This series of articles from Living Cheap helps provides a useful guide to how to live life on a low income. They are ideal for those of us living on benefits, although not all of the tips will help all of us. Living on a low income needs planning, and the ten tips will help you plan not just for the everyday, but also how to deal with financial emergencies.
'These ten tips should provide you with a great starting point for saving money.
#1 - Don't Make Big Changes
Changing your financial situation is much the same as trying to lose weight. Lots of people go on diets and find that they can lose quite a bit of weight quite quickly if they make drastic changes such as going on the latest diet and hitting the gym really hard. The problem with this is that it is not sustainable. Sure you can keep it up for a few weeks but then something happens to make you fall off the wagon and it becomes really hard to get back on again. This means that the weight you have lost over the last few weeks gets put back on again with usually a little more on top too.
Making drastic changes in order to change your financial situation can work in much the same way. If you cut back so much early on you will feel the pain much more and will eventually buckle and go on a spending spree. The little bit of money you might have saved over the last few weeks will get spent with probably a little more added to the credit cards besides.
So, the best way to tackle the problem is in bite sized chunks. In much the same way as losing weight, set yourself achieveble short term goals that you can then sustain over a long period of time.
So here is a golden tip with regard to using this website as well. Pick one tactic that you think you can sustain and stick with it. Don't move on to anything else until you have mastered that one item. Don't try to do everything all at once because you will not be able to sustain it and you will fail.
By taking the slow and steady approach and adopting a number of different tactics over a longer period of time you will eventually be able to look back and realise that in fact you have made a huge change to the way you live your life without even knowing it.'