Ways to reduce monthly spending and forgotten costs

The lifestyle I have chosen for myself has forced me into a serious evaluation of where my money is going. This is a good thing, I have found many useless drains on my bank account and alternatives to services I once believed to be standard.

Review your Automatic Payments

I looked through my bank statement and found I was paying monthly for services I had either forgotten about or rarely used; they totaled around $50 per month, I immediately canceled them.

Free or Low Cost Alternatives

There are many services we accept as standard, such as our phones and cable; these are things most of us, if we can avoid it, don't want to live without. My solutions were sort of a pain in the beginning, but I have found that I like my lifestyle more and now cannot imagine going back.

Cable

When I had cable, I always complained that they played the same stuff over and over and that there were way too many commercials; this one I will not miss! We were paying for cable, Xbox Live and Netflix. It turns out if you have Xbox Live you can watch Netflix movies on your TV, as you can imagine deleting cable was a no-brainer. With this choice we reduced our expense from $50 to $15 per month.

Books

I absolutely adore audio books, sadly we decided that we could find better uses for the money spent on our Audible account. I was so sad to see it go, that is until I figured out that I can download audio books for free from my local library website. They have an amazing selection and I can have up to ten books at any given time. Another good source, for classic audio books, is Project Gutenberg.

Phones

This was a huge expense for us; if you total up our land line and two cell phones it comes to around $150 per month. We got rid of the home phone and replaced it with skype. Our lives are pretty much centered around the computer, so this wasn't a huge bother. We did get a skype phone, but we find it more convenient to just answer the computer. To replace our cell phones we got a pay as you go card, if you can manage to limit your usage this is a much better option.