Twelve easy ways to save loads of money

posted by Simon Moynihan

"Expenditures rise to meet income"

Or no matter how much you make you'll find a way to spend it. So said the English author Cyril Northcote Parkinson in his famous second law. His first - "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" - is a canny observation on how a five minute job can take an hour if you let it.

Parkinson was right on the money though. I know that with every increase in my income, I've found a way to spend most of it. But over the last year, my income has shrunk along with almost everyone else in Ireland. Thanks to taxes and levies it's time for me to really look at ways to cut my expenses.

There's a another part to Parkinson's second law and that is that "the reverse is not true" meaning your expenses don't automatically shrink to match your dwindling income. Now I know that it's hard to cut back, but I don't think it's impossible. I think we're just paying too much for the stuff we need and the stuff we do.

Of course, the Internet is full of money-saving tips and advice, but a lot of it just too much hassle. I don't expect cutting a couple hundred euro a month from my spending to be easy, but if it's torture I won't do it. I've looked at lots of sites, spoken to friends and colleagues and come up with a few things I thought were good ideas. Some I've tried, some I haven't and some I won't do at all, but I was surprised at how much can be saved by doing just a few.

Here's some good ones for around the house:

Cable and Satellite TV. Most of us are paying a monthly subscription for TV, but most of the channels we watch are available for free. The free-to-air satellite boxes that turn up in Lidl and Aldi every now and again cost about €120 - you can even get a version with a recorder for a few euro more. The dish needs to be put up which apparently you can do yourself if you're handy, and that's it. No more monthly TV bill. Thanks to JC for this one, will you come and install mine? :-)
I reckon on savings of about €30 a month here.

Home phone 1. Do you still have a home phone? When did you last use it? Just the line rental is probably costing €30 a month. This is an easy save. Just cancel it. I cancelled mine when I moved home and didn't get a new one - I don't even notice that it's gone.
Savings at least €30 a month.

Home phone 2. If you actually need a home phone and have broadband in the house, consider using Voice over IP. You can get a VOIP box which plugs into your broadband modem and your plain ole telephone plugs into that. It works exactly the same as the real thing and for about a fiver a month, you get a real phone number. Then just pay for calls (which are very cheap). There's a bunch of Irish providers that'll set this up for you. The box will cost about €40 which is less than two months line rental. Thanks to the guys at Worldlink.ie for this one.
Savings at least €25 a month.

Bundled communications. The simple answer here is don't do it. It might sound like a great idea to get a home phone with unlimited calls to the UK included with your digital TV pack for an extra 15 a month, but unless you call the UK every day and stay on for an hour at a time it's not worth it. Same goes for the so called TV deals. They are all designed to pull an extra fiver out of you here and another tenner out of you there.
Savings on bundled calls and TV recorder subscriptions €20 a month.

Electricity 1. It's easy and fun (no kidding) to reduce your usage. Get an electricity monitor like an "Owl" which shows you in real time how much juice your house is using. Turn stuff off and on again, find out how much the gadgets and appliances are using and then, as they say, knowledge is power. The Owl guys reckon you can save about 15% off your energy bill just through awareness of how much electricity stuff uses. I love this one and I think they're right, although I've become insufferable as I walk around the house with the monitor in my hand!
Savings about €10 a month.

Electricity 2. Switch. If you haven't already, you can save as much 14%. If you switched a year ago you're coming off your introductory offer and your discount has fallen to as little as 5% off ESB rates, so it's time to switch again. bonkers.ie will show you exactly how much you can save, which provider is cheapest for you and help complete the switch for you.
Savings about €10 a month for an average house.

Gas. Switch that too. Savings of as much as 11% off Bord Gais rates are available. bonkers.ie is building a gas comparison service, but if you want to switch right now, contact Flogas or Airtricity directly. It took a week for mine to go through.
Savings of about €6 a month for an average house.

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Just by sorting the utilities, I could save about €100 a month. Not bad, and they are easy saves; make a change once and the savings keep on coming. Just don't let new expenses rise to meet your newly-saved cash!

There's a few more suggestions below that I found interesting. They're not as easy because you've got to keep doing some of them, but the savings can make it very worthwhile.

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Check your tyre pressure. Know how much harder it is to cycle a bike with soft tyres? Same with your car. If you're tyres are not properly inflated, your car has to work much harder to move you around. With petrol now costing around €1.35 per litre this is an easy way to save a few bob.
Depending on how neglected your tyres are, I'd guess savings of about €10 a month.

Forget the car altogether. It's summer, the weather is better, the traffic is lighter and it's easier to get around.  Take the bus into the city centre and when there, use a Dublin Bike or the city center bus to get around. If you sign up to the Dublin bike scheme you can take out bikes for free and the city centre bus service only costs 50c per journey. Save on petrol, parking and hassle.

Make three times as much! Next time you're making chili, curry, casserole or any big pot dish, make loads more than you usually would and freeze what you don't use. These meals are great replacements for take-away and delivery food. Just pull it out of the freezer, reheat, and you'll have dinner faster than the pizza guy can say 20 minutes.
Savings €20 on take-away for 2.

Bike to work for the summer. It costs nothing to run, nothing to park and gets you into shape. Best of all, you'll know exactly how long it'll take to get from your house to your work every day.
Savings off the bus or train about €80 a month.

No money fun. Instead of going to the pub, cinema or restaurant, try something cheap or free instead. With the long evenings it's a great time to go for a walk in the park, have friends around for a bottle of wine outside or go along to one of the council's free events (check their websites for details - they are surprisingly good). Thanks to Aoife for putting me on to the events.
Savings on skipping a night at the pub or restaurant... €20, €30, €40, more?

I'd say with a few easy adjustments, I could save a couple of hundred euro a month which I can put into my high interest rainy day fund. If you have any more easy or interesting ways to save a few bob, we'd love to hear them. Just leave a comment below!