Saving Money – A Comparative Strategy

Take a look at my income portfolio, and you’ll probably deduce that I’m a lot more interested in making money than saving it. Sit down and have a cup of coffee with me, though, and you’ll find out that saving money is as much of a get-out-of-debt strategy for me as building extra income streams.

When I talk about saving money, what I’m really talking about is “not wasting money.” In other words, it’s about efficiency for me. If I can get the same quality for less money, without spending unnecessary time I could use to make money, then I’ll do it.

For example, clipping coupons from the newspaper is rarely efficient for me. If I spend an hour sifting through coupons, I might come up with about $10 in savings. If I spent the same hour working on a freelance project, I’d earn $40 – $50. So I’m not going to cut into my work time to clip coupons and end up with a $30 – $40 loss.

Now, I sometimes get coupons in the mail from the grocery near my house. I realize these coupons are automatically generated based on the things I’ve already bought, which might seem a bit intrusive, but who really cares if my grocery store knows how many pounds of tomatoes I bought last week? If it means I can save$0.40 this week on tomatoes, then the execs at Kroger can print out my receipts and roll around naked on them for all I care.

By the same token, hiring someone to mow my lawn may seem like a waste of money. But even though the lawn guy charges me $25 for a job that takes him 10 minutes, the same task would take me an hour. And I’d hate it. I’d much rather spend that hour making $50 on a freelancing project and not break a sweat doing so.

Saving money is about finding people (or tools) that can do things more efficiently than you can do them yourself. It’s not about spending hours saving what you could make in a few minutes. That’s just plain stupid. What can someone else do for you more easily than you could do for yourself? Be realistic — pride isn’t going to move you any closer to your financial goals.

Eliminate waste. You’ll save money (and, just maybe, add a couple of years to your life in the process).