As we are semi-retired and move toward our? full retirement years, we are looking to cut our cost.? We started by looking into our insurance policies on our home, two cars, and our motor home.? We checked around at several places, and talked to a Insurance broker.? He reviewed our policies, and found where we could save $70.00? a month.? This was comparable to what we have now, except that the deductible was a little higher.? We have changed over to the new company, and I think we will be well satisfied with our choice.
We do our budget yearly with monthly reviews.? We decided now that we are on fixed/reduced income that we would use our non-camping month(s) to pay everything like insurances, subscriptions, at a yearly rate.? This saved us a ton of money if you are looking at the yearly figure.?? This also allows us to live the other 11 months without so much monthly expense for those items.?? We still put back a couple hundred a month to cover that dreaded February month where we don’t live, we just get by….? but the other 11 months are great !
Another item we checked into was our cell phone bill.? We cut off the 4G service to our two tablets, leaving just the 2 phones.? That lowered the price of data and device “access fee”,? we are paying for which saved us more money.? Just calling and talking to someone we found out about $40.00 more savings per month.
We have also changed our internet service.? We are going from $117.00 a month to $39.95 a month just by changing providers to a new customer introductory rate.?? That rate lasts for a year so the savings is worth it and the bandwidth is better.?? (btw, we have now used up our first year introductory rate, and are paying 59.99 – still a better deal than DSL via the phone company.? We live in a small town, and options are limited )
February is our car tag month, so we were looking for savings here also.? We have bought specialty tags the past few year, and we decided not to this year, which saved us around $100.00.
We have also eliminated the cost of cable TV/Dish, by using a couple of internet ROKU appliances and our internet connection to provide better on demand programming than what we had with satellite.?? Not that the service was bad, but $89.00 per month is a lot for the little amount of TV we watch, and nothing was suitable for family entertainment anyway.? As of 2017 we are complete cable cutters.? We have an outside antenna for local channels, and we use Amazon Firestick with DirectvNOW app added for all the cable channels, and sports that we were paying “extra” for when we used the dish.? This requires us to have a strong WIFI dependency when parked.
We revisit and redo our budget regularly. ? Just on the items above we saved over $285.00 a month. This is just food for thought – I’m sure you may have other items in your budget line items.? The point is to go through them all one at a time, and compare rates with competitors and make the decision if you really want to pay for a service and if you are getting that amount of value for your money.