Heather Barnett, editor with Money Crashers, joined Cheddar News to discuss ways to cut down costs when living alone and what apps to use to stay on budget.

<div class="block">Heather Barnett, editor with Money Crashers, joined Cheddar News to discuss ways to cut down costs when living alone and what apps to use to stay on budget.</div>

Stretching Your Dollar

Stretching Your Dollar: How to Reduce Expenses When Living Alone

To help you decide if you can afford to live alone and to give you some strategies on how to make it work. I'm joined by Heather Barnett, she's editor at Money Crashers. So, Heather, is there a good rule of thumb to calculate whether you can even afford to live alone? Um You know, I think the most important thing that you can do is uh go through and track all of your spending to make absolutely certain that, you know, where every single dollar goes. Uh You want to write down every single one of your expenses too, not just bills. Uh You wanna make sure that you've got all of the individual groceries and streaming every streaming service. It's really easy to get signed up for those subscriptions and kind of forget about them. So, uh you know, a lot of the newer fintech banks have analysis tools you can use to go through all of that and put together everything and that'll kind of help you determine exactly where all of your money is going right now. Now, how much of a cushion should you have for emergency expenses? Think stuff like medical bills. Uh The general rule of thumb is 3 to 6 months worth of your, uh, living expenses depending on, you know, exactly, uh, where you live, how high the cost of living is, et cetera. Uh, but if you don't have that don't panic, just start with an emergency fund of one month, uh, and build your way from there and it's just about saving a little bit here and a little bit there. Cutting expenses where you can, uh, if you try to make it so that you get everything all at once, all you're gonna do is stress yourself out even more and you're probably going to stop doing what you need to get your budget back on track. Now, food is one of the biggest weekly expenses. What are some strategies you have to save on that front? Uh, I mean, I think that a lot of us and my, this is myself included, uh, things like, uh, deli food delivery services. Uh, doordash, seamless. We spend a lot on that kind of stuff. Uh, we go out to eat a lot. Um, we just don't really feel like cooking for ourselves. And, uh, I personally think that one of the best ways to sort of get in the habit of cooking for yourself is to kind of take one week and to start with a meal delivery service. Uh, like, uh, uh, hello, fresh or, uh, something along those lines, they give you all the recipes and, uh, you can really just, you only need to do it for a week or two before you kind of get into the groove. And after that, you can start planning your own meals and kind of learning, you know, where you can cut costs and how to put together a meal plan that takes advantage of everything that you have instead of going out to eat. Now, what about utilities? Are there ways to track and reduce your usage? Absolutely. There are tons of apps out there. Like I mentioned previously, a lot of you probably already have access to those apps in your bank account. Uh, especially some of the newer neo banks, some of the online banks, uh, those are really good at providing services that break every single thing down so that you can see really easily at the touch of a button where every single dime you have is going. If you, if your bank doesn't do that, you can download an app called Mint, uh, and use something like that, uh, or whatever you do. Uh, the most important thing is just that you, uh, know where every dollar is going. Now, what are some other ways that you can cut back on spending if that's something you want to keep an eye on? Uh, I, I think for every person it's a little bit different. Uh, like for a lot of people, I think that there's, there's something like the latte tax where you pretty much are spending 6 $10 a day. Uh, just because you stop at a place like Starbucks or a coffee house on your way to work instead of making it yourself. And if you kind of go down the online rabbit hole of coffee making, even if you spend two or $300 on a really nice machine. If you start making it at home, you can start saving a lot of money. And honestly, I think most of us only need a 50 or $100 machine. Max. Uh I think what we really want to learn is just kind of some of those coffee mixing recipes, stuff like that. Um Another place that I think a lot of people have a lot of problem are those streaming services. Uh It's like you're subscribing to these things to sort of cut the cord, then you end up paying just as much on that because you subscribe to every service under the sun instead of doing that. Pick one service a month or one service a quarter, go through all of the stuff that you watch on that, make sure you've seen everything, then switch to a different subscription, cancel your cable, especially if a lot of what you watch are the channels uh that are generally free or if you find yourself watching lots of reruns, there are free services like Pluto and Tube that offer uh free online television. If you get an antenna there's over the air broadcasts and depending on where you live, there are way more than a lot of people realize available to you. Uh, in terms of between internet and over the air broadcast, you can get a lot of the stuff you currently watch just by using those methods. Well, thanks so much for joining us today. That's Money crashers, Heather Barnett.