household finances

Between buying a new home and transporting yourself and your belongings to it, moving can be an expensive process. One often underrecognized cost of moving occurs before one's original house has even been sold, and that's staging the house. Homeowners often spend hundreds of dollars making a home appealing to potential buyers. To ease the financial burden of moving, here are several tips for staging your home on a budget.

Downsize Instead of Storing

The goal of staging a home is to create a blank canvas that potential buyers can imagine their own lives painted upon. To accomplish this, homeowners should depersonalize the home as much as possible, removing items that are specific to their family and eliminating clutter. This is where homeowners often incur their first costs as they rush to put as many older things in storage as possible.

To cut costs, focus on downsizing rather than storing items. Look for items that you can sell, donate, or give away. For remaining items, look for alternative places to store them, such as a friend or relative's house. This will also reduce the cost of moving your belongings when it is time to go to the new house.

DIY What You Can

There are times when homeowners should bring in a professional to manage home renovations and decorating, such as when a task requires specialized skills. These types of jobs, when done incorrectly, will incur even greater costs if attempted on your own. However, many of the home improvement tasks that go into staging a home are simple enough that the homeowner can DIY them, such as painting, installing a backsplash, or refinishing the deck. Doing these tasks yourself will save you a significant amount of money.

Don't Redo, Update

Homeowners are often eager to make their houses look as appealing to buyers as possible. However, recall that the point of staging is depersonalization, making a home presentable so buyers can mentally impose their own style onto it. When staging a home on a budget, focus less on completely transforming the space and more on making what is there look presentable. For instance, if you wanted to give your bedroom a facelift, trying to replace the furniture and flooring would be pointless unless it was damaged or unkempt. Simply organizing the space and replacing the bed's comforter would be sufficient.

Maximize Space

Another way to update the space without entirely redoing it is to rearrange it to maximize the space that is already there. For instance, pulling the furniture away from the walls will make a room appear bigger and allows more space for those touring the house. Using window trimmings that maximize natural light and incorporating wall mirrors can also make a room seem more spacious.

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Everyone wants to save money, but life on a strict budget can start to feel like an exercise in misery.

But living paycheck to paycheck is also exhausting, so how can you save money without making life boring? To help you with this balance, we've gathered the easiest tips and tricks for saving money with relatively little hassle.

Buy Generic

Most people think that buying the store brand cereal means a decrease in quality, but in reality most generic products come from the same factory as the name brand, meaning you get the same product for serious savings.

Buy Bulk

If you know your family is going to go through X number of toothpaste tubes in coming months, why not stock up all at once? Buying bulk is usually cheaper than buying individually, especially as big box stores like Costco, so look for deals when it comes to the non-perishable goods you know your family will use.

Consolidate Debt

Take advantage of historically low interest rates to pay off high-interest debt, and save you and your family a bundle.

Only Eat Out on Special Occasions

Make a dinner out with your significant other an intimate date night saved for special events. Chances are you won't really mind giving up your $11 salad that you rush to eat on your lunch break. Start brown-bagging your lunches as often as you can, and watch the savings grow.

Maintain Your Car

A well maintained car is an inexpensive car. If you ensure your tires are properly inflated to increase gas mileage and that you're regularly checking all of your cars systems, you can avoid preventable (and expensive) problems from occurring and keep your car on the road as long as possible.

Get a Cashback Reward Card

If you have a credit card already, why not get one with benefits? For the best savings options, choose a rewards card that offers a percentage of cash back for every dollar you spend.