cutting back on expenses

[swingchickie]

i'm looking for little ways here and there that i can cut back on my monthly expenses. i'm one of the millions of people right now who are going, "oh, hey, maybe $X in credit card debt is not a good idea". in order to try to pay off my credit card by next summer, i'm figuring out ways that i can change my spending habits in order to put it all towards the card. so far i have:

* eat more home-cooked meals. for me, the queen of takeout, this is a big thing. last night's chicken divan experiment tasted awesome, took 30 minutes to make, and gave me 4 meals' worth of food for about $8 in ingredients (and kept me from tossing some food in my fridge in a few days). that alone saved me probably $30 in takeout. whee!

* quit my gym membership. i haven't gone in over 6 months, and that's $40/month i could be putting towards that card. i have my hooping and my dance classes, so no need to pay for a gym membership i don't use.

* magazine subscriptions. every month i buy anywhere between 6 and 10 magazines, so we're talking maybe $40 a month *gasp*. subscriptions to those magazines would cut that down to a fraction of what i pay in the supermarket. ETA: I bought subscriptions this morning for all my regular ones... and the subscriptions saved me almost $350 for the next 12 months. whoa.

so, i'm looking for other suggestions. is there anything you're doing to cut back that really helps?

Comments

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Do you have a daily froufrou caffeinated beverage habit?

When I gave up daily trips to Benna's I started saving a metric assload of money. Tea or coffee at home (or work) generally costs only pennies.

Of course, Benna's is a rotten thing to have to give up for community reasons, and I did so reluctantly. I still go on weekends. And if money starts raining from the sky it's the first thing that will come back, along with liberal use of Phillycarshare to attend out-of-center-city salsa events. (:

[swingchickie.livejournal.com]

luckily, i don't have a coffeeshop habit. i brew a cup in the morning to drink while i'm getting ready for work, and then sometimes in the afternoon i'll have a cup at the office but it's free. when i was a sales rep, my daily morning starbucks run was such a drain on my wallet!

[opadit.livejournal.com]

Food is a huge area where you can save serious money:

- brown-bag your lunch every day (make it the night before if you have to, or make a batch of stew on the weekends and freeze in smaller daily portions)

- quit buying convenience foods (anything pre-packaged, like boxed noodle side dishes, frozen meals, junk foods)

- crock pot! (there are tons of recipes online, and you can either pick up a crock pot for pennies used, or new ones are cheap enough that it'll pay for itself after a short while)

- make a grocery list and stick to it

- very hard-core: keep a price notebook to track the lowest prices of the stuff you always buy, at different grocery stores and at different times of year (the time you spend doing this is worth it over the medium to long term)

[blamedstarlie.livejournal.com]

Oh man... I spent 24$ on my work gym subscription for over a year... and went 2 times. ACK. It was taken directly out of my bank account so I was simply too lazy to go down there and request that they turn it off. haha

Yay for homecooked meals. My favorites are the ones that have left overs. Soup and stew just keep tasting better and better when they sit there... like the song says "some like it in the pot nine days old" haha

[shanabanana.livejournal.com]

Eating out is always the first thing I cut if I need more money. If we do eat out, I just don't order alcohol. We also tend to eat novel foods at home which tend to be more expensive, so I tone that down. But the main thing I do is make sure that the stuff I'm already doing isn't costing me money that it doesn't need to: not returning stuff in time to get a refund, late fees for late payments, paying for services that I don't use (land line, options on the cell package).

entertainment costs

[katehaney.livejournal.com]

Cut back to basic cable. Go to matinees or wait to rent movies. Go to cheap/free dances, or work to get free admission.

We're betting on...

[occhi-cinesi.livejournal.com]

...winning the lottery. But remember, you have to play to win.

We eat almost entirely from Costco. We do Netflix and don't go to movies. We wear a lot of fleece so we don't have to heat the house. I buy excellently used cloth diapers/don't buy disposables. We let my MIL buy all of dd's clothes.

So eat from Costco, do netflix, wear fleece, buy used underwear and let your mom (or your hawt mans' mother?) buy your clothes.

Sorry, not much help. Good luck though in going debt free!