How I've Been Saving Money Without Sacrificing My Social Life

I've made a lot of large and exciting purchases already in the past year. It started with buying a car - this was a tough one for me as I didn't want to have a loan, but ultimately decided that it was the right decision for me. It ended with me buying a home and we did adopt a dog in between. I could write whole posts on these purchases, but that will be for another time. We bought a mountain condo in 2018 that depleted most of our savings. We didn't think that we would be able to buy a primary home for ourselves for another couple of years. We had to make a lot of sacrifices to make this happen. One thing we weren't willing to sacrifice was time with our friends and family. We still took a lot of trips this year, we went out for the occasional drink and the occasional dinner with friends. What we ended up doing was taking a hard look at our finance and decided what we could realistically live without.

The biggest thing for me was losing my trips to the hair salon. I used to go every six weeks and spent triple digits. I did have very high maintenance red hair at the time and that was the first thing to go. I paid a good chunk of change to color correct my hair back to pretty close to it's natural color. I now use my natural color at my roots to get a balayage done every couple of months. I also do put "hair salon gift card" on my birthday and Christmas lists every year.

In learning the difference between wants and needs and knowing what can wait until later and what can't, we've been able to stretch our finances a little further. I keep a note on my phone with ideas for presents that I do send to my friends and family. I think this makes me a little easier to shop for and I appreciate the gifts a little more because I've been anticipating them a bit. I don't regularly spend money on getting my nails done, massages or facials, but I always add them to my gift lists because they're great!

The other major thing I've done was install every single money-saving app on my phone known to man. The big ones that I love are Dosh and Ibotta. I've made the most money between those two. Dosh is really great and easy because you just sync your credit card up and it will give you money for purchasing at specific places. It's huge for hotels and it'll give me 80 cents every time I order an Uber (which I try not to do, but it's necessary on some occasions so it softens the blow a bit). Ibotta gives you money for uploading receipts. There's usually something I got from the grocery store or the liquor store that qualifies. Even if it is less than a dollar at a time - it adds up if you're patient.

I'm in an unusual situation where my place of employment does allow me a clothing allowance for work clothes, so I do not really spend a lot of my own money on new clothes. When I do go out to new clothes, I'll usually head to Buffalo Exchange or Plato's Closet first. I do generally have a pretty full closet, so if I don't love it, I don't buy it. Even if it is very cheap. That was a lesson that was kind of hard to learn, but I've started to value quality over quantity in my clothing choices.

If I can make it to a happy hour with my friends, I do try to do that as opposed for going out for drinks late at night. For the past couple months, we've also been very fortunate to live in a luxury apartment complex with a few pretty great amenities, so we've valued staying home over going out. This does go for dinner as well, we try to grocery shop for our food when we can. We've also gotten meal delivery boxes on occasion. They can be relatively expensive, but it is usually better for your wallet than going out to a restaurant or ordering delivery. If we really don't have any food, we will try to pick up our food as opposed to getting it delivered to save on the delivery fee and the tip to the driver.

I have also been doing my very best to reconsider my beauty products. I've tried to find the best drug store makeup over going to Sephora every time I need makeup. There are still a few products at Sephora that I swear by, but I am trying. I've also been trying to switch up my shampoo and conditioner routine and keep it under $20 per bottle.

These are a few that have really helped my boyfriend and I and it makes us feel really good about where we are at financially. I do believe a lot of these choices are setting us up for financial wellness in the future and we are very excited to see where this takes us!