Financial Management: How to Save Money on Clothes

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Do you know that you can still squeeze more — money — out of the ways you maintain your clothing?

As an individual who adheres to financial management, I always ponder on ways to increase my savings.

And I have found out that our clothing, laundry washing, ironing and, our wardrobe cabinet play a major role in determining whether we have saved some money in our garments at the end of each month or not.

Remember that we use two utilities in our clothes' maintenance — water and electricity.

Whenever we do our laundry and iron our clothes, we use water and electricity. Minimizing the number of times washing and ironing reduces our consumption of these two basic necessities, significantly.

These 2-basic necessities are fluid, and their fluctuations depend on how fastidious we are in our usage.

The trick is to limit the operation of your washing machine to once a month if not once in 2-months, and you can also apply the rule to ironing clothes.

In your financial management plan, enter “washing clothes” and assign the approximate date on which you do it.

Below are tips that you can apply for a budget-friendly clothes' maintenance.

How to cut costs in your clothing to save money & improve on financial management?

Buy a lot of inexpensive & cheap clothes

It pays to have a lot of apparels, especially when you are saving on power usage.

You have got to have a lot of clothes to have enough room for the — one time big time — laundry washing day every month or two. Contrary to the notion that it is costly, it is not.

In buying clothes, particularly for the upper body, consider investing not only in style but the fabrics as well.

Having a wide variety of garment material will help you save even more as discussed in subtopics that follow.

Types of fabric used in making clothes

• cotton
• wool knit
• dry fit
• polyester/cotton combination
• man-made fibers
• denim
• 100% nylon
• silk
• satin
• linen

Tip: Try wearing wrinkle style shirt from time to time. It's good, especially if you carry it well.

You can have a wide array of clothes without spending too much by shopping during mall sales and gleaning at various flea markets.

Have a spacious wardrobe cabinet

It's easy to apply the method of washing and ironing clothes as seldom as possible when you have a spacious wardrobe cabinet.

Your clothes should be tidily arranged in a spacious cabinet where you can easily pluck an article of clothing or two in a flash. Wear it and go.

See we are not only talking about one area of saving money here. We're also highlighting the value of time management.

For singles who rent in a very tiny space, aside from portable closet you can install hanging closet rods in overhead areas like corners or sides of your room.

Hangers should be plentiful, in your money saving wardrobe maintenance.

Replace hamper with extra hanging rods

Hanging rods are not only for clean clothes. You can utilize it to set aside clothes to be washed so that they don't develop more dirt that you get when clothes are stacked together in a hamper.

It is an area of general maintenance of clothing that you don't allow garments to develop bad smell and still look fresh even if they are already for washing.

Hampers are good if laundry sits there for a couple of days only before washing. But if you leave a mound of laundry in the hamper for weeks, the bad smell might develop and your clothes might become stinky and dirtier than it should have.

Provide extra hanging rods for dirty clothes. Hang clothes that have been used and let air breath freshness onto them so that when you wash them, there would be no unremoved bad odor.

Bad smells that develop, while dirty clothes are put together cling to garments and most of the time they don't get away even after washing.

Minimize ironing rock-bottom

Minimizing the ironing of clothes significantly cut your power usage and lower your electric bill.

It's a well-known fact ironing clothes is the most electrically voracious chore at home. That is why we iron clothes at one batch that will be enough for a particular number of days.

Reasons why having different types of fabric for your clothes is advisable for saving money

• You can skip ironing a significant number of clothes.
• Shirts made of man-made fibers are generally wrinkle-free.
• Dry fit shirts can be worn without ironing.
• Other fabrics that don't need ironing are wool knit, 100% nylon, polyester knit, etc.

Later in this post, you will discover how to maximize being wrinkle-free of fabrics in the way you wash them.

Now underwears are not seen so if you want to save don't iron undies and socks.

How to reduce ironing time?

Reducing the ironing time boils down to breaking the habit of ironing multiple times.

You've done the washing, and now all your clothes are already dry in the clothesline. Take them inside.

1. Sort out all clothes according to the following: jeans, slacks, linen shirts, cotton shirts, handkerchiefs, etc. Separate all clothes that don't need ironing and those with wrinkle-free fabric and hang them inside your wardrobe cabinet. Consider them ready to be worn.
2. Iron the jeans first. Remember that you only need to eliminate front and back wrinkles. Skip the seam area (between legs) and both inseams. The only parts that needed to be ironed are — upper back area, front and back pockets, outseams, and the crotch area. It must be done in seconds only for each pair of trouser jeans.
3. Follow them with slacks. The parts of slacks that must be given priority in ironing are the back and front creases. They are the vertical lines running down the pants. It makes for sharpness and elegance of formal pants. Quickly press the hip and crotch areas. The time needed for each slack to be decently ironed is just over a minute.
4. Shirts are ironed in the collar first, and it is followed by button placket. Next to those areas, you will immediately finish a shirt by pressing all the creases, e.g., in sleeves and back and press the cuffs a little if the shirt has long sleeves. Unplug your iron if the remaining shirts are only 3-4.
5. Pressing handkerchiefs while the iron is already beginning to cool is the right money-saving technique in completing your ironing. So after the shirts, follow with the t-shirts that needed to be pressed a little bit. You don't need to spend longer than 20 seconds in each t-shirt as you only need to focus on neck, sleeves, chest, and hem if you don't tuck t-shirt into trouser.

Tips in using the iron to conserve even more

• Even if you separate those with fabric that doesn't need ironing, check tags of other garments before you put them in the ironing board. Tags tell you if a piece of clothing needs ironing or not.
• It is always best to use water in ironing like sprinkling the garment before the iron touches it. Don't let your iron sit over an area just because the wrinkle is hard to remove. Sprinkle extra water, and it will do the trick.
• Always make sure the iron is moving, that's the bottom line. Don't believe in ironing both inside and outside of garments.
• The fact that you're sparingly using your iron is enough to preserve and prolong the quality of the garments.

Don't rely on washing machine auto mode

If you think that putting the dirty laundry onto the washing machine, setting it on automatic mode, leave it to operate and return to air dry your clothes is good for the garments, then you need to rethink again.

The last phase of automatic mode on the washing machine is spin dry. Allowing your clothes to be spun dried would wrinkle them. After air drying, you definitely need to iron all of them.

Clothes that don't need to be ironed would develop unwanted wrinkles once air dried although it would be lessened once hanged in the clothesline. But our purpose is to minimize ironing. So we need to minimize the wrinkles brought by washing.

Spin dry is practical to use in towels, socks, and undies. But for our clothes to last we need to air dry them without letting them undergo machine's spin dry.

How to do laundry to avoid ironing?

Proper use of the washing machine can help in minimizing the ironing of clothes considerably.

Now that you have a mound of laundry which accumulated for a month or two, it's time for your washing machine to help you in such a way that, in partnership with the iron, it will reduce the number of clothes to be ironed to the minimum.

• Make sure that only clothes that are not dingy or super dirty will go onto the washing machine. Soiled garments must be hand washed.
• Separate non-colorfast from colorfast clothes and white from colored clothes.
• Before you do the laundry, turn every piece of clothing inside-out. There is quite a lot of benefits in doing these like avoiding wear and loss of color and direct contact of detergent to the outside surface, etc, that will make your clothes to look old too early.
• Do not tumble dry clothes at any given time. It is no brainer that prolonged usage of any appliance consumed more power that translates to the high electricity bill. But the real damage is in the clothes itself. The heat of the dryer damages the fabric no doubt. Over time, lint and fluffs would disintegrate from garments they'll look nasty and worn-out prematurely. The only best option in drying the washed clothes is air dry — using washing lines.
• Do not wring out all of your clothes — jeans, slacks, shirts, t-shirts, etc. You can air spin towels and undies to fast track your laundering in general. Wringing out washed clothes leaves wrinkles that will only be undone by ironing. Air dry is the best solution if you want your clothes' new look to last.
• Wash all white clothes in manual mode. Set it to low so that you don't need to wash per fabric as it will be energy consuming. Put all your white clothes inside the machine's drum and when with the right estimate taking into consideration the slightness of dirt wash them for the corresponding time after which, rinse. Again, do not wring out.
• Combine all dark colorfast clothing including the slacks and wash them similar to the white clothes but with the different setting in speed and time duration. All non-colorfast clothes must be washed separately.
• Wash your towels, undies, socks, washcloth, handkerchiefs, and other similar items at one go. Put them together inside the machine's drum, and set your machine to automatic and press 'on' or 'start.' Let the machine operate until it automatically turns off. All of the items are spin dried but you still need to hang them to dry them completely.
• For extra protection against fabric snagging, threads pulling and other signs of clothes being damaged especially those delicate ones, use a mesh bag or two. Put the items inside a mesh bag and throw it inside the washer.
• Don't use fabric conditioner. It has chemicals that when used in clothes overtime will definitely rid garments of the fabric absorbency making your clothes to lose the new and fresh look. The best alternative is vinegar. Simply add the right amount of white vinegar, instead of fabric conditioner, in the softener's dispenser. That being said, line drying while clothes are bleeding in rinse water would give your clothes unwrinkled look when dried.

Final thoughts

It is much easier to save money from our daily clothes. One needs only to be practical without sacrificing grooming. Clothes last and there should no fuzz about how you dress as long as you are neat.

On the other hand, we easily slip and waste money without knowing it, so the need to be self-aware should always be there.

Lastly, clothing should occupy a large part in your financial management to have an improvement in the cutting of costs, if only to be successful.

How do you save from the way you maintain your clothing and the way you dress up? Do you have anything to add — about saving money on our clothing? Share your ideas in our comments' section below.

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Vernie Mallorca

Vernie Mallorca is an entrepreneur and blogger with years of experience in selling to institutional accounts. He gradually shifted to blogging when he found out that it is his calling to write timely and helpful articles online that can help others to save money, make money, and secure their future by handling their income smartly. In this blog, he shares both managing your finances, however small it is and valuable information on running a small business.