Things I've cut to keep our budget slim

I am often thinking about starting a side business to earn extra cash - sewing, soap-making and recently I while planning our wedding I thought about being a "day of coordinator" for weddings - but then I remember, that I already have a full-time job and if anything, I want more free time, not less! This is why I focus on reducing spending, in order to save money.

These are things I cut out to keep our budget slim!

1) Tracking spending

For me, the first step in reducing our budget was understanding where the money was going. I've been using mint.com to track spending for about 3 years and I absolutely love it. It auto-categorizes every transaction paid with any of my linked credit cards and I can make adjustments as needed. I love the graphs that show spending over time and net income.

There are some other software applications such as You Need a Budget but I like mint. It's free and generally works well.

When you first start to do this, you will probably be shocked at where your money is going. $3+ for coffee every morning really does add up! For me, I was surprised how much I spent on clothes and also groceries. When I first setup my Mint budget, I thought a $30 a month clothing budget was fine, since most months I buy nothing but then a month rolled around where I spent $200 in one month and realized that when I buy, I buy a lot.

2) Cable

Honestly, the main reason we had cable was because they offered us a package so it was cheaper than just having internet alone! We only watched it once, during the Olympics! When our promotion expired, our bill was suddenly $120 a month for basic cable and internet. We cut the cable and got back down to about $60.

We're not exactly living light still - we pay 9.99 per month for Netflix and 8.25 per month for Amazon Prime ($99 per year includes streaming, shipping and other benefits) but even for both services, we still pay less than a cable subscription. You could event tack on HBO Now for 14.99 a month and come out ahead. Even when we had cable, we were mostly watching Netflix.

3) Eating out, most of it

We got into a really good habit of eating at home when we lived in a semi-rural location and couldn't get anything delivered, the nearest take out was a 20 minute drive one-way. I could cook something in that amount of time!

We still eat out but budget for it. We currently have 200/month budgeted which is a lot still, and can be one spendy meal or 2 budget eating out meals per week for the 2 of us. If we go someplace extra special for a birthday or anniversary, we might go over a little but we usually try to make it up the rest of the month by eating at home more often.

But we avoid eating out lunches and getting coffee out, which saves us a lot of money.

4) Mindful grocery shopping

As we're not college students anymore, we don't want to subsist on Ramen noodles but we still try to keep our grocery budget under control. I budget 100 per week for the two of us for a total of 400 per month. Honestly, we don't always spend that much but if we have a party, we might spend more. I still consider this to be a pretty generous budget. We both like food and we eat well but we keep our food budget reasonable by doing the following:

• Limited pre-packaged food. We don't buy frozen entrees usually or pre-chopped, pre-cut or pre-marinated anything, which also helps keep our budget down. Now, if having pre-prepped stuff ready to go will help keep you from eating out then buy it, you'll still come out ahead.
• Most of our meat is chicken or turkey and we use smallish quantities. I am often shocked at how expensive beef is! We usually use ground turkey in place of ground beef and eat a lot of chicken both for the cost savings and the health benefits. Usually if I splurge it's for fish which is healthier. I think it's been almost a year since I bought steak and that's because there was a buy one get one free sale at Target.
• Shopping mostly at Aldi. I wrote a whole post on great deals to be found at Aldi. I can usually buy a whole week's worth of groceries at Aldi for about $70 including a few splurge items and lots of fresh produce. 

One area where we could do better is reducing our food waste. We don't waste a lot but it can be hard to  balance having enough food prepared so we don't have to eat out with making sure we eat everything before it goes bad.

5) Excess clothes

Sometimes I feel like being a cute, well-dressed woman requires so much stuff! It can be hard to resist buying all of the cute things you see coworkers wearing at the office. I try to strike a balance here by shopping only a few times a year and only buying things I really love as opposed to chasing every trend but, I'll admit sometimes it's hard.

In reality, I never "need" clothes I just want to wear something new. I try to keep it under control by only buying 1-2 items at a time so I get the new feeling a little more often, and I only buy on sale. You can also shop a

For us, we try to cut out things that don't add to our happiness to keep room for savings. What areas of your budget have you worked to reduce?

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