Cutting those CORNERS~!
I love cutting corners on the budget. It makes sure that we maximize the dollars that are coming into the house. First thing I noticed is that we are paying too much for local cable. Our cable modem is NOT rented so we dont pay a rental fee, but we have the higher end high speed: upto 3MB download. We downgraded to the 768k speed which so far I havent really noticed, because all I do online is get email, read blogs, check news... so not too much high end downloading going on (songs downloaded now take about 2 minutes instead of 1... again unnoticable.) I going to try out Verizon for their DSL service which will save us another $10; I'll let you know how the trial goes.
Secondly the cable bill got me thinking that we dont really need all our 999 channels of television... my wife also agrees and points out that we hardly ever watch tv and she tapes her local channel soaps, so we are cutting it down to 100 regular cable channels for another $20 less! I will be returning our digital box and remote this weekend.
Finally one more cut this week, our netflix went sky high and I havent even noticed that we are being charged close to $40 a month for entertainment. Since the DVDs are for myself and almost never for my wife, we lowered it to the 3 DVDs at a time for $17.99 a month, saving us about $22/month. But I bit the one time bullet and bought a one year pass on ebay for $150 and just squashed the monthly rental, which saved us about $70 for the year additional.
Because I know we are probably going to spend a little bit on the baby, I'm trying to be a little prepared budget-wise. All our additional "luxuries" are currently being scrutinized and we learn to adjust to a lifestyle below our means (or at least think that way) Thats what its all about! We are also trying to get out and enjoy this great weather too.
0 Comments: