We have two corn/pellet stoves. By using them we spent about $500 to heat our house last winter. That is a huge savings over the electric heat. This year we removed a wall so the heat can move thruout the house better. Check your electric bill too. Our was super high this summer. I found out our dishwasher was dying and stuck on wash. I don't want to think about how much money we wasted.

Menu planning cuts down on grocery money. Planning of any sort with help with money.

We could do the following...
Switch to the minimum cable package.
Stop lawn service.
Stop eating out at restaurants on the weekends.

But, when we need a bit of extra cash my hubby always is able to find some side work building websites for people.

Sorry this was a duplicate

We could definitely save a few hundred bucks per month! Between cell phones, sattelite and internet, we could save that much alone! We could also cut back on groceries and all of the "unneccesary" expenses such as going out to dinner, shopping for fun and online shopping. ( I have a serious Amazon addiction- used books!)

this is a funny post, well ironic. last week DH and i bet that we could cut $200 - 300 out of monthly expenses...


so we shut off cable, internet and land line. its rough... but i'll be ok.. $130
We are on a very strick no eating out plan (this is more for him at lunch, i'm on a diet... so no fast food for me!) $80
NO energy drinks for DH $45


This is $255!!
Wow... things add up so quickly!!

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Ugh!
My husband loves energy drinks
What did he sub for them?

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We had to do this 2 years ago as we were being garnished $500/month for past medical bills. We cut our internet/cable (cable was only an additional $2 a month), all phone extras including our cell phone, grocery budget from $300/month down to $100/month, no eating out, no netflix/movie rentals, I only drove the bare minimum, applied for lunch assistance at school for ds, turned our heat down as low as we could manage and hand washed the dishes, bought no new clothes, except for ds when he out grew his.. but then he only had 5 outfits until christmas time when the grandmas steped in (thankgoodness we had bags & bags of handmedowns for dd)... We ended up getting assistance once over the winter for our electric bill & when our lease was up we were able to sign for another year at the same amount/year & no rent for one month.

Dh couldn't work "overtime" because he was salaried and was already working 50-80+ hours/week. I tried to get a job, but nothing would pay me enough to pay for daycare for the 2 kids.

If we had to do it again??? We would buy dh a bus pass & he would either ride the bus to work (2.5 hrs one way) or telecommute. (this would save us at least $20/week, or 80/month after buying the pass & driving minimally on this side of town). We could also lower our grocery budget back down to $100/month (saving us $50/month), no eating out/entertainment/gift spending (up to $100/month). Those few changes would save us at least $230/month. If we had to cut more.. the only realistic place I can see is asking for lower payments for a period of time on some of our other bills.

If we had to do it -

#1- I could go back to waitressing- making a few hundred a month
#2 dh could find some type of side job - he can do anything - and know lots of ppl. so he always finds something.


As far as our bills
oh we could cut about 150 off our monthly food bill

DH could stop smoking!! that'd be about 100 a month!!

Get rid of land line phone - 100.00 per month

get rid of my van -400.00 a month -

Then we'd have no ins. payment - Since dh is insured through work -
We'd save 90 there.

Ok I am gonna stop here!! I alreay see an almost 900 savings I could do....

Our out to eat budget is $200.00 per month and we each have a $50 clothing budget (times four) per month so that would give us $400, plus we have $135 in allowance between all four of us and $40 in our "blow" fund, $100 in our gift fund... we could cut all these dramatically. By doing the cash envelope and spreadsheet budgeting we can find money to save as needed... I love it!

Erica

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We actually did this earlier this year to have extra money to pay off dh's car about a year-1.5year early.

We:

~Cut out cable $80 a month (we never turned it back on, either--but now instead of putting that money towards the car we use it for a "book budget")
~Cut our weekly budget down by $80 a week (just became more careful about grocery shopping and only ate out once a week, plus not so much fun money) so $320 a month there

So, $400 extra a month for fairly minor changes. i wonder what we could do if we were willing to make more drastic changes.

I could go back to work part time, but it would have to be evenings/weekends so we wouldn't also incur the added cost of childcare. I'm not interested in going back to work, but if we ever really needed the money, I would.

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Mama to Princess, 5 and Wild Thing, 3
Progress Since 1/6/09: