Saving Money While Single, 5 Ways I Do It
Taking back some control during the chaos.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
Single women are deeply connected to the cost of living crisis. We were living alone in a world priced for pairs long before shrinkflation was coined as a term. I’m still waiting for it to be labeled as a crime. Everything from laundry detergent to clothing to the natural gas we heat our homes with is getting more expensive for the same (or less!) efficacy. I will not pretend to have answers for you on how to fix it, but I do have thoughts on how to weather it.
In my life I’ve seen my income rise and fall repeatedly, and it’s only in my 40s that I’ve learned to view changes as fluid, rather than as failures. Though I will say, these current times are hitting harder than I remember. I’m not the only single woman struggling right now, far from it, and longtime readers will know that gatekeeping has never been my style and never will be. This newsletter is intended to be a helpful tool as much as it’s meant to build community, so if there are any money-saving practices that have helped you breathe a little easier, please leave them in the comments. The only way to weather chaos is collectively.
I want to be clear that when I speak about saving money, I’m aware that there are big changes that can be made that alter our overall ways of life. Things like moving homes, moving cities, forgoing a car for public transit, etc. While I love all these options, they’re all privileges based on circumstance, and what follows are simple practices that (hopefully) anyone living a single life can implement quickly and easily.
Going into this, I want you to think about your perspective when it comes to saving money. If you’re viewing it as restriction, as a negative imposition on your life, it’s probably going to drain you emotionally. If you choose to view it as a triumph over people and corporations that don’t care about you but still want all your money, I think you might find it fun. In 2024 and 2025 I started making big changes to how I spent and thought about money, because I had to. I wanted to feel secure no matter what came next (and something always seems to come next), and I didn’t want to hate my life in the process. How we think about money is just as important as how we spend it. I choose to feel like I’m stronger than the systems that want to break me, every day.