Reducing variable costs?

[doctorcoug]

As my wife and I finish our annual budget we looked at further ways to save. Obviously saving on fixed costs is not entirely the easiest thing to do, so we focused on variable costs. Here is what we found and what we "plan" to do:

Restaurants $95 a month

We are going to reduce it to $30 a month, which is essentially one restaurant trip per month for the two of us, or one cheapie restaurant trip for the family.

Television $60 a month

We are going to drop sat TV and go a la carte. We will wait for our favorite shows to show up online and stream via something like apple TV. We plan on using Netflix for weekend entertainment as well as Redbox. BYU games are on BYUtv or on ESPN. We will stream these games or I will go to the doctor's lounge to watch them (sister hospital is 2 minutes from home). This should equate to about $15 a month.

$155 a month down to $45 a month. Reduction of $110 a month, or about 3% of my income. People talk about savings rates needing to be about 15%; hitting an extra 3% with such useless junk is quite refreshing.

What do you plan to do this year?

[Uncle Ted]

What do you plan to do this year?

I plan to earn more money so I don't have to make budget cuts by working harder to get consulting contracts year around. Maybe you could do the same by maybe dropping patients that are trying to pay with medicare so you can get more patients that are willing to pay for your services or something.

I am planning on getting rid of my land-line finally. I would love to get rid of directv but I need my sports. Maybe I could just stream everything on Justin.TV or something (ie. be a pirate). It is too bad everything can't just be on-demand, pay-for-view and streamed over the net. I would be willing to buy it legally. I don't watch a 10th of the crap that I have access to on directv. Most of it is garbage.