'Paying with cash accesses a different part of our brain associated with loss aversion,' explains Keehn. Take out a specific sum of money for the week and only make purchases paid for with cash - not on a credit card. Keehn recommends using Stickk, a website where you can set goals and invite friends to help you track your progress.â€¨ Making a promise to cut back is one thing, but making a statement about it to friends and family can put more pressure on you to live up to that promise. Have your friends hold you accountableâ€¨ of 2 - Find out how paying only with cash for a week can help cut your monthly expenses on page 2Ģ.

Keehn says that the purpose of this is to make people more aware of how much they spend, especially when they tally the costs and separate them into categories. Not to do anything different, just write down every dollar spent.' Every six months or at least once a year, I ask my readers to simply account for every single dollar they spend in a 30-day period. 'My solution is what I call my 30-Day Anti-Budget. Â€¨'I don't believe in traditional budgets as they simply don't work - change must be fundamental and systemic for us to achieve long-term success,' says Keehn. Try a few to see what works for you and hopefully these experiments will carry over as long-term financial habits.â€¨â€¨ĥ ways to cut your monthly expenses and reach your financial goalsâ€¨â€¨ Focusing on awareness and self-control, these experiments are easy ways to track your spending habits and see exactly where your money goes each month. Keehn devised five simple experiments to help cut monthly costs and help you reach your financial goals. I ask my readers to count their financial calories and see where they can get creative in trimming the fat long-term, while having still fun.'â€¨â€¨ 'The first thing someone does when they want to drop some pounds or maintain their weight is to count their caloric intake. 'I often compare financial health with physical health,' says Keehn. Keehn makes clear to her readers that controlling spending is all about awareness, not strict, inflexible budgeting.

High interest consumer debt is absolutely the worst debt you can accumulate,' stresses Kelley Keehn, personal finance expert and author.įor instance, if you buy something because it's 15 per cent off and put it on your department store credit card, you're defeating the benefit of the sale if you're paying 29 per cent interest on the credit card, she says.â€¨â€¨ Â€¨'Avoid putting anything on department store credit cards. These kinds of costs can really hinder our ability to reach our financial goals.â€¨ Things like credit card interest, bank fees and automatic subscription renewals can add up and most of the time, we don't even realize how much of our income is supporting these costs. Cutting out small items like your daily coffee can have a small but tangible impact on our ability to save more money, but what about the intangible costs that we don't even realize we're forking money over for?

Weekly lottery tickets, morning lattes, after-work drinks - we've all thrown our money away on small luxuries, then wonder at the end of the month where on earth it all went.

Cut monthly expenses