How to Furnish Your New Apartment on a Budget

If you need to furnish your new apartment, whether you just graduated and it's, your first, or you're leaving a relationship and starting over, you can furnish it nicely, even if you're on a strict budget.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. First see if your friends and family are willing to help you at all. Someone may be willing to lend you some furniture or other household items. You may even know someone who has been wanting to get rid of a few things, and you're now able to help them too by taking in things they no longer want or need.

2. Try freecycle. One of the easiest ways to get free stuff.

3. Look in your paper's classifieds. You may be able to get nice furniture for a lot less than you'd pay for new.

4. Try a rent-a-center or other rent-to-own store. Not exactly cheap, but you can get nice furniture where the payments are small enough to fit your monthly budget. Pay the balance off before a certain length of time and you will save a lot of extra expense.

5. Check thrift stores, yard sales and used furniture stores for bargains. You never know what you might find.