You’ll love these easy ways to save money every month and cut costs to reduce your monthly bills.
If you have kids, then you know they get more expensive each year and monthly expenses keep going up (especially at the grocery store).
I’ve always been interested in personal finance and live on a pretty tight budget. I try to meal plan, have a grocery budget and we don’t have any credit card debt. Using credit cards makes a mess of my budget so I don’t ever use them.
Living on a tight budget is good because you can see where you’re wasting money. Then you can shift things around and have more to spend money on things you want.
My husband and I have financial goals we’re working towards and don’t want to reduce our 401K contributions and want to continue saving money in our savings account, so we have to find extra money somewhere!
I know there are a ton of articles about making and selling things online to come up with extra money or money-saving tips, but I thought I just had to tell you how much I saved in just one morning (in about an hour).
It’s ok to pay for services and subscriptions if you use them, but we realized that we were paying for things we weren’t actually using. You can see below how I save money every month by reducing our bills.
How to save more money every month and reduce your monthly bills
TV
I’ve been trying to get my husband to leave satellite TV for YEARS. He loved it because he could watch all his sports. One day, he signed up for Hulu streaming. I was shocked. I guess my nagging did work.
Switching reduced our “TV” bill by $80 a month. That was about a year ago so I’m not including that in my total today, but if you haven’t thought of getting rid of satellite TV you may want to consider it because it did give us extra money every month.
There are a bunch of these streaming services so look to see which one will work best for your family.
However, he wasn’t convinced yet. He called Direct TV and put our account on hold. They were still charging us $7.49/month. I’m not really sure what that charge was for, maybe equipment rental?
We decided to send our equipment back and cancel for good. We did have to call to cancel, but it was very quick, and no wait time. I also had to drive the equipment to the UPS store to ship but the employees boxed it up for me and there was no fee.
That saved us $7.49 X 12 months= $89.88 a year
Hulu
When my husband signed for Hulu he signed up for a package that cost $69.53 a month. That’s what came out on our credit card bill each month. That included live TV and unlimited screens.
Now that we’ve had it a while, we realized that Hulu is only watched on two TVs in the house so we didn’t need unlimited screens. We changed the subscription to a two-screen limit and saved us some money.
| $69.53 (old bill) – $58.84 (new bill)= $10.69/Month or $128.28 savings a year. |
Music Streaming
We had canceled our apple music streaming service over a year ago because I wasn’t spending $16/month for my kids to listen to music, but my husband had a Google Music account. Since the pandemic started, he’s been listening to more podcasts and Pandora so he decided he could live without a paid music service.
That saved us $10.66 X 12 months= $127.92 a year.
Cell Phone Bill
You aren’t going to believe the savings!
We’re still paying for three phones so I was hoping to get the bill a little lower. We have 4 lines on our AT&T account and our monthly payment was over $300! We went through our past bills and saw how much data we used and thought we could lower it a little. Once we got in and looked at the plans, something seemed off.
We compared a few different plans and with autopay, paperless billing, a military discount, AND the new plans they had to offer, we could have significant savings. We got more data for less money!
$301.45 (old bill)- $195.43 (new bill)= $106.02 X 12 months= $1272.24 a year!!!!!
Total Savings
We saved $1618.32 a year!!
Can you believe it? It was so easy and was perfect timing because two days after we did this our dryer went out and we had to purchase a new one!
Here are some other places to save money.
- Car Insurance
- Home Owners Insurance
- Student loans
- Internet services
- Subscriptions you aren’t using. (Amazon Prime, AAA)
- Reduce bank fees- Sometimes just an automatic transaction every month can save you a monthly fee.
- Removing your landline
- Lawn care
- Gym memberships you aren’t using
If you’re a veteran (my husband was in the military), make sure you get the veteran’s ID and use it! You can get discounts at a lot of different places and stores like Kohls, Nike and Lowes. You can click here to find more places.
Get more saving tips below.
Let me know if I’m missing anything and I’ll keep adding when I find something that works.