10 Ways To Reduce Debt as a Prepper And a Free Gift

Prepping On a Budget And a Free Budget Planner.

One sometimes overlooked aspect of prepping and being self-reliant as you plan for future events is your spending and your budget. As preppers, getting out of debt is just as important as having the right bug out bag and planning for a natural disaster and even more important when it comes to the possibility of an economic collapse.

If you are struggling to pay your bills because you are constantly paying down your credit card bills two things happen…

• You will never get away from this imaginary money system
• You will be limited when it comes to spending money on your preps and working on being more self-reliant.

10 Ways to Reduce Debt

Some of these might be obvious and there are some that are not even on this list, but if we take a hard look at what we spend on a daily basis you might be surprised at how much you spend on stuff you really don’t need. And you would be surprised at how often you can talk yourself into buying something you could really have done without, and I’m speaking from experience here.

Watch Your Pennies And The Dollars Take Care Of Themselves

1. Buy and sell clothes at a thrift store or Goodwill: This might not be too popular if you have teenage children, But what they don’t know won’t hurt them right? I will just hang a shirt up in my daughter’s closet and she will say “where did this come from?” and she loves it.
2. Reduce spending on bills like cable: downgrade your package or get rid of it completely. You can buy two movies a month for half the price of cable, and eventually have a pretty large library.
3. Sell any unwanted or unneeded items around the house: Have a garage sale or sell some unwanted junk on eBay, you would be surprised at what people need that you think is junk. You can also buy used cloths on eBay.
4. Buy generic and on sale: Focus on buying mostly sale items at grocery store or generic brands to reduce your cost.
5. Make a list of unnecessary expenses:  Expenses like magazine subscriptions, newspapers, or any unnecessary reoccurring bill. Ask yourself  “do I want this or do I need this?” Anything that you don’t “need” should go until you are out of debt or at least very close.
6. Put it off: When you feel that impulse to buy that new shiny toy, make yourself wait a couple of days and see if you still feel like you “need” it.
7. Oil companies already have enough money: The prices of gas are not going down so plan your daily errands more efficiently. I could go off on gas prices, but that is for an entirely different post, the point is, there is a lot on money to be saved here.
8. Lights out: This seems obvious, but any of you that have children know exactly what I am talking about. Keeping your house at a constant temperature, turning the T.V. off and turning the lights off add up over the course of a month.
9. Avoid credit cards like the plague: It is far too easy to just “put it on credit” Have the mentality that “if you can’t afford it, you don’t need it.”
10. Budget better: Budgeting is sometimes easier said than done, what really helped me and my wife stay on track was the budget I created below, and it’s yours free if you want to use it.

Free Gift – Budget Planner

The reason I want to offer you this budget planner free is because it works for me and it might for you too. I don’t like putting my financial information all over the internet, and all of the other budget programs I have used were not precise enough for someone like me on a limited budget. Have a look at the video and see if this might help you out, if it looks like it will you can download the excel file below.

Watch The Video To See How It Works

I really put quite a bit of effort into making this workbook calculate correctly (so I didn’t have to) so If you do share it with your friends or family it would be great if you could tell them where you got it. And maybe have them like our Facebook page 🙂

If you have any questions about anything I forgot to mention in the video please email me and I will answer any questions you have.

Dale

Download the 2014 Budget Tracker Here