If you look hard enough you’ll find all kinds of practical money saving tips.  But it really boils down to one simple principle: spend less than you make.  Sometimes it’s the simplest concepts that elude us, or at least they’re the most difficult to live out in daily life.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” - Charles Dickens

We live in a society defined by debt.  Credit is easy to obtain and easy to abuse.  It doesn’t matter how great your financial counseling or how low an interest rate you get, if you spend more money than you make then simple arithmetic will catch up with you sooner or later.

NeoBudget provides tools that help figure out your monthly expenses and allocate your income to cover those expenses.  If your expenses are higher than your income then you need to either eliminate some expenses or increase your income.  Both are valid responses, but often it’s easier to eliminate expenses.

So what are the best money saving tips?

There are many techniques one could use.  In my budget, I treat savings as if it were a bill that is paid automatically.  I make regular payments into my IRA, my 401k, and my emergency fund.  These are automatically deducted from my checking account each month.  If it were left to me, I would often find another use for my savings payment each month.  Treating savings as a regular, recurring bill removes the decision process.  It just happens.

Of course, before I figured out how much money I could save each month, I had to tally up my monthly expenses and compare that with my income.  That’s where the NeoBudget income allocation tool helps.

How about some practical ways to save money in daily life?

When it comes to the practical ways to save money (that is, reducing your expenses so it’s well below your income), there has been a lot written about this on various personal finance blogs.  Rather than come up with my own list of money saving tips, I’ll refer you to these for further reading:

• 75 Painless Money Saving Tips (Dough Roller Blog)
• 106 Money Saving Tips for a Frugal Lifestyle (Zen Habits Blog)
• Saving Money at the Gas Pump (Federal Trade Commission)
• 70 Practical Ways to Save (Family Life Credit Services)
• 20 Small Ways to Save Big (Kiplinger)