The Writer’s Coin

Or: How I boosted my monthly savings from $150 to $200

You hear a lot of personal-finance sites telling you to revisit your monthly bills regularly to make sure that you’ve minimized each one so you aren’t paying for something you aren’t using. I always kind of glossed over that advice, like many other people, because I couldn’t imagine living even further below my means. I mean come on, how much more can I deprive myself?

I figured: I write about personal finance and I’m super frugal, so no way I’m paying more than I have to.

This is the very reason the advice is out there.

I had made the decision to change my 401(k) contributions so I decided to revisit my whole budget and, at the end, realized I had an extra $50 a month to throw into my ING account.

Let’s see how that happened:

Lowered my 401(k) contribution from 6% to 4%
This was something I had thought about for a while. Like most employer plans, mine isn’t very good: their options are limited and their expenses are way too high. It was an easy decision to go from 6% to 4%. Besides, since then I’ve read numerous articles repeating the same thing: for most people it doesn’t pay to contribute beyond the match (which for me is 4%) because of the high expense ratios these companies have.

Savings: $33/month

Revisited my Netflix plan
M and I recently moved in and we don’t seem to watch as many movies. One of us is busy and it feels like we are always doing laundry, which I hate. Either way, we were no longer watching two movies a week, which was what I calculated we needed to do to “get our money’s worth.” I noticed we were almost forcing ourselves to watch movies just to get what we were paying for—that wasn’t worth it either. So I changed our plan from two at a time to one at a time.

Savings: $6/month

Cell phone
I tried every which way to get myself under the $50 (with tax) plan that I have, but I just couldn’t find a way. I didn’t want to worry about going over my minutes and there seem to be a lot of convenient features that you don’t get once you downgrade from the plan I have. So I kept this the way it is, knowing that it’s as low as I can go.

Savings: $0

Budget
After going over everything I ran the numbers on my brand-new budget and realized that I had left myself a little wiggle room when I originally set it up: there were about $5-$6 left over from every paycheck (I get paid once every two weeks) “just in case.” I have no idea why I did that, probably so I wasn’t depositing $156.39 in my ING account every month (what’s wrong with a funky number?). It was a welcome surprise though, and it gave me some more money to put away.

Savings: $11/month

Total savings: $50

Over a year that amounts to $600: not bad.

One more thing: I am obsessive about my bank accounts, my ING accounts, and my credit-card accounts. I check them at least once a day (which is probably not healthy) and so I was surprised that I still had some excess fat to trim. It doesn’t matter who you are, it pays to revisit your whole financial process every now and then to see if you can’t save yourself some extra money.

How much money have you saved by revisiting your budget?

Tags: Budgeting, ing direct, savings