less per month than before and it honestly doesn’t feel like it.

I want to share with you some tips on how we cut down on our spending and perhaps you can do the same.

Service Providers

The first place that I started was with all of the services that we pay for on a monthly basis, gas, electric, broadband etc. I did plenty of research online and found that switching to different providers would give us far more benefits and a better rate. Just as an example, I switched our broadband to Frontier Communications and made huge savings from our previous internet provider, and the speed is better. Try it yourself, put one day aside and call around all of your energy and service providers, you’ll save loads.

Shopping Lists

It may sound small and quite insignificant but the cost-saving that we have made fro making shopping lists and sticking to them has been incredible. We used to just head to the supermarket and buy whatever we thought we needed, now we make a list for the week ahead and stick to it religiously, we currently spend around $100 less per month with this method.

Gift Making

I quit enjoy arts, crafts and cooking so we decided that for all the families’ birthdays that we had coming up, that we would make gifts rather than buy them. So far we have had 6 birthdays between family and friends and made gifts for all, not only are the gifts more personalized and the receivers have loved them, but we’ve probably saved around $25 on each one.

Couponing

Couponing has changed my life and in all honesty, I’ve become a little bit addicted to it. I was never one to collect coupons in the past, I just didn’t think it was worth trawling through women’s magazines searching for little pieces of paper to cit out to save $1 on some detergent. Then I found websites like Groupon, each day there are an incredible amount of deals on the site that can save you money on anything from vacations to your weekly shop and the best part is, it costs nothing to get involved. Simply log on to the site each day and see what is available, you’ll have to be quick as often there is a limited amount of deals available. The savings on this site can be as high as 70 or 80% so you’d be foolish not to get involved.