If you want to keep the amount you’re spending down, one easy way to do this is to spend more evenings at home rather than going to meet your friends at the pub or somewhere else in town. But staying home doesn’t have to be dull – there are plenty of ways you can amuse yourself without having to watch endless hours of TV.
Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of TV now and then; it’s certainly cheap, even when you take the cost of the TV licence into account. And even with something as basic as Freeview, there are so many channels that if you do enough channel surfing, you’ll eventually find something that’s entertaining enough to watch.
One thing that was once considered as a luxury is now something that many of us see as a necessity – that’s broadband access at home, and with broadband internet on tap, so to speak, the entertainment possibilities are endless. Of course, there’s the obvious – catching up with your Facebook friends, seeing what’s what on Twitter and keeping abreast of the day’s headlines, but there are plenty of other ways to divert you during the evenings. For instance, the gaming possibilities that you can do online are almost endless, and many of those online games are free.
Even the ones that aren’t free per se have free elements to them. When you join a bingo site, for example, such as 32red, Gala or Tombola Bingo, and put in your first amount of cash, you’ll get a welcome bonus from the site. And once you’ve joined a site, there are plenty of free games on the 24/7 game schedules. The best way to find free bingo at 32redbingo.com is to go into the Sunshine Lounge, where there are free games starting every 30 minutes from 3pm to midnight. Although the free games cost nothing to enter, they still have a real cash prize attached to them, so just as with any other game of bingo, you may end the evening with more money than you started it with.
If you have a partner, you can make those stay at home evenings into romantic ones – a date night at home. Plan ahead to cook them a special meal, if you allow yourself to be led by what’s on offer at the supermarket, you could make a fantastic home-cooked meal for far less than it costs to eat out or even to get a takeaway. And, as an added bonus, you’ll get the kudos for doing it too!
You can also use evenings in to improve on personal goals such as fitness. There’s no need to join a gym, which can add to the monthly expenditure significantly. For instance, there are some great yoga apps that cost nothing to download and will provide you with different length yoga sessions for beginners upwards.
These are just a few ways that you can find purpose and enjoyment in an evening in at home, all the while appreciating that you aren’t spending lots of money in order to have a good time.