Choices for Saving

Discover how new spending choices can quickly help build savings. Empower your family to make informed consumer choices. As you make consumer choices you exercise power over your financial future. It’s easy to think you have no choice about saving. Families find it challenging just to meet needs. I encourage you to follow the steps below for at least three months. Watch your savings grow.

  1. List things your family uses every week…paper goods, food items, gasoline, entertainment activities, and utilities are starting points.
  2. Focus on one item. Explore the options you have for buying the product. Example: If you use tomatoes every week, what are your choices…canned, fresh and several brands or varieties of each? Buy one of each and do a taste and cost test. Without letting anyone know which type of tomato you are serving, let them taste it and decide if they like it. After each type of tomato has been served, share the cost per ounce for each choice. Let them choose the one that cost least while meeting their taste test. No one choice is best for every family. Changing the form or brand may save from 10 to 75 cents per week on that one choice.
  3. Put the money saved by your new choice into savings. You’ve not missed it in the past by spending it on another brand or form of the product, so you can begin saving money without making any major change.
  4. Make Choices a weekly family event. Focus on a different product each week. You don’t have to be a fanatic. Keep the activity fun. Involve family members who are affected by the choices. Together weigh the options and decide the best choice. Each person in the family might take a week to make a change in something they alone buy or do to add to family savings. 
  5. Click on Choices Calculator and track savings you build from changes you make in your consumer choices.
  6. If you find a new $1 change each week of the year, saving $1 a week the first week, $2 the second and get to $52 a week by the year’s end, you will have saved $1,835, or more if you put it into an interest-earning savings account.
  7. To help your family stay with your new choices, have a goal for your savings. It could be to pay off a debt or to buy something for the family. When you, your spouse or a child tugs at your pockets to get you to buy something, make your first response, “What are the choices?”  To learn more about the savings choices calculator, contact your County Extension Agent for Family and Consumer Sciences.

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Developed by: Lynn B White, Ph.D., former Professor and Extension Family Economics Specialist, Texas AgriLife Extension Service, Texas A&M System, College Station, Texas. December 1999.

Last updated: 9 November, 2010

Educational programs of the Texas AgriLife Extension Service are open to all people without regard to race, color, sex, disability, religion, age, or national origin.