Improve Your Savings

My husband and I revisit our budget often.

We became debt free a few years ago and it has changed our lives for the better.

No more monthly payments for student loans, cars, credit cards, etc.

We are currently building a home and we will have a mortgage to pay and our goal is to have the home paid off FULLY in ten years. 

Back to our written family budget. 

(If you don’t have a written or excel budget, do it! It’s a great way to see where your money is going.)

We were looking for ways to save more money and cut our spending even more.

Areas we found:

•Cell phone - One call to our cell phone provider saved us $48 MONTHLY. We removed our phones insurance (we own both of our old iPhones) and we advised them we were going to switch providers if we couldn’t bring our bill down. They made up a $20 MONTHLY promotion to keep us.

•TV Subscriptions - If it were up to me we wouldn’t own a TV, period. But my husband enjoys sports, movies, and other media so we compromised and have one TV in our living space. We saw we were subscribed to several TV steaming services so we cancelled some. 

Ask yourself, “Do I watch this service?”

“Do I need this TV service?”

“Could I be using my time, energy, resources elsewhere?”

•Mail Subscriptions - Subscribing to monthly mailing services claims overall savings, but it can spend all your money. We often subscribe to things, have the setting on autopay and then forget about it. This is a great way to spend your money without consciously knowing it.

We are subscribed to Dropps for laundry and dish soap that is plastic free. This subscription aligns with our family values and we use laundry and dishwasher soap regularly as a family of four. This type of subscription might not be as useful for you.

We were also subscribed to another product subscription that caused us to stop and evaluate “Does this product add value to our life?”

We decided to stop the subscription and find out. If our lives are worse without it, we can always purchase the product if needed.

I have a feeling we will enjoy the savings more than the product.

In our family we don’t have an earning problem, we have a spending problem.

Even being debt free we still have areas of our spending we can improve.

We downsized our physical items so we know what tools we need to live.

We no longer buy new clothes because we have plenty of clothes in our closet. When new clothing is needed we go to our local consignment shop as there are many gently used clothing that will fit our needs (Buying used clothing also helps keep our planet green which is a value of ours.)

We no longer purchase excess food items because we know what meals leave us feeling healthy and strong.

We evaluate our lives often and make changes where they are needed.

Living well below our means has helped us tremendously, I would love to see if it helps you as much as it has helped us.

TANCKS for reading.

(Improving your savings will leave you smiling as big as Chelsey in the photo below.)

July 2022