Cut your expenses.

What exactly do I mean by this?  See where in your monthly bills you are able to lower the prices.  Have a gas guzzling SUV and only 1 or 2 kids? Look into a car with lower payments and better gas mileage.  Just this in itself has saved me almost $200/month.  I lowered my car payment by $75 and I am not getting an average of 30-35 mpg as apposed to 12-15 mpg in my previous SUV. I now only get gas twice a month (if I don't take trips) instead of every 4 days. This was the first step in my journey of becoming debt free.  I thought I would miss my fully loaded with entertainment center Jeep, but in reality, I'm just upset that I didn't think about it sooner. And I plan to pay off the new car in 3.5 years max - but I'll discuss that in a later post.

What about utilities? Recently I talked it over with the hubs and we agreed to cut the cable.  Keep the internet and saved $80/ month instantly.  However, now that it's football season, it's impossible not to have some sort of cable. After weighing our options, we choose to go with Directv.  The only con is that it's a 24 month contract which I'm not thrilled about, and that the cost will go up after the first 12 months.  But I am saving about $30/mo for the first 12 months, and saving about $240 over the 2 year time span vs. Time Warner.

As far as other utilities go, I conserve the electric as much as possible (unlike my husband.) I turn off all lights when not in use, unplug kitchen gadgets not being used, and set the sleep timer on my tv for 90 minutes so it's not on all night.

Water, gas, and sewer is all about the same every month (even though the water just said they will be going up in rates - boooo!) so I haven't really had to cut my losses there.

Another thing that will help is Wake Up Now's personal finance management tool.   It keeps track of what you spend your money on and you set the budget so you know when you have gone over or how much available you have of your budget. Read more about that here (it's all the way at the bottom of the page on the left.)


What would you personally do for yourself or your family if you could save at least $300/month?