Living on a Budget

  • Save $400: Take the Frugal Month Challenge in February

    The holidays may provide a festive reprieve from the daily grind, but as a rule of thumb, they’re not good for your wallet. With January comes a return to real life and living on a tight budget as you pay…

  • 10 Tips for Sewing Your Way to Savings

    Sewing does require skill, no doubt about that. But for certain projects around the house or in your closet, it may be a worthwhile skill to learn and put to use. Sewing can save you a bundle on clothing and…

  • 11 Things You Should Be Renting Instead of Buying

    Recent years have seen the flowering of the rental economy. What started with streaming services such as Netflix and Pandora has become a full-on profusion of rental options as an alternative to buying. The upshot is less personal debt, less…

  • What’s Worth More: Your Money or Your Time?

    My banker husband has always said, “Time is money.” I understood the point but never put the old adage to the test. We all probably have a different bottom line when it comes to how much our time is worth,…

  • 50 Best Money-Saving Tips of the Year

    Another year is coming to an end, presenting a chance to reflect on what we learned during the past 12 months. From electricity costs to credit cards, we’ve covered it all on Cheapism.com. Continue on to see 50 of the…

  • What Are the Best Free Resources for Learning Personal Finance?

    From 401(k)s to the monthly budget, personal finance can be a dull and difficult subject to master. Countless articles and paid and free courses tackle the matter from a variety of angles, each aiming to help knowledge-seekers get a better…

  • Is Free Money Worth It?

    You’ve no doubt received a flyer in the mail or seen the billboards: Open a new checking account with us and receive $100 cash! Sounds like a deal, to be…

  • Save an Easy $100 by Unplugging These Devices

    Just because the TV is turned off doesn’t mean it isn’t consuming energy. Millions and millions of watts of “phantom energy” are used every day by unsuspecting electric customers. When…

  • Advice From the Minimum Wage Front Lines

    Mysti Reutlinger has been through tough times. Although now in the process of starting her own business in the Cheyenne, Wyoming area — the third in six years and the…

  • College Tours: How Students Can Visit for Free

    As high school students prepare to spend the next several years and thousands of dollars earning an undergraduate degree, finding the right college is critical. The atmosphere on campus, the…

  • Narrowing a Multitude of Money-Saving Tools to 10 Essentials

    Every day, it seems, a new digital destination promises to save consumers money. But who has time to cycle through a lengthy roster of bookmarks in search of deals? The…

  • 7 Steps to Landing a College Scholarship

    There is such a thing as free money when it comes to paying for college — if you know where to look. Between merit-based scholarships and grants for students in…

  • 4 Ways to Teach Your Kids About Frugality

    “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” was, at one time, the modus operandi of many families in America. Since then, we’ve become a consumer-oriented,…

  • Declutter Your Bills: 3 Steps to Save You Money

    Are you sitting in the midst of stacks of documents and receipts, trying to get organized before filing your income tax return? As you wade through the data, you might…

  • 11 Essential Rules for Negotiating a Discount

    Coupons at the grocery store, weekly sales at the clothing store, and memberships at the discount store are all routes to the best deals. But there are no coupons for…

  • Turning Happy Hour Into Dinner: A Cheapskate’s Guide

    Happy hour, once known as cocktail time, is that transition period between the end of work and the start of dinner. It used to be that you had to hang…

  • 8 Things ‘Girls’ Can Teach Fans About Frugality

    Like generations of young people before them, the cast of HBO’s Girls came to New York to make careers in the arts — writing, acting, music. In the meantime, Hannah…

  • No More Bank Fees

    The New Year is an opportunity to start fresh, and for many folks that means getting your finances in order. Perhaps it’s time to wave goodbye to your bank in…