First Step: Cutting Back

I am reading the book "live your life for hlaf the price" in conjunction with this experiement of mine so I am going to include a quote from the book with each entry. The first one is about cutting the small stuff: "You can cut 20-30 percent of your expenses by looking at the small stuff. You don't need all those premium cable channels, you need to recognize that you are throwing away your money on things that have no long tterm impact on your life."

So, our goal is to cut our budget in half. First thing we needed to do was to go through our budget and find any unneccessary expenses that we could cut back on. We decided eating out was one of those. I don't feel like we eat out a ton, mostly while I am running errands and it becomes lunch time much sooner than I expect. We are going to start packing more snacks to take with us so that when we need something to eat we can grab a snack to tide us over until we get home. I hope that we can cut it down to once or twice a month.

The other expense I am going to try to do without is my beloved Netflix account. We have had Netflix for a long time. It is awesome because they send movies to your house or you can just get on line and watch a movie any time you want. A part of getting rid of it is because I felt like I was watching too many movies, and so is my daughter. So for at least a month we will not be using Netflix. That means more time for me and my daughter to do other things together and 12 more dollars in our account. It isn't much but hey, you gotta start somewhere. We have found tons of movies at the library so when I am in the mood for watching a movie I can just run down to our public library and check one out for free. I also let my daughter pick two movies each time we go so I have a couple of kid movies on hand. I am amazed at how many good movies our library has.

Any ideas of anything else to cut back on?