In the context of your monthly salary a R100 may not be worth an awful lot. It may buy you a CD, a modest lunch for two or a basic t-shirt.

Collectively, the mindless purchase of these things could be making you broke. If you took the time to add up the cost of your impulse purchases you could be frittering away thousands of Rands per year. This could be one of the reasons you are finding it difficult to save money.

Track your spending

There is a simple way of stopping this invisible loss of money. The first step is to keep note of what you spend over a month.

Buy a notebook and keep it with you at all times. If you don?t get a receipt for an item jot it down in your book. Retain all of your receipts and separate them into two categories. One category being essential buys the other impulse buys. For instance, bread and milk is necessary while a bag of chips is not.

Adding up the receipts and book entries to verify how much is spent on unnecessary purchases is the second step.

While you may declare that all the groceries (click here to learn how you can spend less on food) you buy fall squarely in the necessity side of the list you may be surprised at how much is squandered, for example, on convenience foods. Pre-packed, cut and cooked foods can cost up to 50 percent more than unprocessed products. Frozen convenience meals are very expensive for what you get. A frozen pasta meal may cost as much as R20 and the serving will barely feed one person. You could cook an entire pasta meal for 4 people for R30 if you bought the ingredients yourself.

In today?s on-the-run world it is understandable that you may not have the time to cook from scratch every evening, but some planning ahead could take care of that. On the evenings you are cooking, double up and freeze the surplus for a cheaper and healthier alternative to store-bought meals.

Another way we waste money is when we go shopping for necessities and we return home with an assortment of things we don?t need. We are impulsive creatures and stores are aware of this. They come up with clever ways to 'trick' us into buying things we don?t have on our shopping lists. We are constantly bombarded with advertising messages and clever merchandising. If you are aware of the ploys used by stores to make you buy, you can avoid them.

Will the world end if I don't buy this?

Get into the habit of second guessing yourself every time you lift an item from the shelf. Ask yourself 'would my world end or would my family be deprived if I did not buy this'? The answer will often be 'no'.

If you realize that you routinely waste between R300 and R1000 per month on impulse buys and you resolve to halt the habit, you could redirect the savings into a debt elimination plan or to a savings plan.

On page two: 12 guidelines for keeping your spending in line...