Common Sacrifices to Get Out of Debt
April 2nd, 2008 by Ana
This phrase has turned up in my search hits, and I also promised Middle-Aged Man over on his blog I would do this post. Most people who want to get out of debt quickly will make a budget, then start cutting.
Naturally, the first thing you need is a budget! Once that is drawn up and you see where your money is going (and how much) here are the most common budget items that go on the chopping block and get sacrficed:
- Eating out: Restaurants can kill your cash flow fast. trust me on this one, it is a vice I struggle with myself. While dine-in restaurants can take large chunks out of your budget at one time, my problem has always been the convenient and “cheap” fast food drive-through while out and about and pressed for time. Yes, that’s a double whammy: the food is less than nutritious and it hurts the budget. When I first started out on the budget last year, I allocated only $20 per week for all eating out.
- Cable or satellite television: This one waited until last summer to go on the chopping block. Now I am not even sure why I waited! Since there is no “a la carte” channel choosing option available in our area, we were paying for 60 channels and only watching about 15 of them. Last fall, I decreed that until the cable company offers the “Nerd Channel package” we weren’t going to bring this back (nerd channels: Sc-Fi, TLC, Discover, A&E, History, etc. You know, stuff “only nerds watch” that I do enjoy.)
- Cell phone package: If you are under under contract like we are, then the cell phone calling package gets stripped down to the lowest level. The teenagers in the house will cry and moan, but as an adult I personally see no reason to text message “lol” and “what u doin?” all day.
- Store brand groceries: Buy the store brand at the grocery store instead of the name brand! Usually they are made by the same company anyway, so this isn’t much of a sacrifice except in image.
- No “window shopping” for entertainment: So-called window shopping and mall-crawling end up in impulse purchases that we so often don’t need. If you need to venture into the land of retail temptation, make a list and stick to it!
- Cut the clothing budget: Buy only what you need. I don’t consider myself a clotheshorse, yet I have enough clothing in my closet to last two weeks without doing laundry. Honestly, I don’t know how this happened. Children outgrowing clothes is a necessity. Work clothes are a necessity. A nice outfit you might wear only once a quarter isn’t.
- Movies or DVDs: I haven’t been able to stomach movie theater ticket prices for about half a decade now, unless you are talking about the dollar movie theater (which is now $1.50 even!), but impulse buying DVDs were a drain on our finances. We now have a movie-buying policy: If we won’t watch a DVD at least five times we don’t buy it.
- Home phone (Land line): If you have a cell phone package that includes long-distance, you can cut your home phone service to local only, then strip off all the little add-ons like call waiting, caller ID, and about a dozen other little services that I don’t even recognize anymore. My monthly home phone bill is under $21 a month! That is for local calling only, which is the only thing I use it for anyway (and to receive incoming calls from friends and relatives who have had that phone number for years). I’m even thinking of getting rid of the home phone completely.
This is just a list of the simple little budget sacrifices that often add up to a surprisingly large number! Cutting back on these things often doesn’t even feel like a large sacrifice after a short time of adjustment (usually two months max). I haven’t even touched the larger sacrifices some folks make to slash their budget like selling vehicles with notes attached or actually going back to a dial-up internet connection (which I shudder at!).
Now I’ll throw out the question: What are some common budget sacrifices that you know of and have done?
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:06 am
This is a pretty good list. I also find that as a woman, I used to tend to over estimate personal care stuff in general (makeup, expensive hair cuts, etc.) When you really par down, a lot of products can go and a lot of money can be saved.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:16 am
We use Vonage for home phone (the 500 minute plan). We also switched from a cell plan to prepaid cell (tracfone) at the beginning of the year. We have already recouped the cost of getting started on this from not paying the cell bill for 4 months. If you use tracfone, always purchase your minutes on line and do a google search for coupon codes. The phones I bought had automatic double minutes and I purchased 2 400 minute blocks. I found a coupon code for an additional 200 minutes for free, so both phones have 1000 minutes. Also, activated on line for an additional 100 minutes (and 20 minute bonus). To do this for 2 phones was around $230 total. I have used 50 mins in 3 months. The wife has used around 200. We both have plenty of minutes left and they don’t expire until Feb, but will extend out when I purchase another card for each phone by then.
So, as of right now, our total phone cost (home and cell) is less than $20/month.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:23 am
We replaced our cable, movie watching and movie renting with Netflix. They have a massive collection of titles to get and we are not so tempted to buy a DVD when we know that we can get it from Netflix and see if we love it or not. This move saved us a lot of money although my husband still does grumble now and then about getting rid of the cable. He would love the nerd TV channel package.
April 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
The no window shopping and only shopping with a list is huge for me. I hardly buy anything when I do that. It really does save me a ton of money.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Great list! The 2nd commenter, about the cell and landline phones, great tips, too. When my cell plan with Verizon runs out, I just may do the pre-pay type plan.
Anybody know of a cheap way to get *great* internet service (ie, cable, not dsl or satellite)? I live in Comcast area, and while the product is great, so is the price (meaning, it’s BIG).
Thanks.
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I have never had cable or a land line, but I still needed to cut expenses. Stuff I cut: going out barhopping! I guess that could count as eating, but really, it’s not. Cover charges, drinks at $9 a pop… no thank you. One of the first things I quit doing when I got serious about debt was to stop going out. I started inviting friends over to my place and we’d buy a 12-pack of soda and a $20 bottle of rum to split between us if we really wanted to drink (That’s like $6 a person total for 4 people, 3 drinks each). Sometimes if we wanted to go out clubbing, we’d drink at home first and then catch a bus to the club. Forking over $5 for cover isn’t so bad when you know you’re paying for the dancing and music and people, and aren’t going to spend another $40 inside on drinks
Good list! On point #3 you have the word “under” twice
April 2nd, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Eating out is our family of four’s weakness as well - we like sit-down restaurants and before our budget was put in place, we were eating out at least 2-3 a week at $40 minimum per meal. We still budget $200 a month for restaurants but we save lots in other ways, such as…
1) Getting DVD’s and videos from the library. Our local library has a great collection so we’re blessed in that sense. We don’t get to see movies right when they come out or are available on DVD, but we see them within a year usually. It’s a form of delayed gratification I guess. The library’s software tallies how much we’ve saved by using their collection, and since January of this year, we’ve saved over $950 - mostly on movies.
2) Using the prepaid phone service from Virgin Mobile. My husband and I don’t use cell phones except for emergencies, so this works well for us. It’s $6.95/month when you have automated ‘top up’ in place and then $.10/minute. Most months only cost about $9 per phone.
3) Energy efficiencies - of course we’ve done the usual things like buying CFLs, but that costs money. One efficiency I didn’t expect to have such an impact was shutting down the computer and printer when we’re not using it. That alone accounted for about $10/month on our energy bill, near as I can figure!
4) Cutting back on wine - we’ve always liked a glass of wine with dinner, but sometimes one became two and next thing we knew, we’d finished the bottle in one night. Now we try to limit it to just a glass, and then only once or twice a week.
5) More vegetarian meals - “Beans and rice” really is cheap!!
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Limiting the number of trips! We go to the store once a week max. (Ok we’ve broken the rule for milk and eggs a couple times). I have X amount of dollars and if I don’t use it this week I roll it over to the next. But only going once has really helped. (I tried once every two weeks but that exploded the budget because I tried to buy everything I could fathom I’d want in that two week period). We eat meatless a lot too.
We attacked our gas budget and have been tripling up on errands (which makes us endure overtired crabby kids a lot)!
I pay all bills that I can online to save on stamps.
I halved what my kids can have in their wardrobe. Since I don’t have on site laundry facilities I wash a lot of things in our only bathroom sink, line dry in in our bathroom and make them wear it again before we hit the laundromat (tons of savings here!)
I water down my sons juice and we get one treat per grocery trip instead of four.
We reduced the coverage on our auto insurance.
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Saving money is a great way to <a href=”http://www.squidoo.com/getyourselfoutofdebt” rel=”nofollow”>get yourself out of debt</a> - but I’m surprised at the amount of people who stop at that!
In my attempt to clear all my debts I started exploring how to get rich online - and I found it to work very well indeed!
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I agree with this entire list. I actually find it very funny that Americans do not consider cable a luxury. We have not paid for cable our entire married life and we get along just fine. We watch a couple of stations with the help of some rabbit ears. They do still work
April 4th, 2008 at 6:22 am
[…] Partly in response to an ongoing conversation, DebtFREE-Revolution has posted on “Common to Sacrifices to Get Out of Debt.” The point of the post is that the sacrifices that one needs to make in order to live within […]
April 6th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I definately agree with your comments about clothing, it’s amazing how much you can save by being frugal about where you shop. I always ask for dvds as presents as it saves paying out for them.
April 14th, 2008 at 8:26 am
#Store brand groceries# - I couldn’t believe how much I saved when I started listening to this advice. Easily $20 a week saved on the budget & as you mentioned they are mostly made by the same company anyway. We hardly notice the difference in quality - but definately in price!
May 1st, 2008 at 12:32 pm
There’s alot of money to be saved by “Down shifting”. Which is just a general term for buying items one brand lower than you normally do and it’s so easy. Also I buy all our shopping online, that way i don’t look like a geek walking around the store with a calculator trying to stick to a budget, as my online shopping basket tells me how much I have spent and I avoid impulsive buying! mmm chocolate