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?
