Save and Stretch Your Cash.

There is a video doing rounds on social media, it is funny but not funny. There is this young lady that went to the supermarket, she picked a packet of ugali flour and while cashing out, the price made her scream her lungs out. No kidding, she saw the price at 225 shillings and nduru filled the air. It is funny the way she was holding her head but not funny the way inflation and the high cost of living are driving us faster than the safari rally that was happening in Naivasha the other weekend. And the prices keep going higher, a kilo of Mwea rice is now going for more than 200 shillings, up from 130.

When fuel goes up, it trickles down to everything else. The only companies that don’t increase prices are biscuit companies, they just reduce the number of biscuits in a packet and call it a day, true story. Inflation has hit a record high the world over. This has greatly impacted the way people spend. No one is spending on unnecessary stuff anymore. Consumers are reconditioning and reprogramming the way they spend while allocating urgency and necessity where possible.

People are coming up with ways to survive. We are now seeing balcony gardens everywhere, a balcony garden is where someone pants vegetables in a sack or containers on their balconies, this is very effective despite small living spaces. The end goal is to save as many coins as possible.

Besides apartment gardening, other effective ways of saving include shopping in bulk from wholesalers, this will save you an incredible amount of money. As the law of economy says, the bigger the quantity the more the economic sense it will make.

To save on your electricity consumption, unplug gadgets and electronics after use. Don’t just switch them off, unplug them entirely. Switch off lights in rooms that are unoccupied and reduce your shower time, yes.

While we cannot reuse, repair, plant, or save everything, there are things that we can refurbish to save us that extra coin.

A growing economy is emerging through a new make-do-and-mend attitude. With pressures on consumer discretionary spending and ever-increasing sustainability concerns, more shoppers than ever before are looking to care for, repair, and re-wear what they already have.

Welcome to the repair economy.

1. Electronics.

There are more than 50m tons of waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE, or e-waste) sent to landfills each year. That is a lot of electronics going to waste not to mention the environmental impact that they have.

If your laptop or phone has developed an issue or is not fast enough, do not throw it away just yet. There are so many electronics repair shops around. What you need is an electronics doctor to have a look at your device and lease some much-needed new life into it. This will have you up to more than half of what you could have spent on a new device.

• Clothes.

Everywhere you turn in this city, there is a second-hand clothes store. They now call them thrift stores, pre-loved clothes stores, and such endearing names. If you go to these stores, you will find good quality clothes at a much discounted rate. More people are opting to shop from these convenience stores as opposed to new clothes that are a little bit more expensive. In some stores, they are offering repair services for clothes, way to go.

As repairs become a trend in themselves, retailers are increasingly baking in repair services to their sales journey. Trends can be created from anything and everything.

As the cost of everything, fuel, food, and, consumables continues to go on an upward leap, we are finding new ways to survive, we are tightening our purses and inventing ways of stretching what we already have. The biggest way yet is making do with what we have by embracing the repair economy.

• Furniture.

If you have old furniture, instead of getting rid of them entirely and purchasing new furniture, you could try to refurbish them. Carpenters have come up with new ways of turning your old furniture into something entirely new. This will definitely save you some coins.

There are ways that we can get through the high cost of living without getting burnt. Whatever you do, remember tough times don’t last but tough people do!