Trimming expenses in Life as a Mom of 2 boys.....and a girl!!

When I’m interested in a topic, I go to the library and get as many books about it as possible. I read some of them, skim others and sometimes even go back and get more books on the topic. Lately I’ve been interested in the topic of money. How to make more, how to save more and stuff like that. I have 2 credit cards I want to pay off eventually and I want to be able to save as much as I can so I can stay off work until Summer is at least 18 months old. Plus Mike wants me to be regularly contributing to a trip fund we have (eyeroll- I like trips but I’d much rather put my money towards debt repayment and saving for when my mat leave payments end). I like numbers and took accounting, so reading about numbers is interesting to me.

So I decided to look at my monthly expenses and see if there’s any way I can lower them. And I was able to do it!! I was so excited!! Some of my monthly expenses are fixed costs like condo fees, car payments and my mortgage (until we renew next summer anyways). Others may seem like fixed costs but might be able to be tinkered with....like car/home insurance. I called and told them I’m trying to pay off debt and am shopping around for better rates on insurance and the lady told me she’d look around with our information and get back to me. I had an accident a couple of years ago that was my fault (hit a car in the mall parking lot when pulling out of a spot- very dumb) so she couldn’t really get better rates for us. But she did say I could enroll in this program where we put these devices on our car and van that track how good of drivers we are for 9 months. Then, depending on our driving, when our car insurance comes up for renewal next summer our rate will go down by between 5 and 25% (never up she said). Plus, just by enrolling in the program we got a $190 credit on our insurance spread out over the time from now until our renewal. So I said sure why not. That will lower our car/home insurance payments from now until July by $22.

I also called my bank to see if there’s any promotions on to reduce my monthly fees and while we did find I’m using the best plan for me ($14.95 a month- good for people who use debit a lot) I was able to get rid of a $4 fee I pay per month for overdraft protection. Next I transferred the balance of one credit card I have ($1314) onto an empty credit card I have because they were offering 0% interest until April 2017 on balance transfers. So instead of paying $25 per month as a minimum payment I will have minimum payments of $0 and make sure I pay the whole balance off by April. But if there’s a month I can’t put anything towards that (like December) then I don’t need to.

I also was able to find a $15 monthly payment I was making towards something for my internet that we didn’t need anymore so I got rid of that. And I got rid of a couple of TV channels we never watch ($11 plus tax off my bill a month).

I noticed recently that I got charged a yearly fee on my BMO mastercard so I called them and asked about that and said that I just want a credit card with a low rate and didn’t care about any of the extras. So I was able to be switched to a 11.9% credit card and I’m getting that $144 yearly fee back (hooray!) I have no idea when I switched to a credit card like that....but I have a horrible memory so it’s possible I did. Lastly, I called Visa and asked if I could get a lower rate on that credit card (which is at 10.45%) and I ended up opening a line of credit for the first time. The guy said my line of credit has interest of 5.69% so if I put the $11,666 (yuck) I owe from my Visa on it then I will have to pay far less in interest and more money can go towards the principal. So I’m doing that! Instead of minimum payments of like $130 they should be about $65 a month. Once I pay off the $1314 credit card I can focus more on this one.

So, I was pretty happy about the changes to my monthly expenses I was able to make just from making a few calls. I lowered them by $122/month! I still might call Bell today and ask them if they can look at my usage and tell me if we have the best package for us, although I suspect we do. And if I REALLY wanted to I could lower our grocery budget by a little bit just by buying absolutely NO extras. But that’s no fun lol. And I’m going to call my bank 6 months before my mortgage renewal is up to see if I can negotiate a lower interest rate :)

If anyone can think of any other ways I could save $$ I’m interested! I also buy a lot of no name stuff when grocery shopping (taste/work the same) including store brand diapers (who cares? they never leak on me and I have a young baby and a 3 year old and only spend $30 on diapers a month). Plus, I buy the kids clothes secondhand, sell stuff we don’t need and don’t buy unnecessary stuff. As much as possible anyways.....I’m not perfect. I’m actually thinking of looking around to see if there’s any Christmas gifts I can make the boys myself instead of buying them a ton of junk. Like a DIY project. I’ll have to brainstorm about that one!

Last updated September 13, 2016