Lessons Learned From Shopping Around
Last week, I wrote about how I called my car insurance provider and had them add my home insurance to my existing auto insurance policy and saved a bunch of money (I know sounds like Geico commercial, but I didn’t switch to Geico!). It got me thinking about other regular expenses I have that I hadn’t given much thought to that could be subjecting me to the cost creep. As I look through my budget there are some opportunities to save some more all important dollars:
- Cut Electricity Consumption. My electricity bill is ridiculously high and with summer coming I need to do something about it. Back in April I listed 10 Everyday Tips to Save Money and a couple of things that I would add to that list would be to turn up my thermostat this summer from 70 degrees to 73 degrees. Also, when we are out of the house for the day or away for the weekend, I’m going to program the thermostat to 85 degrees.
- Having three kids in the house, we use our TV’s quite a bit but we certainly don’t use all of the channels. We’re going to sit down as a family and discuss what channels we really watch and get rid of the extras. Hopefully we can save some money here.
- Cellular phones. This one is nebulous. My wife and I need our cell phones for work. My daughter has a phone that we could cut out a bunch of the bells and whistles.
- I have a rather long commute (45 miles round trip) to the office daily and at least one or twice a week I’ll use the toll highway to get home but I figure I can save $40 a month just taking the regular route and learning to deal with the traffic.
- Since my commute is so long, I may discuss working from home once or twice a week with my employer. I have a laptop and can easily work from home. Patience is required because the network connection is slow but I can save 20% of my gas consumption for each day I stay home.
- I’m also going to discuss car pooling with others in my office. I may be able to car pool all or part of the way. This should cut my gas use even more.
All tolled, I figure I could add an additional $150 to $200 per month just by working a little smarter.
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Tags: cable, car pool, cell phones, commuting, digital cable, electricity, energy, frugal, home office, office, save money, termostat
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