Related: Turn a Death Benefit into a Living Benefit and Pay for Long Term Care
#3. Stop Comparing Self To Others
This is easy to do if you follow the point above about knowing what you value. This usually happens when you visit friends or family and see all they have. But just like with social media, appearances can be deceiving.
They may appear to have everything going for them, but if you step back and think about it, you will see whether they truly have it all or are just showing off.
Simply be happy with what you have. The sooner you learn to do this, the happier you will be.
#4. Be Proactive
A great trick to slow the rising cost of living that many people overlook is to be proactive. Have you looked at your property taxes compared to your neighbors? If their houses are similar in size, you should be paying close to the same in property taxes.
If you are paying a lot more, then challenge the assessment. This is easy to do too. When we saw that we were paying a lot more than others in our neighborhood, we reached out to an attorney.
They took the case and argued it for us. Their fee was a small portion of the first year’s savings. If they didn’t get our taxes lowered, they didn’t charge us.
Related: Renewable Energy is Finally Living up to Hype
The savings we realized from this was a few thousand dollars. Trust me, it is well worth the little bit of effort.
#5. Move
A final solution to keep your cost of living in check is to move to a location that costs less to live. Many cities on both coasts have high costs of living, but in the middle part of the country you can get by with a much lower cost of living.
And you can find low cost of living areas on the coasts too. You just have to do a little research to find an area that meets your needs.
Final Thoughts
So there are 5 tricks to help you limit the rising cost of living. In most cases, you can start working on these right now. Some may take some more time to implement, but the sooner you get started, the sooner you can limit the rising cost of living and start changing your financial picture to the positive.
This article has been republished from Modest Money.