Finding easy ways to free up money

Gauteng.- Despite the pressure on disposable income, middle-income consumers can still save by making easy changes in how they manage their money in the new year. This is according to FNB Retail’s Money Management unit which looked at the savings potential among the Bank’s customers.
Doret Jooste, CEO of Money Management in FNB Retail says “Rising fuel, food and electricity costs and unchanged interest rates are some of the factors that continue to place significant financial pressure on peoples’ income. Families are still heavily reliant on unsecured debt to get through each month and find it hard to even think about saving. However, looking at our middle-income clients we found that by making a few small changes in financial or spending behaviour they can actually free up a significant amount of cash every month.”
Use your rewards: Free rewards programmes can give great value to customers. For example, customers can pay in eBucks for their in-store purchases at eBucks partners like Checkers, Checkers Hyper, Engen or Dis-Chem. This means you can pay for daily necessities like groceries, fuel and toiletries with eBucks.
Manage your data/airtime spend: telco services such as data and airtime is a big spending item for most people. Most telco providers do offer special deals now and then and it’s important to take full advantage of these if you can generate some savings. FNB customers who use FNB Connect can benefit from free data, voice minutes and SMSes every month, by holding a qualifying FNB cheque account.

Consolidate debt to pay a lower interest rate: Consolidating your debt (e.g. clothing account, furniture accounts, micro loans, etc.) into a single loan with lower interest will not only save you on monthly admin fees and help to simplify and ‘declutter’ your debt, but also result in you paying less interest over the term of your loan.
“Implementing these simple changes in your financial behaviour could give you the necessary room to save for a better life. The biggest challenge for South Africans is that money management is not sufficiently taught at school or at home. Unfortunately, poor financial literacy is then passed on from one generation to the next and we can see it in our customers’ money management behaviour. We are committed to making a change in these statistics by helping our clients change the way they manage their money and in turn enable them and their families to have a better life. These small tweaks to financial behaviour can result in significant changes over the long-term and is some of the first steps we are helping our clients to take on the journey, ” Jooste concludes.