Being financially secure is a long-term thing. There are loads of things you can do in the short term to save money: stop buying coffees; cut down on buying name brands at the supermarket; sell your unwanted goods. But I want to talk about the long-term.
What can you do to secure a more money-safe future? Well, I’m going to tell you.
- Learn how to cook
You can save loads of money by cooking simple tasty meals with fresh produce. It’s hard to do this though if you don’t know how to cook. My signature dish of plain pasta and bacon was legendary at uni, but for all the wrong reasons. Since I was a disaster in the kitchen, I used to eat out A-LOT; so much so I was on first term names with the Dominoes delivery driver.
The savings here are simple. If you know how to cook delicious, inexpensive food, you’re going to spend way less on eating out. You’re also going to learn about buying food: where sells produce the cheapest; not over-buying ingredients etc.
These might not be massive savings over a week, but over a lifetime it can add up.
Also, think about that side-hustle cash you can make with all those impromptu bake-sales you’re going to run. That’s some major dough.
- Learn new skills
Skills are money-makers. Learning new skills can open up more avenues for saving and earning. One thing I did that made a big difference was learning how to build websites on WordPress.
I had wanted a website to promote and display my writing work but didn’t know how to make one. I was going pay a friend to create one but decided instead to teach myself how to use WordPress.
Not only did I save money by not having to pay someone else, I got good enough at the skill that other people wanted to pay me for it.
- Can your hobbies make you cash?
If you can make money doing the thing you love, then why not? When you’re doing something you enjoy it feels less like work. Maybe you enjoy gardening in your spare time, or photography? Have a think and ask yourself, is this a skill I can sell?
I never used to take the writing I did seriously until someone offered to pay me for a poem. Because I enjoyed writing it didn’t correlate to me that I could make money from it, probably because doing something for money is considered work, and work’s boring, right?
Having another person see my hobby as worthy of money validated it for me. After that, there was no looking back. Don’t wait for someone else though. Be proactive.
These three things won’t just potentially help you towards a financially-safe future, they’re things that will enrich your life, and that’s something you can’t put a price on.