This is a rewrite of a post I started a few months ago, in which I was going to detail all the cool tips and tricks my husband and I employed to reduce our spending when I took a pay cut. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out as we had hoped.
While we both feel we are careful with money, it is true that I drank the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) Kool-Aid long before Mr. Physician in Numbers. I recall reading The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement in 2015, and getting very excited to cut waste from the budget and accelerate our progress towards freedom. I was inspired by J. Money’s “Challenge Everything” post, and contacted our utilities and cable company to reduce costs.
Mr. Physician in Numbers was less excited about cutting costs at first. He was happy to let me do this, but didn’t want to pull the purse strings too tight. And to be fair, income was great. What need did we have to pinch pennies?
However, I cut back my hours last year, and with that came a salary cut. Without too much prompting, my husband got on board with reducing some of our expenses. He came up with an audacious goal for saving money each month.
After a few months of looking at targets for cutting costs, we haven’t gotten all that far. Each opportunity to save money brings up a counter-argument.
Utilities
My favorite target for saving money is (are) utility bills. After all, if my house is warm in winter, comfortable in summer, and water flows from the tap, I don’t mind saving money. There are no designer utilities. Additionally, I think reducing energy waste is a worthy goal.
To that end, we weather strip the doors in winter, and plastic-wrap a drafty french door. We have even turned down the heat in the evening, now that we have warmer comforters.
Nevertheless, our utilities haven’t budged, except that some bills went up. Careful reading of the bill shows our rates rose, even if usage stayed stable or dropped. We can shop for lower rates on a few of our utilities, but I couldn’t actually find rates that were truly cheaper. We could keep the house even colder in winter, skip showers and reduce toilet flushing, but at that point, we don’t really feel that saving a few dollars a month is worth it.
The Gym
We considered quitting our gym membership, as my husband wasn’t really using the pool, and was doing more workouts at home. I thought that was a shame, as he is much happier when he swims. It is possible I dragged my feet on cancelling or downgrading the membership. He started swimming again a few months ago, and I started going back as well. No savings here.
Entertainment
We thought about cutting cable. Truly. However, we have discovered the Music Choice channels and tune in pretty much every day. Having grown up in the age when radio stations sometimes wouldn’t tell you who was playing, we really enjoy getting the extra information about the songs and artists. We have been listening to (watching?) the classical stations too, and have been introduced to quite a few new (to us) composers. This may sound like an excuse to the cable-haters, but we feel this is actually educational TV. Anyway, we decided we weren’t going to cut our cable.
However, we are certainly OK with switching up our movie watching habits. We started getting DVDs from our public library, now that we’ve figured out which branch has all the good stuff.
I called the cable company last week to get a cheaper plan, and knocked off the premium channels from our bill; you know, the ones you get free, or for a dollar, when you first sign up. Six months later you find you are paying boatloads each month for your premium channel subscription.
I have the an old Netflix subscription, which will have to go as well. As soon as I find the DVDs they sent a few months ago which we still haven’t watched.
Phones
This is a target frequently mentioned by other bloggers for cost savings.
Unfortunately, I have a lot of anxiety about not being reachable by phone. I figure if I am on-call, I should be reachable. There are a number of areas in the house, and even in the hospital, where certain networks don’t reach. For that reason, I am sticking with my (expensive) carrier, at least for now.
I suspect we could reduce our monthly bill by switching the carrier for my husband’s phone. However, his phone is so old (an iPhone 3), that I think any savings may be negated by having to get him a new phone. This is still under discussion.
Groceries
As for the grocery bills…To be honest, I don’t do the shopping. I took a quick peek, and I think the grocery bills have gone up since our discussion about cutting back. I suspect something may be going on in the same vein of my diet plans: as soon as I decide I have to go on a diet to lose weight, I start eating more junk food than I did the week before.
Conclusions
Is there a lesson with this story? I think there are a few, actually.
- You have to want it. Although my husband and I say we want to cut costs, we have limits on what we are willing to put up with, or get rid of, to save money. I am happier when my nose and fingers are not blocks of ice.
- Does your spending reflect your values? We have looked at our spending pretty carefully. We value eating healthy food, including organic produce. We truly enjoy listening to the classical music stations together after dinner. Swimming is excellent exercise for my husband (and would be for me too, if I would go). These are all optional luxuries, and if we had a true financial emergency, we would cut back drastically in all of these areas; but since we aren’t having an emergency, it seems silly to drop things that we enjoy and appreciate.
- Are you cutting costs for the first time, or is this a second or third pass through the budget? It was easier to cut costs a few years ago when money was tighter: I stopped getting my nails done, we became a one car family, we worked on energy efficiency. I’m sure our budget has plenty of fat to be trimmed, but we already got rid of the stuff that meant less to us years ago.
- What’s right for some people isn’t right for all. This is an old lesson, older than the internet, but worth bringing it up again. I have great admiration for people who try new things, like MNVO phone plans; who give up modern luxuries like cable and a gym membership; who walk to work everyday and live in a home with (non-related) roommates. I’ve done some of those things in my youth, but right now is not the time of my life where I want to do all that. And that’s fine, since I’m not living beyond my means to do it.
I know there are people out there on the Internet who–if they actually found this blog–would be pretty dismissive of our efforts to cut costs. Going by the numbers (I think we’ll be saving a whopping $60 a month), I would have to agree we didn’t do too well. But when I reflect on some of the other aspects, I feel pretty good about what we are spending.
Have you tried reducing spending? How successful were you? What were your sticking points?