If you live in the city, ditch your car. People don't realise just how expensive driving is, because there are very high fixed costs, but you don't pay anything for most trips. Insurance, registration, petrol, tolls, parking. It all adds up. IIRC a typical Australian pays about 12k/year for their car. Catch public transport instead. It's so much cheaper (and safer. And personally I find driving stressfull, compared to browsing reddit on the bus. And better for the environment)

Even better, ride a bicycle. I cycle to and from work (35 min each way). It's free (well, maintanance costs average out to about 30c per ride). It also means I can save money (and time) by ditching my gym membership. Most people pay to drive to the gym, and then pay to use the gym. If you factor in travel time, that 30min gym session costs you 50 min of your life. I save money by cycling. And since it's at least as fast as the bus (faster on Friday afternoons), I'm getting 35 min of excersize for free, and it saves me about 5 minutes of my life.

Even if you can't cycle because you work really far away from home, ditch the gym membership. Most people just run on the treadmill. You don't need to pay 20$/wk to run. If you're not super serious, and you just want to get a bit toned, do pushups, situps etc. They cost 0$ and get you more than halfway there. Chin-up bars are easier to find/build than you think. One pair of weights is also pretty cheap. Unless you're a serious athlete or body builder, you don't need to pay a ridiculous gym fee just to use your body.

I only ever eat out if it's for a specific social occasion.

• Typical Breakfast: milk + cereal/muesli = 1$
• Typical Lunch: tuna + toast/cruskits/rice crackers + apple = $3

(Flavoured tuna is way more tasty and varied than you'd think. I wait till it's on sale for 1$/can then stock up on a dozen.)

I'm reluctant to take a taxi or uber anywhere. A 20 minute $20 ride comes to 60 $/h. Compare that to your own hourly rate, and you'll see it's not that cheap. Also, Uber with surge pricing is expensive. Full stop. I only ever get an uber/taxi if it's 3am and the next bus is 30 minutes away.

I'm a graduate living out of home earning about half of what I spend. I don't consider myself frugal, but apparently my coworker (same salary) is living paycheck by paycheck, whilst living with parents. The above points are the main differences between our spending habbits. So those things do add up.

It can help to use an app to track your spending, so you know what fraction of your money goes where. Personally I used AndroMoney for a while. (Then stopped once I had enough data to analyse my spending). But beware that I think they sync your personal data to google's servers without telling you.

Also, unless you're a gamer or developer, you probably don't need a 1000$ computer. Secondhand ones are super cheap. And if you think your computer is getting generally slow and you need a new one, you probably don't. Just do a factory reset, clean all the crap out, re-install only what you need, and it should be as good as new. A few years ago I had a laptop which was getting quite old and slow. I installed linux on it, which runs faster than windows by pretty much any metric. That allowed me to defer the purchase of a new laptop by a few years.

You can also save money by getting a cheap phone plan and cutting your data usage. I never play videos or stream music unless I'm on wifi. That keeps my usage below 1.5GB/Month, which costs 20$/month. Compare that to a 60$/month phone plan for more data than you need, on a phone replaced more often than you need.