Saving on Regular Monthly Expenses

I'm a believer in taking stock of your regular monthly expenses and thinking seriously about what could be cut or reduced. What you find and the action steps you choose to take will vary depending on your situation. What my wife and I found a couple of years back is that it made no sense to keep a land line phone when we had a cellphone plan. We also found that we are people who can live without cable television and never really miss it. (In fact, we know that if we did have cable, we would be unable to resist the lure of watching pure garbage. I just can't take the risk of seeing more than one episode of VH1's Rock of Love.)

More recently, we found a way to cut our high-speed internet bill by $20. We're honest with ourselves when it comes to the fact that we are people who need the internet. A good deal of our information and entertainment comes from the web, and it's also rather important when it comes to our personal correspondence and shopping. We had been paying quite a bit for cable internet, and while researching other options we realized that our cable company offers a lower tier of broadband internet at a significantly lower price. This is still broadband - just slower than the 11 mbps he had been paying for. From the research I did, all of the things we use the internet for (YouTube, email, research, news) should still work fine. I just called them yesterday to make the switch, and I'm already feeling about $20 cleverer.