Freeing Up Cash For What You Need
Even if what you think you need is what you're paying for right now....
Monthly expenses. Who doesn’t wish they could whittle them down with little or no change in lifestyle?
Ooooh, the lifestyle word. As far as I’m concerned lifestyle is something most of us have paid a huge premium for, and we don’t even know what—-if anything—-we’ve gotten in return. Let me illustrate.
Sixteen years ago, when we were huddled over preliminary blueprints working with an architect to design our house, he got a serious look on his face and asked, “Tell me about your lifestyle.”
Honestly, I don’t know when we’ve ever laughed so hard. We were raising three kids on a budget, sacrificing things other families considered “normal” (like cars with basic amenities like sun visors and horns) in order to pay tuition at the Christian school, which we had prioritized over other uses for our money. But we’d scrimped and saved to buy a small acreage and now intended to build a modest home with the intention of staying there for many years.
When he pressed us to identify our hobbies, indulgences, and extravagances and our eyes glazed over, he finally rephrased, “What’s the one problem you’d like to solve with this house?”
Now he was speaking my language! I instantly knew the answer and couldn’t wait to share.
“The sock problem!” I said. I had read how Ethel Kennedy, when her brood was young, kept all the clean socks in the deep bottom drawer of her kitchen and let the kids scrounge for matches. Let’s just say she was WAY more organized than I.
“Sock,” he said, dumbfounded but definitely not dumb.
“Yes. If you could design my house in such a way that each member of the family could always find their clean socks, I would be completely happy.”
“Don’t worry about a thing.” He smirked and had a twinkle in his eye. Kind of a swirly twinkle, actually, sort of the shape of a dollar sign. “I can solve the sock problem.”
A series of shallow shelves in the laundry room, each one holding a clear Rubbermaid bin which slides out and contains one of five family member’s socks, improved our lifestyle by miles! But did it really take an architect to figure that out? I’m thinking, not so much.
These days, three of those bins are empty. The time has come to seriously reconsider how many other “sock problems” we’ve spent our hard-earned money on. However we’ve inadvertently ramped up our lifestyle in the past fifteen years in ways that no longer make sense, we are now determined to take it down as many notches as necessary for the sake of our future.
How can it be that not long ago, we believed Starbucks was something akin to a right? How could we have ever thought cable a necessity? How did it elude us that you can purchase “New Car Smell” in a can and save a boatload of money?
The thing is, I’ve always counted myself frugal. And yet until recently, while I would never pay a fee to use an ATM machine, I didn’t question the fact that my checking account had a monthly service charge attached to it. And our business checking account did, as well. $240 per year for the business and $180 for the personal account? I won’t even admit how many years I paid these fees until I finally switched to a regional bank and put the kabosh on the rip-off.
Nickel and diming my way to lowered expenses, thus freeing up cash for items and services (and savings accounts!) with genuine value for the lives we’re living now, is one strategy. But I much prefer to go after the big-ticket cash outlays and attempt to bring them under control at every opportunity. So far in 2009, we’ve updated my husband’s life insurance policies for a significant annual savings, raised the deductibles on our homeowners and car insurance (in the process discovering a $600 overcharge we were refunded) for much lower premiums, bundled some of our communications services and ditched a cell phone in favor of sharing, and are nearly ready to close on our house refinance.
We locked in a rate of 4.625% for ten years. We only had 11 years left on a 5.875% loan, and while this refi doesn’t sound like it would make a tremendous difference in either monthly outlay or total amount paid, it does. We’ll be paying several hundred dollars less per month (can you say beefed up emergency fund?) and will save $25,000 in interest over the life of the loan if we don’t pay it off early.
When you really get down to it and behave ruthlessly toward some of your larger expenses, you too may find that you can make some changes that don’t affect your quality of life (*ahem* lifestyle) at all, but put money back in your pocket for uses more in line with your purposes as a bona fide girlvivalist.
If you haven’t started whacking away at your monthly expenses, give it a try! I hope imagining how much I paid to solve my sock problem is all it takes to motivate you to bring those line items under control.
Hey, how’s this? For every $50 per month you cut back, buy yourself a cute pair of socks.
Blog RSS