I can't remember a time when I wasn't savvy about saving money, I'm always looking for a bargain, using coupons, looking for freebies (that are relevant to us of course), trying to stretch our money that little bit farther, finding much needed items on Freecycle and the list goes on.
I'm always looking for inspirational blogs about how to save money and become debt free and kept coming across articles about using cash instead of debit cards for your weekly or monthly budget, the money is to be stored in different envelopes depending on your budget, for example we have one for groceries, one for petrol and one for Chris's expenses.
I started using the envelope system at the beginning of January and so far it's working really well for us, because we can actually see where the cash is going it's making us more careful about spending it, any money that's leftover each week goes into a separate envelope and will either be paid off our credit cards or used for a family day out, as much as we want to pay our debts down quickly we also need to be able to have a treat or life would be very dull and we would lose motivation.
Another great side effect of using the envelopes is that our 'loose change' sealed money box is filling up nicely.
I'm so glad we have given the envelope system a go, I feel like we are telling our money where to go instead of it disappearing in dribs and drabs from the bank, it's helping me budget better for our groceries which I will write about in next weeks Money Monday post.
Do you use the envelope system ? I would love to hear how it works for you if you do.
Angela x