Have you recently moved to a metro city from a small town or a rural area? I know you were overjoyed during the time of shifting in hope that you would be able to enjoy the fast-paced life. However, with only a couple of months gone, you now find it hard to cope with higher living index in a metro city. Rent and other household expenses are eating into the lion’s share of your income, leaving you with almost nothing for saving.
However, things are not as bleak as you may be thinking. In fact, if you wisely make a budget and follow it religiously, you will manage to meet both ends meet without sacrificing your standard of living. Things are tough but not impossible.
From my wealth of experience, I will now share some of gems in regards to money saving after you move to a metropolis.
Make a List of Priorities
While making a budget, you need to identify your priorities. Find out the cheapest alternatives to the necessary items. Quality will not differ much but you will get to save a lot. In fact, you will be able to free up a larger space on your grocery budget. Spend more money on a few top-listed items which are of more priority to you and counterbalance your budget by skewing few pennies towards the less important items.
Change Habits
Most of the people think the only way to cut on expenses is to offload some not-so-important items from the budget category. However, there is other way to cut coats within the cloth. If you make some changes in your household habits, it will bring you results. You know how costly mutton is now. Why don’t you switch to chicken and have mutton only once in a month or fortnight?
It’s never easy to change habit and you may take several months to do so. But if cutting cost is what you prioritize, you won’t mind sacrificing some of your most preferred items. However, changing habit never means that you will have to give up consuming all of your favorite items. Just a few tweaks will help you take everything under control and easily cope with downsides of living in a big city.
Enjoy Free Events
Living in a metro city is not bad, especially if you can control expenses. The metro cities host a lot of free events. You can have lots of fun at these events and there are offers of cheap deals for the participants. News of free events come on the newspapers and is even announced on local cable channel.
Forget Your Car
Do you own a car? It won’t be a problem as long as you are not using the car quite often. Big cities have a far better transportation system. Post office, library, schools and all other things are located nearby. If you are going out to enjoy shopping or movie together with your family, use your car. However, if such outings are quite frequent in a month, use rented car to save money on travelling expenses.