How does a family with two graduate students and one part-time job make ends meet? The short answer is that we don't... we've had to draw upon our savings to make sure that all the bills get paid. However, recently we've been looking at strategies to save a bit more money. Since we're both really busy, methods that take a whole lot of time in order to save a few bucks are probably out, but here are some things we've started doing.
- Visit the food pantry at our school and a local church to supplement our trips to the grocery store. Potential savings: $15-20 a week.
- Change our shared cell phone minutes from 700 to 550 a month, which is about what we use anyway. Also apply for a student discount with the cell phone company. Savings: ~$20 a month
- Reduce our out-to-eat budget from about 15 dollars a week to about 5 and only go out once every couple of weeks. When we do go out, split portions at restaurants. Savings: ~$10 a week
- Camp out at Chick-fil-a openings so we can get free coupons that allow us to go to CFA whenever we want. (This helps make up for having such a small out-to-eat budget.) Savings: ~$500 a year
- Reduce the insurance on our 13 year old car to the minimum that we need to have. Potential savings: ~$30 a month
- Resume closely tracking our spending and reconciling it with our budget. This is probably the biggest thing we can do - with the stress of school and the sense of futility trying to make our income match our expenses, we gave this up for a while. We've started again, though. Potential savings: $???.??
Any other good ideas?
4 comments:
One idea you could stay in the Sawyers' Spare Oom! Really, I admire the efforts you guys are going to to save money. Tracking the ol budget always helps. But it seems without much coming in, you can never save enough. As a little piece of advice, which I am sure you thought of, is to get a little money on the side. When we were putting Michael through school, I did some tutoring and got paid enough to help supplement the income. I know time is the big issue always. But sometimes it is easier to make an extra $100 bucks a month than to cut back some more. Love you guys!
I'm sure you guys do most of these things already but here are some of the things we did as students:
-buy generic (everything)
-use coupons!
-combine phone plans with other family members and split the costs. cut down on texting!
-shop at the Dollar Store and other low-cost providers for certain items
-walk/ride bike/car pool as much as possible
-eat lots of PB&J sandwiches and pasta!
-have someone you know cut your hair
-wear glasses instead of contacts
-keep heat or air conditioning at a higher or lower than you might normally keep it at
-thrift it if you need it
...I'll let you know if I think of any other big ones. I feel like I'm missing some...
Oh, I think the one I was thinking of was - the library! We used the library for a lot of our school books instead of buying them. This was great for books that I was unsure if I would keep. We also stumbled upon a great used bookstore that ended up being a place where a lot of people traded in their school books so it had many of the ones we needed. And, Amazon always had lower prices. Basically - don't buy books from the school book store unless you have to.
Buy in bulk when you find a killer deal (my freezer is packed with Buy-1-Get-2-Free Salmon)
Use Mint.com to keep track of all your spending - set budgets for each category and keep up with it in real time. You can sync all your accounts if you have multiple.
Overall, I agree with Amy though about finding some supplement income. You'll find a point where the quality of life (especially living in a city) with your budget is simply no fun. Remember that both of you are intelligent, educated and able-bodied kids that could have more money than you'd know what to do with if you were to make it a priority.
All that keeps me sane some days is waking up and reminding myself that I have the freedom to change my circumstances every day but choose to make the same sacrifices.
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