Need to cut your expenses by at least $100 right now? This post is for you!
How to Cut Your Budget By $100 This Month
A few months ago on Facebook, I asked this question: “If you had to cut your expenses by $100 this month, what would you cut out?”
There were lots of great comments and I wanted to put together a post with some of the top suggested strategies for cutting your budget by $100 this month:
1. Call and Re-Negotiate Your Bills
Look at all of your monthly bills and see if there are any you can discontinue (subscriptions or membership fees?) or call and ask for a better rate.
It never hurts to ask — especially when it comes to things like phone plans, internet, and insurance! The worst that can happen is that they say no!
Bonnie says: “We cancelled our landline phone for savings of $38 per month. We re-negotiated our DirecTv bill and got it cut by $50 per month. We also discontinued a monthly subscription service to save $10 per month. Finally, we re-negotiated our internet and got faster service with a savings of $7 per month!”
2. Switch Your Cell Phone Plan
There are so many cell phone options out there now! If you’ve not checked into them recently, you definitely should!
For instance, Twigby currently offers phone plans starting as low as $8 per month!
Judy said: “I just ordered the phone and plan from Tigby. With the plan I selected (unlimited talk –I will only use wifi option), I will be saving approximately $50 a month. I currently have Verizon – a basic plan with unlimited talk/text/2g of data. I keep my data off most of the time and hardly use any at all, but my current total cost per month was $73.00 with Verizon.”
3. Brown Bag It
Since we’ve been married, we’ve saved thousands of dollars alone just by packing sack lunches. While Jesse was in law school and we were living on a beans-and-rice budget, brown-bagging it was a must as there was no way we could afford even eating off the dollar menu on a regular occurrence.
But even though we brown-bagged it out of necessity, we found lots of ways to make it easy and yummy — so it really didn’t feel like a sacrifice. Plus, the money we saved made it every bit worth it!
Tip: I’ve got lots of great tips for how to make sack lunches quick and easy here.
4. Eat From Your Pantry
One very simple way to save money is to skip shopping for a week or two and use what you already have on hand. We call this Eating From the Pantry at our house and it’s something we try to do fairly regularly
Instead of approaching eating from the pantry as a difficult thing, we make it a game on occasion to see how long we can survive without going to the store. When you view it as a fun challenge, it makes it exciting and interesting. And it can help bolster your spirits when you find yourself eating some rather interesting meals.
Need some tips and ideas to get started? Here’s my post with how it works for us!
5. Cut Back to a Barebones Grocery Budget
What would you need to cut or change in order to save $25 per week off your grocery bill? (If saving $25 per week isn’t possible, what about challenging yourself to trip $5 or $10 per week off your bill?)
Could you eat less meat, eat more beans, plan your menu around the markdowns, or shop at Aldi?
I’ve got 10 of my best tips for cutting $50 off your grocery budget this week in my free cheat sheet here. Sign up and I’ll email it to you!
What would you do if you had to cut your budget by $100 this month?
I’d love to hear! This is something Jesse and I regularly talk about and it really helps us to remember what are needs versus wants and what we could do if we needed to quickly reduce our budget. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
P.S. If you feel like you’ve cut everything you can cut and you still are coming up short, I highly recommend looking into making more money. I compiled a list of some of my best income-earning ideas here.
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