Roll Call

The first tip in achieving the Cheaper Life is to take inventory. This may sound simple but it’s an important first step. Most people don’t know what they own. They have a general idea but not specifics. Taking and maintaining an inventory of your possessions will save you money from buying the same thing or even similar things that are superfluous. For the overachiever a color coded spreadsheet is optimal but for regular people a simple list by category will do.

People often do this on smaller scales. For example, making your grocery shopping list while going through your kitchen to see what you have and what you have need of so as not to be wasteful or miss something important. I suggest you do this with other areas of consumption. Besides groceries, I recommend taking clothing/accessories, linen, personal/cleaning products and entertainment inventories.

Inventory lets you know what you have (e.g. 5 pairs of shoes) but it also lets you rate the expected life of said items. Knowing that 4 pairs of those shoes have varying levels of wear and tear in them will help you realize you need to buy replacements before it’s necessary to spend money to replace all 4 at once. Accessories and linen are comparable. Personal items like deodorant and cleaning products are another area where money can slip through your fingers if you totally run out and have to buy in haste from a more expensive outlet.

One of my favorite areas of inventory is entertainment. I learned this lesson at an early age. My dad (who I love greatly) is an extreme movie buff. Movies provide fun and relatively inexpensive entertainment and he has hundreds of movies spanning from beta max tapes through DVDs. The problem with his obsession is that he would buy the same movie more than once because he doesn’t know what he already owns. There have been several times where he came home with a new movie all excited and us kids run to see what it is only to have our hopes dashed at the realization we already had that movie. I know it won an Oscar but honestly one copy of U-571 is enough let alone three. Not taking inventory wastes money whether you return the item or not. If you don’t return the extra item you are out of the entire cost. If you do return the item you loss time, gas and or postage to send the item back.