St Gabriel Windows

St Gabriel Windows
Photocopy c. 2013 Jamie Laubacher

Saturday, June 02, 2012

Reduce Expenses!

There are MANY website available to help you get a handle on reducing expenses.  For the most part they ALL have good advice.  Here is a simple one I came across.  All I know is you really have to put something into place and try.  

3 comments:

Lisa Boyle said...

Some great advice here! Definitely some items I wouldn't have thought of. Thanks for sharing the link.

I couldn't help but mention some things from your header that really stood out to me. :-) My patron saint is St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, I homeschool using some materials from Seton Home Study School and my 3rd son was born on the feast of our Lady of Guadalupe. :-)

Hope you are having a wonderful weekend! God bless, Lisa

True Daughter of Mary said...

This is really helpful especially if you haven't been trying to reduce expenses previously. The only one on there that we haven't done is the cable/TV thing, which we actually did this weekend. On Friday we are going to buy an antenna and cancel cable all together, and eliminate $100 a month. The rest though, we really already do. We rarely eat out, we are very cautious with grocery expenses, though we have recently come to the conclusion that shopping here in town is a huge mistake - which I knew but had allowed myself to become complacent about because of the fuel perks. Now that they have been cut in half, we don't consider that enough savings to justify shopping there regularly anymore. A couple of things I am going to go back to are:making my own wipes (we only quit because our dog kept eating the containers - that dog has been dead for about 4 years, I guess it's safe to resume!) and making ice rather than buying it. We don't do Starbucks unless we have gift cards, and all those "out" things, out for lunch at work or whatever, have never been done. So, while we are really wanting to cut costs, the only place we can really find to make a huge change is in how we shop for groceries. I just don't have time to clip tons of coupons, though I would love it if I did! Imay have to make that a project for the girls! After going through our expenses, we have found that most of our $ goes to gas, which is unavoidable when Doug and I both work in N.Canton, and the biggest thing, medical. We have been paying on Jonah's medical expenses for years, and it will never stop, plus all the other various things... adds up to about $400 a month in payments, plus any co-pays, prescriptions, deductibles, etc. So, at least now we know!

Home School Mom: Denise said...

Lisa, there's no coincidences with God! :) hehee..just had to say that! How cool is that though? Thank you for stopping by to read.

Megan, we do have the whole medical thing expense between Michael and Mark's on going therapies/meds. And it's a good $200-300 a month. Then some dang credit card debt that we accumulated when I cut back to part time, then no time...and just haven't been able to get on top of it. Pete is going to talk to a finance consult and see what more we could be doing with our income/budget. I'm sure there's something we're missing! We've attacked the utilities, the phone, the cable, (altho' I'd like to check into the phone more and see if I could reduce that more). We did the garbage and are saving another $30 off our bill for that. And the groceries..I hear ya. What about toiletries, shampoos, toothpastes...I've done the dollar store mostly, but I'm wondering if drugstore.com with their free shipping is any better for prices. I'm price comparing now..

Thanks for chatting with me on this!