Cutting Corners In A Stressed Economic Situation

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Copyright © 2009 Hadley Kincaid


The economy has really taken a toll upon my family. My wife was laid off from her job, significantly reducing our total monthly income.

This has forced us to stick to a very rigid budget, incorporating everything from weekly groceries to amount of money we can spend on entertainment. We realized that a budget was going to be necessary, after a couple weeks of paying bills after she had lost her job.

The first place we started when constructing our budget was entertainment cost. Luckily, our only child is 17 and has a part time job to pay for his activities, so we only really had to worry about me and my wife.

We stopped going out to eat and to the movies as often as we had. Instead, we would cook dinner at home, and then catch a matinee movie for the cheaper ticket prices.

We started buying cheaper alcohol also.

Making these small concessions really made a large difference on our spending.

We then started looking at how much we were spending on food. The one thing that people do not really realize is how expensive going out to eat really is compared to cooking at home. Since we changed our budget, we have not been out to eat at all.

This includes fast food restaurants. Even though fast food is a fairly cheap source of food, it still is much more expensive than buying food at a grocery store.

A nice side effect of this budget cut is that now we are eating healthier and are getting in much better shape than we were in. We are both dropping a few pounds and finding that our energy level is on the increase.

One of the easiest things we did to save money was to start cutting coupons. $0.40 here and $0.25 there can really start to add up when you are grocery shopping. If you're not cutting coupons, then you're basically just throwing money away.

There were also a lot of just miscellaneous cuts that we made in our budget that, upon first glance, may seem minor, but they certainly add up.

One of the things was to lower the temperature setting on the hot water heater to reduce energy cost. During past winters, we would usually keep the house at 70 degrees. This past winter, we cut that down to 65 degrees, and instead we just wore heavier clothes around the house. This made a very significant difference in our heating bill.

We also raised the deductible on our auto insurance. This saved us quite a bit, and now we just make sure to drive more cautiously.

One of the other things we did was to change our phone plans around. We got rid of our land line, as we use it very little now. We also cut down the plan we were on for our cell phones. This means that we will have to be a little more cautious about how often we are using our phones, but the savings were significant.

We also started to do home improvement projects on our own. When the sink drain got clogged up, I took the drain apart and cleaned it out instead of calling a plumber. We also installed energy savings light bulbs around the house.

These are among the many steps we took to make it through these tough economic times. We never really understood how much money we were simply throwing away each month. But in this time of economic challenges, we found that we can survive on much less than we ever thought was possible to do.


About the Author:
Hadley Kincaid took up writing to supplement his family's reduced monthly income. While he recommends that one should be careful about using cash advance loans in times of dire need, he also knows that sometimes we need fast access to fast money to cover an unexpected expense. When that happens, Hadley recommends http://www.fastcash4all.net/ for your payday loan needs.


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