I’ve talked a few times how I like to use my budget as a hit list for cutting costs (and cutting out some expenses completely). Yesterday was one of those times. Although it is not normal, I’ll mention the moral of the story first (that’s how I roll, I guess…). So here it is: “just ask.”
My wife and I take our son to swim lessons. We budget for it. My wife enjoys it and we value the skill set. And my son enjoys it. We set aside $360 per “season” for it (when it was one hour per class) but our son often gets tired towards the end and wants to get out early. There are 4 “seasons” in a year. So we do spend quite a bit of money on the lessons. But we budgeted for it, so it was OK.
Earlier in the week my wife got an e-mail from the gym that offers the swim classes saying the classes are being cut down to 45 minutes. That didn’t matter much to us because it’s plenty of time for our son. But they were only cutting the price by $10 per season – to $350. While we budgeted for it, the 25% cut in time with less than 3% cut in price put us off a little, so we were planning to shop around for alternatives. None were ideal, but we could save $50 to $100 by going somewhere else, depending on how far we go.
At the end, my wife decided to reply to the gym and say that we were hoping for a bigger price cut because of the time cut and were not sure we could justify the cost in our budget. Within minutes the coordinator replied and offered the “gym member” price of $250 (we are not members of that gym chain). Score! They were happy. We were happy. Win, win!
So with one e-mail we “found” $110! That will send Ms. Sallie Mae packing a little sooner!
Next up on the hit list is our electric bill. I’m putting together a plan for that this week. What’s on your hit list? How much have you saved? Encourage your fellow reader in the comments.
And how did you do it? We just asked. We saw a cost that was ballooning and did something about it. Good stuff.
It’s really fun to “find” money without changing your lifestyle very much. Trust me, it will feel good.
And, of course, put your credit card down and slowly step away from the mall!
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