November 20, 2008

Cutting Expenses

For the past several months it seems as though most people’s emotions have become a wild roller coaster ride worrying about their jobs, families, nation, freedoms, right to bear arms and the list goes on and on. There are occasionally reports of good news but it is swiftly swallowed up by a sea of despair and gloom. Things seem very uncertain which has made me take a good look at my life and financial portfolio to get better prepared for things to come.

There are a lot of little things my wife and I have decided to do. It started by us looking at our list of expenses and together deciding what luxuries we could do without. A lot of them are very minor things like only having one city garbage can instead of two. We save about $13.50 a month which is not a whole lot of money, but is almost the minimum payment on a credit card which by adding that to our current payment can knock the repayment time in half. Another thing that I am doing is saving about $60.00 a month on dry cleaning by washing, drying, starching and ironing my own work clothes. A few other ideas are canceling our home phone since we all have cell phones, taking the minimum package for cable, preparing meal menus to minimize wasted food and eating out… None of these save a lot of money, but it really adds up and we are able to put that money towards paying off our home, cars or credit cards. Our first major financial goal is to become completely debt free and we are having a lot of fun challenging ourselves to reach this goal. We’re now saving an average of $300 a month and if we had started this when we were married 12 years ago we’d have saved $43,000 plus all the interest that has accrued on that debt.

I read recently that “A paid-off mortgage and large savings account has replaced the BMW and large home as the status symbol of choice.”

Deciding to drop some of these expenses seemed hard to live without, but in reality was very easy. Working together with Liz and watching our expense column decrease has really brought us closer to one another and has been a lot of fun. Now the doom and gloom news isn’t nearly as depressing knowing we are working together to reach our financial goals.

Posted By: Brad Sears