Back in December when I was laid off from my regular 9-5 job and decided to pursue self employment in lieu of reliable income, I did some pretty serious bill slashing.
I called every service provider to our household and demanded a better deal. In all but one instance, I got a better deal. Now for ten months, I’ve been resting on my laurels.
We’ve been in our Financial Peace University (FPU) class for three weeks now so we’re in to budgeting and cash flow, and had to create a zero-based budget. More on this later, but ultimately, it makes me really uncomfortable, so I wanted to whack down our fixed expenses even further.
This week I took a look at all of our expenses from largest (house) to smallest (my gas money—at about $35 a month) and made some likely targets for a better deal. Here are my results.
Newspaper
My husband likes to read the NYT on the ferry to work though, but he doesn’t touch it on weekends. Total cost: $65.00/mo It really was always our intentions to read the weekend papers… but, well, you know where good intentions get you. This week I phoned the circulation desk and asked for a deal. Could I drop the weekend papers? They seldom do this for residential addresses, but they agreed. New cost: $30 a month!
Mobile Phone
I have a contract with my provider. Two lines, two phones with data plans. I use my phone for my business, but rely very little on actual minutes—more on the ability to send/receive data on the road. I checked out the competition with www.billshrink.com and saw that my $260/mo bill wasn’t exactly competitive. Mind you, I’m under contract, so I don’t have a lot of leverage here, but I tried anyhow. I called and asked for a plan “that fit the family better.” And they were happy to oblige—reviewing our past use history, and reducing our bill to $120/mo with no change in service. Just fewer “anytime minutes” (though we’ll still have more than we’ve ever used in a month). Total savings: $140/mo!
Food
We’re a family of four, and food is a major expense. I’ve been tackling this with a series of $1/serving dinner recipes, but have also found that meal planning saves a fortune on food. We’ve literally knocked our weekly grocery bill from $150/week a year ago to $90 a week now (and that’s adding one person and disposable diapers to the expenses!) We don’t waste food due to spoilage. We also batch cook a few “convenience” meals for those days when nobody wants to cook. Total monthly savings $120
It’s amazing the difference that such a few little changes could make! The total monthly savings of these easy changes is actually $295!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I do not get the paper, just look online so that’s a way for me to cut costs. I also don’t have a land line, just mobile. Makes it easier anyways.
I agree with the newspaper comment. Reading the paper to me is out of date. I do not mean old-fashioned, but that you’re actually reading yesterday’s news because you can read it almost in real-time on the internet. If you must read the newspaper, purchasing a Kindle might be able to save you money over the long term, and it’s green too!
The one number that shocked me…you have two lines and two phones with data plans that cost you $260/month??! Do you have iphones or something to that caliber?
If you have cell phones, you should be able to kill the two landlines because the cell should be enough. And the cell phone service you choose shouldn’t be that expensive… especially when you’re trying to kill debt. I have a family plan with four cell phone lines that cost under $90/month and we still don’t use all the minutes every month. It feels like your plan still isn’t competitive enough.
yeah, we’ve got blackberries, and we can’t kill the land line because of a home office.
I run an emergency mobile notary service so I have to be “online” 24-7 and anywhere. This allows me to download my documents on the road, and also to get land-line or office calls and faxes. There’s only one landline (bundled with our cable internet and for the purpose of the fax and emergencies). Thankfully, almost all of this is deductible as a business expense, so it’ll keep our tax load down a lot.