Can The Internet Help You Be More Frugal?

There are many tips and ideas that can help you save money and live a more frugal life. Often, when you look at a lot of the ideas, they all have something in common. Most of the time, the ideas revolve around using the internet.

This got me thinking, can the internet help us become more frugal? Has the rise in internet usage helped to make the nation save more money as years go by? It’s an interesting idea, and I thought I’d share my thoughts about it with you today.

So, I started writing this piece, which takes a bit of an in-depth look at the internet and how we can use it to save money in ways that we might not be able to without it. Hopefully, as well as being interesting to read, it can also provide you with a few ideas on how you can save money and be more frugal.

So Much Information Online

It’s fair to say there is so much information online to help us be more frugal. I mean, you’re literally reading a blog that offers free advice on how to save money! There are many other blogs just like mine out there that do this same sort of thing (but mine’s still the best obviously!). Likewise, there are actual websites set up to provide you with professional money advice. Many governments create these sites for people to go on and chat to advisors or look at frequently asked questions. All in all, there’s an abundance of free advice for people to use online.

The great thing about this is that you don’t really get any of this information anywhere else. If you took away the internet, how would we all find this advice? There aren’t people on the street just giving you money saving advice for free! You’d have a few choices; call up a hotline, hire a financial advisor, or find a place to go to talk about money. While calling a hotline is still free, it can be a lot harder to really find the information you need and digest it. Likewise, there are few places to go to talk about saving money. Perhaps a support group for people with money problems? Either way, the best alternative is hiring a financial advisor, which costs money!

We’re blessed in that we have access to financial advice – sometimes directly from qualified professionals in the financial sector – for free! Not only that, it’s easy to access and easy to digest as we pick and choose the information we want to read about. I think we take it for granted how easy it is to get good money saving advice thanks to the internet. If you took it away from us, how on earth would we understand how to save money, or how to live frugally?

It might be possible to get all this information offline, but it would certainly be harder and probably cost us as well.  

Exclusive Online Offers

As well as the wealth of money advice you get online, there are also plenty of websites offering exclusive online offers. Now, you can split these offers into two different categories. First, you have offers that are only redeemable online, meaning you only get them if you shop online. Second, you have offers that you can only find online, but can still use them offline.

Obviously, both of these things are exclusive to people with internet access, if you’re not online, you don’t get these offers. So, you can see how the internet has paved the way for us to save more money, and live more frugally. I mean, there are even sites like Coupon Sherpa that are set up purely to provide people with various coupons and voucher codes that they can use online or offline. You wouldn’t see this type of thing without the internet. There are no physical shops or places you can walk into and be greeted with shelf upon shelf of coupon or voucher. This is an idea that only exists online, and we should be grateful for it as it does help us save a lot of money.

Coupon sites are a big example of exclusive online offers that you can only find online but redeem offline if you want to. E-commerce sites are usually home to online offers that you can only get the benefits from if you buy online. So many online stores will have sales that their online customers enjoy, but offline ones don’t if they visit the physical store. It’s interesting because you rarely have stores that only have sales offline and not online. Sure, they do have sales offline, but they’re usually accompanied by online sales too, as shops know loads of people shop online nowadays.

I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that shopping online can definitely help you be more frugal. There are exclusive offers out there just waiting to be found. It feels like retail companies are putting more effort into their online outlets which will only mean more deals for people that shop online.

Price Comparison Websites

This point is almost a combination of both points, but it’s so important that it warrants some attention of its own. Price comparison websites are huge for anyone that wants to be frugal. The idea behind them is so simple, you go to a website and can compare the price for a product or service with absolute ease. All the work is done for you, and you’re greeted with so many results for whatever it is you’re searching for. Comparing prices is pretty much the main idea that everyone talks about when you want to save money. It always makes sense to look around and find the best deal, so you save as much as possible and don’t pay extra for no reason.

How is this a combination of my first two points? Well, a price comparison website is something online that provides you with lots of money saving information and advice. It’s also somewhere that you can find exclusive online offers. In general, they’re an important tool for anyone looking to save money. You have price comparison sites dedicated to a specific thing, and you have some that are general where you can search for anything. But, one thing remains the same; they’re only available online.

Take the internet out of the equation, and you have no price comparison websites. It’s like when I mentioned coupon sites and said that you wouldn’t see a coupon shop anywhere – you don’t see price comparison shops either. The thing is, they’re so essential for saving money, like, so essential. It’s so hard to find the best-priced phone contract, insurance provider, credit card provider, or anything else without a price comparison website. You can literally spend hundreds of dollars more every year if you don’t use them.

Without the internet, we’d have no choice but to not use them as they wouldn’t exist. Instead, we’d have two options; take a chance, or compare prices ourselves. The second option is incredibly difficult as we’d have to somehow find a way to search for different prices and create our own table and take into account things such as ‘new customer offers’ or ‘customer benefits’ to work out which deal is best for us. In fact, just the thought of doing that makes my brain want to cry.

My point is that the internet has given us price comparison websites, and they help us in our search for true frugalness. Is this possible without the internet? Maybe, but it’s a very small maybe. The effort required to compare things yourself is almost too much for most people, which would mean we’d likely just take a chance and buy whatever we see.

So, Can The Internet Help You Be More Frugal?

If you haven’t already guessed, my answer to this is a resounding yes. It’s not until you take a look at things that you realize how much we take for granted. Without the internet, I’m utterly convinced it would be much harder to save money and be frugal. We’d have less information out there to help us, there would be no voucher codes or coupons or online offers so we can save money, and there’d be no price comparison sites that ensure we always find the best deal.

What you should take away from this article is that the internet is there to help you. If you’re having trouble saving money and being frugal, pay attention to the information in this article. Use some of the things I’ve mentioned, and you will see the savings start piling up. Take advantage of the free advice from financial professionals, use comparison sites at every opportunity you get, and look for online discount codes whenever you make a purchase. This will help you save money, the internet is your frugal friend, start using it wisely!