by Amela Piric

Created on: April 19, 2009   Last Updated: July 22, 2009

We are short on cash like never before. We are not certain how much longer we are going to be able to keep our jobs due to economic recession and layoffs. Thus, reducing your daily expenditures and saving money becomes ever more important in today's time.

Below listed are outlined steps on how you can make wiser and healthier consumer choices that will benefit you in the long run:

1. Become a better informed and critical consumer

We live in a culture ruled by the principles of immediate gratification where patience and critical thinking skills fall in the background. We have become non-critical consumers of anything that is nicely packaged and presented to us. However, this uninformed and non-critical consumerism is not working for us but against us. Thus, we need to revise our spending patters and become more critical and better informed consumers.

2. Avoid impulse spending

Impulse spending encourages immediate gratification and makes us think short-term rather than long-term financially. Impulse spending usually relies on credit cards and can eventually get us into unnecessary and unplanned expenditures if we do it often enough. Thus, it has the capacity to make us a slave of our spending habits if we use it irresponsibly and throw us into unnecessary debt instead of saving.

3. Stay away from credit cards

Credit cards will lead you into unnecessary purchases that you need to stay away from. Staying away from credit cards will allow you to become a more responsible and healthy consumer. Thus, you will manage to reduce your wasteful spending habits and thus save money.

4. Rely on cash

If you want to avoid frustration, anxiety, and worry associated with impulse spending, rely on cash instead. Buy only what you can afford to buy with cash. Try to live once in your life without a credit card and you'll soon see for yourself how much you can manage to save up that way. With cash you will be paying only for the original price of the produce and not the high rates that the banks are charging.

4. Abstain from buying new clothes, shoes, and too much make-up

Use the wardrobe that you have already accumulated in your closet. You probably have quite an amount of clothes stored up in your closet that you haven't even been using. Don't buy new toys and clothes for your children. Rather ask a cousin of similar age whether they have spare clothes and toys left over from their children to give to you in exchange for little money or a

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