How to Save Money

Hey everyone. So today I thought I would make a post on how to effectively save money. These days I think way too many young people have no idea how to save their money. I have way too many friends and know too many people who are always complaining that they only have $20 left in their accounts and "can not wait until their next pay so they can go and spend their money". I'll give you a brief overview of my working life & savings habits and then share some of my best money saving tips I have! 

Working Life Overview

• Pre-working life (under 14 years old): 
• Typically got money off my mum every now and then when I asked to go to the movies or something
• Other than that the money I got came from birthdays, christmas and doing chores for my mum or my aunty. 
• I used to always try and go by the "save half and spend half" rule
• First job (14-15 years old):
• Worked at McDonald's
• Wasn't very good at saving lots of money
• Would save for short term goals, i.e. concert tickets
• Mum used to make me save at least $20 each week from my pay into a savings account
• Having a key card was a bad idea: I didn't pay attention to what I would spend
• 16-17-start of being 18/the remainder of high school
• Didn't do 'formal' work
• Money came from babysitting over the years
• Saved all of that money to spend at schoolies (didn't spend it all- bonus)
• Post-high school/uni student life
• Became a workaholic
• Focused on the future
• Saves more money than I spend
• Got a job straight from school and have worked there ever since
• Each summer holidays I get an extra job (e.g. Christmas casual job and a seasonal theme park job)
• Work as much as possible during all holiday breaks so I can ease off a bit during uni time to study and focus on the uni work

So that (in very basic terms) sums up my life to do revolving around working and saving habits!

Online Shopping

Let's talk about online shopping shall we? 

How many of you are students and shopaholics like myself? Well just before you go back to being sad about everything you can't buy because you don't have the money, I have something great I need to share with all of you! It's called UNiDAYS. There are basically just a whole bunch of different stores (places like Glue Store, The Iconic, ASOS etc.) that gives you a discount code to use when shopping (ranges from about 10%-25% off). It is literally the best thing ever. All you have to do is verify your student status and then you're free to redeem the codes when shopping. You can sign up here if you're interested!

 I am a sucker for online shopping. Not only do I find it the most convenient thing in the world to do (I don't have to leave my house, I don't have to put on pants, I can literally just grab my laptop and spend as much money as there is in my bank account). I always spend hours online when online shopping though, because I need to make sure I am buying the best bargain (duh).

The other day, for example, I was bored at home and I decided to make a list of all the essential items I was going to need to buy for myself this Winter (I don't really own a lot of winter clothes because I just try to ignore the fact it gets cold and also I was used to just wearing school uniform, so last winter I alternated between basically 2 pairs of pants, 1 jacket, 1 coat and 2 pairs of shoes). I genuinely needed winter clothes. My list consisted of:

- mid rise jeans

- knee high boots

- cream/white jacket

-black coat

- denim jacket

- comfy jumpers

- hooded cardigans

- infinity scarf (red, black or grey)

- beanie

- low white converses

- high top black & white converses

- pleather tights

- handbag

- flanno

A bit of a list but like I mentioned, I don't really own anything warm and last year I wore the same thing constantly or I would freeze. My converses broke recently (after 5 years, bless you my white converses) so that was the starting point for my online shopping experience. 

As I sat at my computer and opened up 10 or so different tabs with shopping sites, I started my shopping adventure. I created carts with the items I needed, compared the prices over different sites and then (so far) settled for making purchases from 4 different websites all because I either:

a) got a good bargain on the items

b) they had free shipping

c) both of the above

I started off on Glue Store because of the 15% student discount and I figured this was going to be the best place to buy my converses. I was happy with the $27 saving because everyone knows that the popular, classic converses never go on sale (and they're the ones that I wanted). Then I ended up scoring an amazing black coat from ASOS for only $45 and a lovely knit cardigan. I then went shopping on the Cotton On website because they always have such good bargains. I ended up buying jeans, a jacket, some shirts and a beanie. I also bought a denim jacket and another cardigan from city beach.

I am pretty happy with everything I bought and now I just can't wait for all of my items to arrive.

Thanks for reading,

Stelle xx