Reduce Your Other Expenses

Stop Wasting Your Money

There are other expenses you have that can be reduced, or even eliminated.

Again, I am not going to tell you how to live your life.



Only you can decide which other expenses are unnecessary. But you need to ask yourself:

What is the Trade Off?

Is the price I pay for premium cable (which I don’t watch that often) costing me the ability to pay for my daughter’s ballet lessons?

Is the extra house phone worth us sacrificing our vacation?

Everything costs money.

And no matter how hard we try, we will not make enough money (in traditional ways) to ever have, “It All”. So we need to make adjustments.


Lets look at these Other Expenses:

Cable TV

This is my husband’s favorite. He once threatened to divorce me if I ever mentioned getting rid of cable again. Yet here we are, perfectly cableless.

When I first met my husband, he paid nearly $90 a month for the premium cable package, with all the bells and whistles, sports channels, movie channels, you name it. As soon as I moved in with him, I cut it down to the package right above the basics.

He didn’t even notice.

You see, he did not have time to watch TV. He worked 60 hours a week on a good week, 80 hours on many weeks. He would come home, slump down in bed, and turn on “the 24-hour MASH channel” and that was that.

Months later, I asked about further reducing the bill, down to just basic. This was when he first noticed that I had gotten rid of the premium. Well, we argued about it, and the cable stayed….until we moved.

Then I did reduce it down to basic, and no one noticed.

When we moved into the RV, many parks offered cable for free. So we canceled our subscription altogether. The park we are currently in does not have cable, but we are so busy that it’s not too much of a problem. Though if you ask my husband, he will tell you it is the worst thing in the world.

Benefits to No, or Basic Cable:
--Save Money
--Watch Less TV
--House Stays Cleaner (you have time to clean it)
--Kids Play Outside
--There is Time to Make Supplemental Income
--More Family Time

There will probably come a time in our lives when I get a satellite again, but for now, I actually like not having the distraction of too much TV.

And I particularly like that I have reduced this portion of my other expenses completely.

Don’t want to give it all up?

You don’t have to. Investigate the basic cable package offered by your cable or satellite company. Try reducing this other expense for a month to see if you even miss it. Maybe there is one channel you miss when you do this. Is that one channel worth $10-30 a month?

Phones

How many phones do we need?

There is the house phone, or landline.

Then there is your husband’s work cell phone, his personal cell phone, your personal cell phone, and in some cases, phones for each of the children and even the dog!

Well, ok, maybe not the dog.

But all those phones add up fast!

I got rid of my landline years ago.

Why did I need it?

A cell phone made more sense to me.

And since I had to buy a certain quantity of minutes that I never used anyway, it was an easy thing to ditch the landline.

My husband has a work cell phone. So we canceled his personal cell. He couldn’t carry two phones with him anyway, so why pay for something he wasn’t going to use?

See if you can condense the number of phones you have in your home.

What about all the extras?
--Caller ID
--Call Waiting
--Texting

Even if you only trim $5-10 a month, that adds up to $60-120 a year!

Internet

Are you tied to a landline because of your internet access? Make sure that landline is just the bare minimum $15 a month plan.

You may want to investigate a high speed alternative, if the cost of your unused landline plus your internet access is more than the price of DSL or cable internet.

Maybe you have a big DSL line that costs you a lot of money, PLUS a landline. Time to reduce?

Gym Membership

This is my favorite in the expenses category.

Do you have an expensive gym membership that you used one week and then stopped going? If you can’t cancel it, then make sure that you don’t renew it!

Many of those memberships are set to renew on autopay, meaning they will just assume you want it unless you tell them no, and will automatically deduct it from your checking account.

Autopayments

Which makes me wonder, what else do you have on autopay? Examine your checking account and credit cards carefully. What other payments are coming out? What payments are scheduled to be deducted automatically? What can be stopped?

Many people sign up for “free” trials and end up getting charged hundreds of dollars for some travel savings club, or credit monitoring membership. Most of these people don’t even notice the charges! So examine your bills and statements very carefully.

Energy

You can reduce your energy consumption and save money on your heating and electric bill.

This can be from things like replacing existing appliances with Energy Star ones, or it can be from a host of other ideas.

Simple things will reduce your other expenses, like only washing dishes when the dishwasher is full, or setting your thermostat to 78 degrees in the summer will go a long way towards reducing your energy bill.

Children's Activities

This can be a big source of your other expenses.

Are your kids each in dance class, scouts, sports, and art classes?

Do your afternoons feel like you are on a race car track, taking one kid to karate while simultaneously another is at ballet? Then right after that its onto piano lessons and boy scouts.

Then you rush home to grab a bite to eat (or grab something while you’re out) and try to get homework done before bath time and bedtime.

And that’s just Monday!

Tuesdays is soccer, girl scouts, and tap.

Wednesday is church and more karate.

Thursday is so busy even you get confused about what is happening, and Friday you have to do grocery shopping.

Then its dance competitions, sporting events, and scout trips on the weekend.

Sound familiar?

Why are you doing this?

I know the drill: the activities will make them well rounded individuals. We need to broaden their horizons. We need to let them explore their interests.

But it comes time when Enough is Enough.

If kids are too busy, they won’t have time to be kids!

They need time to go outside and get dirty, to play with their friends. They need time to read a book in their rooms, or play a board game with mom and dad.

Mom and Dad need time too; to breathe.

Limit your children’s activities. Do just one thing. Or, like us, do one physical activity, and scouts.

There will be more time later to explore their interests.

Dr. Robert Barnes talks about limiting activities in his parenting courses. We started to follow his methods and have noticed a tremendous difference.

We spend less money and we have more time together as a family.


I hope this page on other expenses will give you ideas on how you can reduce your other expenses in your home. Again, my ideas are meant to be used as springboards to your own.


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