dreams

A lot of my posts are focused around how we are trying to save money, pay off all our debts, and set ourselves up for the future.

I'm not sure I've ever completely explained why we do what we do, why we live below our means, why we want to get all our debt paid off.

Alex and I have a few dreams for when we're done with all this.

1. Freedom. Freedom from debt, not feeling trapped or owned by the jobs that we do. Freedom to do what we want with our income, not just pay it all back to loans.

2. Saving. Saving for retirement, for kids (someday), for the someday kids' college, all the things we want to do in the future.

3. Vacation/Relaxation. We want to travel, see the world, you know. But we also want to be able to do things like visit our families on a regular basis, take frequent weekend trips, get out more in general.

Sometimes I need to remind myself what we're working towards to remind myself that it's worth the sacrifice now.

7-8: benefits of marriage

This post is a continuation of the post 10 ways to reduce your monthly expenses. Here are numbers seven and eight on the list, and how we accomplished them.

These two things are things we could combine and save money on when we got married.

7. Combine car insurance

When we got married, we were eligible to combine our car insurance, as well as our renter’s insurance. This brought our total insurance payment down by a small amount. (This wasn’t a huge expense cut for us, but it did contribute a little.)

8. Combine health insurance

Alex was getting private insurance, since he owned his own business, and the payment was about $200/month. My insurance as a single person through work was $80/month, coming to a total of $280. Adding him to my insurance at work when we got married brought our total payment to $180/month.

Even if one of you is not paying an exorbitant amount for private insurance, combining to one insurance carrier through one of your employers will most likely be cheaper than each holding your own insurance separately.

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5-6: cheaper living expenses

This post is a continuation of the post 10 ways to reduce your monthly expenses. Here are numbers five and six on the list, and how we accomplished them.

5.  Switch to a cheaper cell phone plan

When Alex started his business, we determined that he’d be on the phone a lot, so we decided we’d need unlimited cell phone minutes. We were paying about $170/month for a big name cell phone company. We switched to StraightTalk, and now pay only $90/month for unlimited talk, text, and data. We have experienced a slight cut in service, but nothing we can’t deal with for the price cut.

6. Minimize rent/mortgage payment

This is another one we didn’t do after Alex moved in, rather, I did it when I moved into the apartment. I picked an apartment with a fairly low monthly rent, even though the apartment isn’t the biggest/nicest apartment I could have gotten. Keeping that payment low has really helped us control our monthly expenses. We currently live in a 1-br apartment, and have worked really hard to minimize our stuff to be able to stay here as long as possible. It's easily saving us more than $300/month to not rent a 2 or 3-br apartment. If you have a mortgage payment, it might be worth looking into refinancing to minimize the payment.

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3-4: unnecessary expense

This post is a continuation of the post 10 ways to reduce your monthly expenses. Here are numbers three and four on the list, and how we accomplished them.

3.  Eliminate storage payments
 

This one doesn’t apply to everyone, but there are a lot of people that have storage units full of stuff that they don’t need/want. We emptied ours and completely eliminated the $50/month payment.  I’ll talk about how we dealt with all of the furniture/stuff in the unit in a later post.

4. Cancel cable/extra channels

We didn’t actually cancel any cable, because I have never paid for it, but it is a great way to cut your monthly expenses. (As an added bonus, you’re less likely to watch TV and will have much more time on your hands.)

Now, it’s not that we don’t watch TV at all. Buying an antenna ($20 tops) allowed us to get the regularly broadcast networks on TV for free. This includes FOX, ABC, CBS, and NBC. We also get a couple local channels that have various other shows on them.

Another thing you can do is watch TV shows online. There are a lot of shows available on sites like hulu.com, as well as some of the shows being available on the websites of the TV networks.

I truly think that by tuning into the free channels and figuring out which shows you can watch online, cable and extra channels aren’t missed.

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10 ways to reduce your monthly expenses

  

When Alex moved to Colorado in March, we started to try to cut our monthly expenses. So far, we’ve managed to cut expenses by $1000/month. Here’s a list of the things that we’ve done, plus a couple that I had already done/looked into before he moved in. 

1. Pay off smaller loans

2. Pay off a vehicle

3. Eliminate storage payments

4. Cancel cable/extra channels

5. Switch to a cheaper cell phone plan

6. Minimize rent/mortgage payment

7. Combine car insurance

8. Combine health insurance

9. Take advantage of things that are free/discounted

10. Make a budget

Cutting monthly expenses is a great accomplishment! As my wonderful husband put it, it’s like getting a $(amount of expense reduction X 12) raise this year!

In the following posts, I'll write in detail about how we did each of these things.