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Whenever I heard the word frugal, I used to think it was all about clipping coupons, standing in line for the best sales, constantly looking for bargains at every purchase, or always eating the cheapest meals. And that is not really me.

But the more I immersed myself in this minimalism world, the more I realised there are some really great principles of financial minimalism that can help me out on my journey. 

These are the kind of rules and money habits that can help you save your first $10K fast. They can help you on your journey to be more financially flexible and free, and they just bring many benefits to your life. 

Keep reading below or watch the video:

1. No car payments

We have zero car payments, and I believe this is one of the reasons why we have been able to save money, like saving the down payment to buy our house.

This also helped us get out of debt, which we used to have in our 20s, and it just frees up that space in our budget that otherwise we wouldn’t have.

What I have learned about car payments is that they are very likely to never end. 

The average monthly car payment in the UK in 2025 is between £300 and £500 per month. And this is on types of contracts where you get the car and pay the monthly payments for, let’s say, four years. But at the end of the contract, the car is not yours. You either have to pay a big balance at the end if you want to keep the car, or you trade it in and you get a new one, and your monthly payments start again. This cycle is never going to end. That’s what the PCP contract for cars is like. (source)

And those monthly payments don’t even take into consideration all of the other things you’re going to have to pay for the car, for maintenance. And, the more expensive the car is, the more expensive all the maintenance will be. 

Let’s say you have 30 years of car payments as you are going from one car to the next, times 12 months, that’s 360 months you might pay. And if it’s, let’s say, £500 per month, that is about £180,000 by the end of those 30 years. 

Such an amount of money, or at least some of it, can be invested, which is something my husband and I are trying to learn a bit more about. Or it can be put in a savings account that brings interest back. Or just kept as a fallback, or paying off a mortgage.

That amount of money can help so much more than having a new car every few years. So this is what we have decided works for us because we have other goals we want to pursue. 

At the moment, we have one car that my husband and I share. Everybody’s lifestyle is different. You might need two cars, for example, for you and your partner if you commute to different jobs. Our situation is that we both work from home quite a lot, and even when we do need to go to the office or a meeting, we can share the car and make it work. 

So we have one car that is completely paid off. We saved up the money and then we bought the car. This way, we have zero monthly car payments, which I think is very freeing.

2. Spreadsheets, baby!

In the past few months, I feel like I’ve gone really nerdy with our budget. We’re not very strict on budgeting or super frugal or anything like that. But we’re also trying to be intentional with our spendings, especially nowadays, with all the subscriptions available. 

So many things could be adding to our monthly expenses without even realising. It can be so easy for them to go up and up if we don’t have a grasp on them. 

To help us with this, I did a spreadsheet. In it, I put everything that goes out of our bank accounts, both mine and my husband’s as we’re sharing the bills.

It’s really helpful to see what percentage of the spendings is the house, whether that’s rent or mortgage, and how much is the car payment.

Another one that’s quite big for us at the moment is the nursery, as my toddler recently started going to one. And if you know anything about the UK nurseries, or child care in general, they are very expensive.

So that’s one thing we have added to our monthly expenses, but nursery is what also allows me a bit more flexibility, a few more hours in my week so that I can work on my business. 

And looking at our spreadsheet, I have been able to find a few things here and there we could cut, like some subscriptions we weren’t using anymore. We had some for the iPad for my kids, but they’re not using them as they don’t really play that much on the iPad. So we got rid of those subscriptions.

Looking at the spreadsheet, there are the two things we can do.

One is think about how we can reduce the big costs.

For many people, including us, the biggest cost can be car payments. There’s also groceries—that can be a big one too—and child care as well. These are the bigger expenses and no, we can’t completely cut them off. But there are ways to maybe reduce them here and there or find ways to optimise them.

For example, using a mortgage broker to buy a house can be helpful as they give you an average of how much you can spend, depending on how much deposit you have and your monthly income. That’s what we did when we decided to buy a house.

We then saw a few houses that were in the budget given by the mortgage broker. And we also saw some that were below budget. The one we went for and in which we live right now was actually below. 

We chose to do this so that our monthly payments are lower, at least for now, because we want to make sure we live below our means. We want to reduce the stress and make sure we feel comfortable. So that’s one decision we made.

The second thing we can do when looking at the spreadsheet is to cut down small impulse buys. Because those can really add up.

I’m not saying never shop again, but it can be really good to check with yourself: Are all of these little things really bringing value, or are they just impulse buys that are hurting your budget overall?

I feel like this is a vulnerable article to write, and there’s a reason very few people talk about money. But money is the one thing that impacts all of us. We all need it to survive and have happy lives. And I think it’s helpful for us to talk about this.

Now, sometimes, cutting down costs can help us a lot. But there’s only so much we can cut down before we feel like we’re depriving ourselves.

And this is where earning more might be needed. So, what we can do for this is to…

3. Learn a profitable skill

Because sometimes, in a traditional job, there’s only so much potential we have to increase our income. Whereas if we start a side hustle, that’s where we can really start to increase our income and supplement that as needed. 

The way I’ve been able to do this is to learn from others, whether that’s watching YouTube videos, buying courses and programs from other people who have done what I want to do, or using an online learning community such as Skillshare (*AD/brand partner).

The best thing I’ve done to increase my income is to learn a profitable skill and use it to build up my online business here. And my business is around YouTube and also all the other platforms that I have, like Instagram and my website. 

At the moment, I’m taking a film-making class by Dandan Liu. Her class really drew my attention because it’s all about how to film solo, which is what I do as I am a solo content creator. My husband helps me sometimes, but a lot of it is just myself and my camera.

I love learning different tricks about filmmaking, or how to do social media, because there’s so much strategy, there’s so much behind it. And the more we learn, the better we get at it. 

I have already learned so much in the Skillshare community. It’s been really, really helpful. So, if you want to learn a skill that can be highly profitable, then this is a great community to start with.

4. Set a goal

Back in 2019, we moved from Romania to the UK. My son was about to turn two at the time, and he was about to start nursery as well. And that was when I decided to go all in on my content creation business.

It was a really slow growth in the beginning as I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t really have the skills for it yet. But I was so highly motivated to not have to go back to the regular 9 to 5 I had been doing previously. I didn’t want to go to a job where I wasn’t happy and that required me to sacrifice a lot of my time and family time.

So, back then, I had what felt like a dream—to replace my previous income by working on my own content business flexibly from home. 

It’s several years later now, and I have achieved that. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of. At the moment, I work less than part-time hours, between 12–15 hours a week, depending on the week. Yet my income at the moment is way higher than it used to be in my 9 to 5.

Sometimes having a goal that’s highly motivating for you can really help you stay on track with your finances. 

So, what’s my next goal? 

I want to reach 100k subscribers on my YouTube channel and further grow my business around it. And no, it’s not about the vanity metrics. It’s about the two sub-goals I’m working towards right now, along with my family. 

I’ve never mentioned this before, but I want to earn enough to give my husband the option to not have to work 5 days a week. Maybe he can switch to 3 or 4 days a week instead. He wouldn’t quit his job because he loves what he does. But having more flexibility and working less is one thing that I think is going to benefit us as a family a lot. So that’s one of my goals. I want to help my husband work less.

The second sub-goal is to be able to pay off our mortgage early.

Am I going to be able to reach all of this? I don’t know, but I’m going to give it my all. And you can stick around with me to find out together. 

5. Consume less

The whole point of minimalism for me was to not feel so consumed by things. 

I didn’t realise it back then, but buying a lot of items wasn’t just the act of me impulsively buying. It often actually also consumed a lot of my energy and my time. I would want to do research before buying a product, and there’s so much that goes on behind a purchase.

But I don’t want to spend my time researching for the best or cheapest thing or researching for this and that when making a purchase. And one of the ways I can do this is to simply consume less. 

By this, I mean consume less products, like making fewer purchases in general, and also consume less social media. It might be weird for me to say that because I’m on social media a lot. But I think it’s all about being more intentional with what accounts I follow or the things that I watch on YouTube.

Probably you and I both are very easily influenced by the things we see online without even realising. Sometimes we scroll on Instagram and all of a sudden this desire to buy something is kind of implanted into our brain and it’s all we can think of. But money can go out really fast. So being intentional with what I consume has been extremely helpful. 

6. Declutter

This might feel like a weird one because what does this have to do with financials? 

Well, over 2 years ago, I started massively decluttering our home. I stumbled upon this minimalism trend and even though I never aimed to be a minimalist, I have discovered that it benefits my life a lot.

Decluttering did two things for me, aside from helping me feel more calm and present with my family. That’s just a given. 

For one, it helped me realise how much money I had wasted on unnecessary purchases—knickknacks, clothes I never wore, toys my kids didn’t really play with, home decor I had no place to put around my home, and many other purchases that I made that I probably shouldn’t have.

That was a really hard realisation because it’s not easy to realise a waste of money. But I think it was an important one, at least for me. It allowed me to be a lot more intentional.

Nowadays I very rarely do any sort of impulse shopping. I have a whole list of tools that I use to stop me from impulse buying and instead use my time and energy in a different way. 

And the second thing that decluttering helped me with was gettig a bit of cash back. In the decluttering process, I sold some of the items, especially some of the higher-value ones we had just lying around the house.

Selling on Vinted—I’ve been using it for a few years now—I made over £2,000. That’s all the stuff that was in my home, stuff I wasn’t using or didn’t even fit me. So those items went to somebody else who hopefully is getting use out of them. And I got some money back. I think that’s pretty cool.

I’m not saying that when you start decluttering, you’re going to make all your money back, as that’s unlikely. But for some items, you can get some money back. 

7. It’s a marathon, not a race

I first started running years ago while battling infertility, as I was so angry at my body—I just needed an outlet.

I soon realised that just improving a little bit at a time helped me a lot more than trying to do these massive changes to go super fast really quick and end up not enjoying the run or just making me feel miserable.

Comparing myself just to myself, to my previous experience, was a much more helpful way to approach running. It made me enjoy it more. And I think it’s what helped me get faster in the long run. 

It can be really easy to compare ourselves to a lot of other people, especially to those we see online. But we forget to compare ourselves to where we were in the past. 

And it’s the same with our financials. Doing these small little changes, it can feel like it’s just pointless. But in time, they do make a difference.

We don’t always need to be making huge drastic changes. Sometimes we can simply slowly adjust our budgets, slowly manage our spreadsheets a bit better, change a bit of our daily habits, maybe do some changes in our mindset over big purchases. 

In time, all of these little things add up, and they add up as money in our bank accounts.

I hope these minimalism money habits are helpful, and do let me know, in the comments below, what financial tips you have. I would love to hear from you as I’m still learning as I’m on this journey myself.