So, while I’ve been banking years-and-years of schooling and debt, and the 40-90hrs a week I clocked for years went only to sustaining my simple life in an expensive area of an expensive city, I learned something very valuable. I learned to save money on things that I needed to survive.

For starters, I learned that if I wanted something special, I would need to put money aside. Secondly, I learned that if I was to put money aside, I would need to save. I was raised by a very frugal woman, but I had no idea what that truly meant until I was actively trying to save money myself.

I wanted to backpack, and the equipment for that is very expensive, so I needed to put money aside. Some ways that I was able to put money aside, included:

• Using coupons and only buying items I actually needed. A coupon can be tempting, and if it gets you an item for free, then go for it, why not? but… if you are saving a dollar on a three dollar item you didn’t need or want before seeing that coupon, don’t even clip it! I saved on average $70/ month using coupons for products I already purchase, and that’s without doing anything extreme or timely. I saved over $800 in my first year using coupons, and that was before digital coupons were a thing.

• Quitting smoking. I was a pretty heavy smoker, and I initially wanted to cut back, but I soon realized that cutting even one cigarette out of my day was not a possibility, it needed to be all or nothing. Some people say use a timer, but truth be told, smoking was never about timing for me, it just seemed to fit in with a lot of the stuff I did… reading on the porch, drinking coffee, going out for drinks with friends, general socializing… I needed to quit. I found coupons online, and never paid more than $25 for a box of Nicorette gum, which is about half the retail, and I still saved a FORTUNE. When I say I was a heavy smoker, I mean, $18 a day habit (about 3 packs). I found out you can’t call yourself frugal when you add up the bill and see you’ve spent over $500 on cigarettes each month for nearly a decade. The gum after coupon ended up costing me $100 or so a month in the beginning and about $50 a month after six months. That’s a savings of $441.80- 491.80 a month!

Quitting Smoking saved me $5,600 a year! The average smoker would still save nearly $2000/ annually!

• I cancelled my cable and shared internet. I was paying $20 a month for cable I didn’t use, because I seemed to always be watching netflix, or I checked out shows on the web sites for the network the shows were on. Cancelling my cable save me $240/ year. I also decided to forego paying for internet when my neighbor upstairs said I could pay her $10 a month (the cable company wanted $30 for the slowest speed), so I saved an additional $240 a year there. That’s $480 a year in savings! Not bad for a single phone call needing to be made (another perk to cancelling the cable is not seeing commercials offering me additional products I wouldn’t have otherwise know about… products I don’t really need).

• I made my own coffee at least three days/ week! I enjoy coffee out, I enjoy tipping the baristas and I enjoy small talk with strangers, so cutting out my morning cup of Joe at the local coffee house just didn’t seem very sensible, so I committed to making my own coffee three days a week, and you know what I discovered? I enjoy coffee on my couch in my jammies or undies or whatever, I lived alone, so its no-one’s business =). Including gratuity and refills, assuming no food products were purchased, I spend about $4.50 a day on black coffee out. Drinking it at home cost about .80 cents for a large, shareable pot, or I could ice the extra a save it, either way, I saved almost $10 a week having coffee at home only three days. That’s about $510/ annually saved.
• I put money aside each week, adding a dollar more each week than I did the week before.
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*This was meant to be my “fun money” initially, but I ended up saving so much with everything else, that I was actually able to spend 6 months of 2010 backpacking through the Sierras in California.

• I cooked my own food four days-a-week. I lived in a really fun neighborhood in San Diego, and eating in just never seemed to happen, by eating at home four days, I saved $200 a month on Thai food alone, and another $300 on a variety of other cuisines. $500 a month (which I felt guilty about… the poor servers without my tips… e-gad!) That’s $6,000 annually.

To sum this up, between July 2009 and June 2010, I saved $14,766 dollars in a year. I was single with no kids, so I’m sure nothing seemed too crazy when I was spending it, but when you consider I was making about $30,000 a year and was “inexplicably” broke, the spending starts to seem crazy.

Its over six years later and I spend even less today. I’ve changed the way I look at money, I’ve invested, and I’m proud to say that I understand now that is it far better to have money in the bank for things that are important to me… for the people who are important to me, than it is to have coffee and food out every single day. I save money on inhalers, because I no longer smoke and no longer need them multiple times a day, because I met a staircase with more than three steps. I’m healthy and happy and good with money today. The simple goal of saving enough money to go hiking changed my life.