CyberCJH's Blog

Call me weird, but there’s something incredibly liberating about going through the monthly household budget with an eye towards economy and figuring out where cuts can be made.

And, actually making those cuts is really, really satisfying.

We’ve been DirecTV free now for just over two weeks. So far, we don’t miss it. Sure, a couple of times I’ve put the TV on and said, “There’s nothing on!” But, I used to say the same thing when we used to get 200 channels for $63 a month.

I took a look at our household budget last night for the billionth time and I’m really surprised at how much we’ve cut. And, what prompted all that cutting was this article over on MoneyCentral at MSN. It was written by Donna Freedman. I’ve followed Donna since she started writing for MoneyCentral and I always enjoy reading her articles and the Smart Spending message boards. Her writing style is memorizing, like Jennifer Patterson’s style of speaking.

Anyway, what started as a financial fire drill turned into something that resulted in some real cost savings for our household. We’ve managed to cut $2,286 from our annual budget and we’re contemplating an additional $732 in annual savings by combining our cell phone plans into one family plan and getting rid our our land line telephone service and replacing it with an inexpensive VoIP provider like ooma. If we follow through, that would result in annual savings of $3,018 – which works out to us rediscovering $251 lost dollars each month.

Here’s a summary list of what we cut, in order from biggest to smallest:

• DirecTV = $754/yr
• SnapFitness = $498/yr
• Microsoft Action Pack Membership = $318/yr
• Web Hosting Downgrade = $180/yr
• Extra Credit Monitoring = $143/yr
• MyFoodDiary.com = $108/yr
• Amazon Prime Membership = $89/yr
• SkypeIn = $60/yr
• Microsoft Live OneCare Membership = $50/yr
• BJ’s Wholesale Club Membership = $45/yr
• Unused Domain Names = $41/yr

written by cybercjh