Can you cut $1,000 from your monthly spending?

[kh54s10]

Moving out of NJ would do it for me. I'm paying just under a K a month in property tax alone.

Move to Rhode Island and pay at least twice that for property tax.

 

[Cyclman]

Could, or Should?

I could easily stop my charitable donations, drop life insurance, reduce auto coverages, reduce my medical savings- all this would "save" well over $1k a month- but at what cost?

Food, brewing, clothes, kids activities, vacation savings, etc. etc. are over $1k a month (for a family of four) and I suppose we could cut back on that, but you have to get some enjoyment out of life.

I live well below my means, no credit card debt, no car loans, putting money away for retirement and if my wife can find a job in this GD economy, money away for kids college.

I have worked my butt off for decades to build the income and property I have. Despite some common views, I think it is deserved.

It isn't always about cutting- that's virtually always possible (we spend Billions in the US each year on pets and coffee). It's about balancing what you earn vs. what you spend, so that you have something left to save, to give, and to enjoy.

 

[LosAngelino]

Yes I could.... if I sold my house or got rid of our two vehicles. To be honest, I have been mulling over the thought of buying some rural mountain property and building my own 1000 sqft cabin on it and going off grid. I am getting sick of the establishment and,,,, to be honest.... Stupid People who think Jersey Shore and the Kardashian's are relevant and deserve to be on my TV.

+1. True that brother!

 

[yeahfairly]

So, uh, why ARE the Kardashians on your TV? They aren't on mine, and I am FAR from off-grid...

They're not.... It was more rhetorical... my point is we have walked over the cliff's edge as a society when it comes to morale issues and priorities. Has anyone seen the movie "Idiocracy"? Seems like the majority are all too happy to continue down this path.

The OP is dead on in the initial post. I am in Afghanistan right now and the majority of these folks are living very similar to the way people did 200 years ago... except for the cell phones (lol.... everyone has one).

There was a time, and not to long ago, that people knew how to survive on little to nothing. When I was a little guy we spent every other weekend on my uncle's farm. No running water (but the coldest well water you ever tasted), No electricity (oil lamps), an outhouse, a wood burning kitchen stove and a wood stove for heat. It wasn't just him... the majority of the community in Madison County lived that way. They raised their own beef, pigs and chickens and had a HUGE garden and a root cellar full of the best canned veggies you ever tasted. When they went to the store once a month they bought flour, sugar, salt, corn meal, coffee, Prince Albert tobacco, rolling papers and BEER!!! They needed nothing else... Heck my aunt even made lye soap from hog renderings. What they considered a good life would be camping or roughing it to the majority of Americans.

They were advanced in certain ways though... I can remember sitting out on the porch at night and seeing lantern light emitting from the green energy production facilities up the wooded holler along the creek (lol)!!!!

 

[yeahfairly]

No, for me there is no way I could trim $1000 a month off of my expenses.

I don't have a cell phone, dish TV/network, a car payment, a house payment, or any payments actually, besides electric, water, gas, internet. I keep the house cool, and wear a sweater. We have two homes, and pay insurance and taxes on both, and two vehicles. Those are probably our biggest expenses- to maintain two houses and utilities for them and two vehicles. We do spend the winters in South Texas, but we rent a house there and don't have expenses there except rent and groceries.

We shop at thrift stores when we need "new" clothes. I don't buy much from a grocery store as we hunt/fish/gather, and I don't eat packaged food or refined grains. Our meat, aside from venison, comes from a neighbor who raises grass-fed beef and lamb.

We live well (even have a boat), travel a bit, but we live on about $2000/month total and that includes my brewing expenses and all of our hobbies. I guess we could give up traveling to Texas each winter, and maybe save an average of $400/month over the course of the year, but I'm not willing to do that!

I think that we are more frugal than most Americans, though!

You and your hubby have been added to my Hero list Yooper! Not only do you contribute a great deal here to the folks on HBT.... but you are living a lifestyle that I envy!!!!

 

[Rhumbline]

Move to Rhode Island and pay at least twice that for property tax.

I can't even begin to fathom this. I have a small, comfortable home here in FL and just got my tax bill for $998.00 for the year!

I don't think anyone needs to defend or explain how they spend their money nor do they need to feel guilty about enjoying the fruits of their labor or the good fortune that has visited them.

I was just shocked that this guy was bleeding $1k worth of frivolous expenses every month and thought he was doing something noble by eliminating some of them.

For 48 weeks of the year I'm the cheapest, most penny pinching guy in the office. My passion is Italy and I spend four weeks a year there living the good life. The sacrifices are more than compensated for by that.

An interesting bit of data from the CIA Factbook. According to the latest data there are about 120 countries in the world with a median per capita annual income of less than $12,000. Half of those are below $5,000.

 

[raabs]

If I had to cut $1,000 from my monthly spending I'd be eating even more Ramen than usual. At least I don't have to pay for beer (homebrew & commercial).

 

[brewmcq]

My SWMBO has done an amazing job with our finances. We've made some significant cuts here and there, such as ditching cable and getting Netflix streaming.. why not, we were paying $90 a month to watch reruns of Law & Order.. so now we're paying 1/10th that to watch reruns of Law & Order..

We were able to get our mortgage payment and interest rate cut drastically, and she is able to get her student loans paid off through the NHSC (wish I could..).

One of the big money savers, believe it or not, are the "infrared" space heaters we bought a couple years ago. Electricity here is dirt cheap.. fuel oil, not so much. We have two of these space heaters running, one in the living room and one in the Pub, and there is no noticeable different in our electric bill during the winter than during the peak of summer, when we have the air conditioner running fulltime in the bedroom.

Another huge money saver has been the moose that Dad shot last year. We still have a couple hundred pounds of meat in our freezer from it, and since Dad doesn't eat as much moose as he'd like (his girlfriend is not a fan), the next time he comes up, he's going to bring another big chunk of it with him. Of course, we have a bunch of trout and partridge in our freezer as well... and the investment of the raised garden beds this past spring has already paid for itself with the veggies SWMBO has grown and canned/frozen.

Then there's homemade things.. like salsa. Believe it or not, we tend to go through so much salsa that by her making and canning it, we're saving $3 or $4 a pop vs. store bought stuff (and it tastes better and is better for us!). She also makes a TON of bread.. again, tastes better and is better for us, especially now that we've found a great source for bulk stoneground whole wheat.

Bulk.. I'm not talking about the 100-count packages of toilet paper at Sam's Club or whatever, but other stuff.. flour, Jasmine rice, oats, black beans... the basics. Well worth the 4 hour round trip to Bangor, or the 45 minute round trip to the "Amish store" in Smyrna to buy 50 or 60 pounds of goods.. still half the cost of even the local IGA including the price of gas... and we're not really ones to travel, so there's another huge savings in gas costs. Although I did get a "rewards" card from Irving so when I was commuting 180 miles a week, if I planned it just right, I'd save in the neighborhood of 10 cents a gallon... if I timed it *really* good, I'd get cheaper gas, plus the 10 cents per gallon savings, s there were times that I was saving 20 or more cents per gallon. I've probably saved a hundred bucks on gas this year.

Most of the food-related savings has stemmed from our desire to eat healthier... the savings is a nice side-effect... but we're going into winter with a pantry full of canned goods and a freezer full of meat and veggies.

Next up: we're going to invest in an electric water heater and eventually a pellet furnace, which will completely get rid of our dependency on fuel oil for heat and hot water. Come spring I will be putting in another ~100 sqft of raised garden beds. Hopefully I'll bag a deer this month. If not, no biggie. We are also going to further investigate investing in local pork and beef, which typically will run 50 or 60 cents per pound.

And, of course, drinking homebrew, now that the initial investment has been made on the brewery. A good number of ingredient kits that we get are Morebeer.com's "under 50 cents a beer" category. Even if we get a more expensive kit, we're still spending less than $1 for 12oz of good beer, instead of $10 per 6er or 4-pack. Every batch of Irish red I make saves us like $50 vs. drinking Smithwick's (if I did my math right). Granted, I need to make 30 or 40 batches to pay for the brewery, but whatever.


I've rambled. Sorry about that.

 

[grathan]

My wife could save $1k by simply stop going to work. She wouldn't even need to work if she hadn't gone to college on loans.

 

[Grannyknot]

We've already beat our budget down into the ground.
If we ditched our Tv/internet service, that would save us a mere $60.
The rest would be misc spending totaling maybe $150.

 

[SPR-GRN]

I don't think we could cut $1,000 out of our budget, but we could realistically cut it a bit. I'd start with the "luxury" crap..
T.V/Phone/Internet - $110 - drop to just internet, as we work form home some times (so reduced to $50)
my cell phone - $50 (she has a cell paid for through work)

The majority of our expenses go to (in descending order)
Mortgage - we pay ahead so we could reduce our payment to increase savings, but that's robbing Peter to pay Paul
Student Loans - again we pay ahead
food - could adjust to eat less expensive items more often
electric - this would go down if we got rid of TV
car loan

I suppose we could sell my car and share hers (one drives and drops) but once we have kids that would be a super PITA.

We already burn wood as our sole source of heat, I could hunt more, but she won't eat any of it - so that really just covers me.

There are foods we eat that we could stop eating (goat cheese for one).

Without reducing our mortgage and student loan payments, we could realistically slice $200-$300 a month simply by dropping some luxury items and changing our eating habits. My budget for hobby stuff (which brewing is) is $300 a year, so if I want to spend more than that it comes from selling other hobby stuff.. the system is fairly circular.

If I fired the "maid" she'd take half my crap; much like if she fired the "landscaper" he'd take half her crap. (I'm the landscaper and she's the maid in this scenario; it's a joke people).

 

[motobrewer]

i could easily cut ~$2k a month from my budget by donating my kids to charity.

I could probably get a tax break on that too.

 

[Brewtah]

The average income in this country is about $32,000 a year. To me this means about half of the folks would have trouble paying for the basics let alone cutting $1,000 out their budgets. Especially if they were the only wage earner in the family.
If I cut out cable TV, cell phone, internet = $318 per month. This is a rediculous amount of money.
Two adults earning minimum wage = $2,552 per month. This is a rediculous wage for 2 full-time employees.
You can only cut expenses if you have the luxury of non-essential expenses.

 

[yeahfairly]

i could easily cut ~$2k a month from my budget by donating my kids to charity.

I could probably get a tax break on that too.

Haha! +1.... wish I could have figured that one out about 8 years ago. The damage has already been done as mine are grown! Looking forward to Grand Babies though..... I anticipate spending another fortune spoiling them!!!!

 

[SPR-GRN]

The average income in this country is about $32,000 a year. To me this means about half of the folks would have trouble paying for the basics let alone cutting $1,000 out their budgets. Especially if they were the only wage earner in the family.
If I cut out cable TV, cell phone, internet = $318 per month. This is a rediculous amount of money.
Two adults earning minimum wage = $2,552 per month. This is a rediculous wage for 2 full-time employees.
You can only cut expenses if you have the luxury of non-essential expenses.

I agree with you; minimum wage in CT is 8.25/hr (goes up to 8.70 in January) - cost of living in CT is roughly 31% higher than the average cost of living in the rest of the country; it's got to be ridiculously tough to make it on minimum wage for just the basics (food & shelter) throw health care into that mix (legally required now) and I can see someone being pretty screwed.

Every time I look at my monthly expenses I'm flabbergasted at how much money I spend every month. I always think wow "if I didn't have these student loans" but then I wouldn't be living where I am and getting paid what I am.

Every time income vs. expenses comes up, I'm reminded of a ex-friend of mine; she is a high school science teacher outside of Boston, MA; she was complaining to me about how she doesn't have enough money and has a bunch of credit card debt and how she is underpaid as a teacher and how she needs to get out of debt.

I felt bad for her so I started trying to help her go through her budget and see where cuts could be made.

Turns out she made as much money as I did, so she wasn't an underpaid teacher; and she doesn't have any student loans because her mom paid for college.
She then flat-out refused to give up or reduce her TV, internet, and smartphone plans, she also refused to stop going out four nights a week because "she needed that break from all the crap".
She didn't want to leave her $1,200 a month two bedroom apartment for something smaller or get a roommate because she needed her space and privacy; yes a two bedroom apartment for one person with a cat.

The takeaway from this for me was there is a big difference between "want" and "need" and everyone has their own view for each item.
I want to eat rib-eye steak, but I need to eat.. so rice and beans are fine by me if I can't afford steak.

 

[NickTheGreat]

Probably not living in the Midwest, where cost of living is less.

But like the article says, cut the cable, smartphone, and things like that would shave a few hundred a month off.

 

[david_42]

We are on a rather tight budget, so the only way we could knock out $1000/month would be for my wife to cancel her Master's program. Got a phone call from a furnance company about how a new furnance could save me thousands of dollars a year. I told hm we use less than $700 worth of natural gas a year, so I'd definitely be interested in the additional income.