Money Saving Tips

Simple Ways To Save Money

First Published Date: Dec 8, 2008

Today, I will discuss how you can save money by taking these simple steps. Let’s look at five areas we spend money on a daily basis. 

Save Money On Cable TV

Cable TV can cost you from $50 to $100 per month – which translates approximately $600 to $1200 annually. These amount are hard cash you are paying with your after-tax money. If you think in terms of before-tax income, you will be saving a lot of money. Living without cable is not impossible. Many people watch broadcast channels, which are free and you can do it too. If you think this is not something you can do, switch from premium cable to basic cable – which will cut your cost in half. Do you really need to have 1000 channels that you hardly watch?

Save Money On Lunch

How much does lunch cost these days? It costs somewhere between $7 to $12 to have a decent lunch. Let’s assume you are spending $10 per day. How much money you are spending annually? $2,400 each year and this is your after-tax money. What it means that if you can eliminate buying lunch all together, you can give yourself a raise of about $4,000 (if you are in a 42% tax bracket) annually. If you can’t cut lunch daily, at least bring lunch from home three or two times a day and still you will be saving a lot of money.

Save Money On Home Phone

We subscribe to lots of features we never use. Cut all these features and live with a basic phone service. You  may be able cut your cost by about 40%. Keep an eye for other phone company offers and rewards. If they are giving the same services you have at lower costs, switch your phone company. Also, you can ask your existing phone company that their competitor is offering it at much lower prices and ask for discounts. Chances are high that you will get it.

Save Money On Cell Phone

Added features on a monthly plan can cost you a bundle. Try to stick to a basic plan that meet your needs. Pay As You Go is an option you should be looking at. Usually it costs a lot less except some extra features. One thing I like about Pay As You Go is that there is no System Access fee. Also, Pay As You Go already includes features like caller id, voice mail etc for free. Nowadays, you can buy unlimited evenings and weekends Pay As You Go services without breaking your bank account.

Save Money On Internet Phone

VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) gives you the opportunity to use your high speed Internet to make phone calls and save money. Home phone plans using VOIP can be as low as $10 per month. Many VOIP companies offer this type of services. To find one, just do an online search entering VOIP, Internet phone keywords. You can even make long distance calls for free these days. Here is an article which explains how to do it –

How To Make Free North American Long Distance Calls

Save Money On Internet Subscription

If you degrade your Internet subscription to a lighter version, you will be able to save 20% to 35% right away. Most likely you will not even notice that you are using a lighter version. This is huge saving as this is a recurring cost you are saving each month, month after month. Another way you can save by switching a no brand name Internet provider. Small Internet providers can offer better rates and savings than brand name ones. You need to do your homework to find one. Just do an online search by entering "Internet service provider" and look for better rates.

Save Money On Magazine Subscriptions

Do you really need to subscribe (or buy) all those magazines which you never have time to read? Most of the magazine publishers put  these magazine contents online for free after a few weeks. You just need to be patient  to save money sometimes.

After reading these tips, start following them to save money. You may not be able to follow each of these but at least try a couple of them and see where it takes you.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Canadapersonalfinancewebsite.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to A Dawn Journal. This article originally published on the above website on Dec 8, 2008.