Cutting Back

The theme to a lot of my posts so far this year has been money and how to spend it wisely and save it as much as I can.

I have already looked at our weekly costs and how to save on our food shopping and I have even looked at the different ways of saving money from transferring money between accounts to storing all my change in a jar.

My next step is to look at reducing our monthly outgoings, I can’t do anything about the cost of the house or even our loan repayment and we already have a water meter so I can’t reduce that.

Today I reduced our Sky package so we no longer have sports, movies or even HD which saved me just over £30 a month and I have just changed my Gas and Electricity package to one that will offer better value but where else can I cut down?

I decided to hunt out all of our bank statements and went trawling through all of the outgoings I could not believe how much money we spend on Insurance!!!!

Life Assurance, Contents Insurance, Health Insurance it is ridiculous so I am making it my mission to reduce all of them and I am starting with our Home Insurance, I am sure if I do some comparisons and shop around I am bound to save something. Even if it is only a few pounds a month it soon adds up and if I can reduce them all by just a small amount it would be quite a saving by the end of the year.

I am even looking at a reducing my mobile phone contract but I don’t want to end up paying more by reducing my internet usage or minutes. I ran up a huge bill last time I decided to make that cut back.

All in all these small cut backs have saved me about £50 a month and that is £600 a year which is amazing. Add to that the cut backs in our food budget from not buying my fruit and veg at the supermarket has given us and the additional savings from meal planning I can actually see us not just surviving on our benefits but maybe even living a little bit.