to tighten one's belt
1
5.8
- idiom
- Informal
- It's time to tighten our belts.
- tighten your belt a bit
- need to tighten our belts
- tighten your belt and go
Examples
-
We've all had to tighten our belts.
-
Credit crunch or not, housing boom or bust, we need to tighten our belts, live with less, and give more.
Blog text (8) -
You gotta tighten your belt.
-
Sometimes we all need to tighten our belts.
Blog text (7) -
We're all tightening our belts.
Blog text (7) -
Listen, my lawyers are burning through my money and we're gonna have to tighten our belts.
-
So, I've made a list of places where we can tighten our belts.
-
I know that will require tightening our belts and doing without many of our entitlements and comforts.
Blog text (8) -
Politicians and managers speak about having to tighten our belts, about living beyond our means, while they themselves have filled their pockets (Gerlach, 2000).
Academic text (2018) -
We all need to tighten our belts during these hard economic times to make ends meet.
Synonyms
10
6.4
Spend less money than usual when you buy something
1
4.3
To spend less money to save or avoid debt
1
7.7
Spend very little money and avoid buying things you do not need
1
5.8
To spend less money and control how money is used
Make your money last longer by spending carefully
How Frugal
8
7.4
- Informal
1
5.8
30
4.9
- US
7
5.0
156
2.9
- UK
1
8.2
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal image of making a belt tighter conveys restriction or cutting back, so a learner who knows 'tighten' and 'belt' can probably infer a sense of reducing or restraining something. However, mapping that restriction specifically to spending and financial frugality is a metaphorical extension that is not fully predictable without exposure (though the metaphor is cross-linguistically common), so the expression is only partially transparent.
Etymology
Tighten one's belt comes from the image of pulling a belt tighter when money is short and you must buy less food or clothes. So today it means 'to reduce spending and live more simply'.