Sometimes you can only control what you can control and sometimes you just need to say no.
Eating at home or making home cooked meals is a big one, for whatever reason, a ton of restaurants and bars are still really busy. It's shocking to me and I literally grew up in the restaurant business with my family. Places with garbage food, with zero value and sky high drink prices are busy, why? Also eating less meat can make a noticeable difference, so can buying what in essence is the same thing. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts for $30 kg? Like come on.
Always worth it to do an annual financial audit on almost everything in a household. Cable tv, insurance, mobile phone plan, bank plans and a lot more. Ask for discounts and if structuring things differently can save money. No point in having a larger savings account balance at 2.5% when carrying a min balance to avoid a bank plan can yield 5+% on the money.
Really dig down deep and see if you need everything your actually buying, as in really needing it. Take the cost of an item and double it, cause that is the true cost of gross income in order to buy it. People would be amazed at how quickly their daily shopping addiction of Amazon or something online can get curtailed.
Also do fractional or per use calculations on a lot of things. Those little savings add up to major money over a lifetime. One time savings are exactly onetime savings but savings in perpetuity add up to massive dollars.
You hear people say things like "Tide pods are way better for laundry" at $ .50 a load or whatever, meanwhile Tide liquid, the same thing, is priced at $.25 a load. You just halved a cost for the same product for the rest of your life. Better yet, use powder and your even better. Apply the above level of thinking to things and it's amazing how quickly you realize companies screw us with their "innovation" that then get bragged about on earnings calls with analysts to boost stock price and executive compensation.
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