The Monday Money Wrap-Up

In the past few weeks, I’ve noticed an influx of new readers and I want to introduce you to a regular feature I created last fall called Monday Money.

Monday Money was started to share with you some of the steps that my wife and I took recently to reduce our living expenses and to prepare ourselves to be more flexible for any career or income changes.

I was planning both as I decided to start the search for a different job, which ended last week with a new position that I’m starting today.

In order to confidently know what a decent salary we could live with, we needed to know what our living expenses were.

(The past ten years, my income has been some combination of commission and salary, so it would fluctuate from month to month.)

We discovered that certain expenses had been growing a little bit each month at a rate that it wasn’t noticeable when I paid bills online.

We found a way to trim over $3,000 a year with minimal changes.  Plus a few other ways to save too.

Here’s the review:

1. First off, I was paying Google extra money for some premium features, that I could live without. So, I made some changes and saved the 1st $50.
2. Next I did some changes with our auto insurance which results in an $1100 savings.
3. How about saving over $1000 on home internet, cable tv and phone service? And sticking with Comcast? Yep, we did it.
4. Cellphone service was another money pit. First I had to go back to my old Droid and make sure it would do what I needed.
5. Then we switched to a prepaid service that saves us over $900 a year and still uses the Verizon network.
6. Are you buying your coffee at 4 or 5 bucks per latte?  Or paying nearly 2 dollars for your favorite carbonated caffeine?
7. Carpet cleaning, exercise, and giving yourself permission to save sometimes was next.
8. My wife has become an advocate for buying used.  Twice she organized and hosted a local Thrift Style Fashion Show.
9. There’s the dreaded idea of budgeting, made a little less intimidating.
10. Talk about your buying style and how to save.
11. Talk about waste and what to do about it.
12. I even shared some of entertainment changes last week.
13. And we had to throw some humor in too.
14. But the reality is we were all hit with a smaller paycheck this year, so this is serious business.

I am not planning on continuing this series every Monday, but I will add more Monday Money tips from time to time. Meanwhile, there are plenty of others who have wisdom to share on this subject.