Frugal in the new year!

Posted By Paul

Happy New Year!

Sorry that this blog has been so quiet recently, but times have been hectic and I haven't been able to post for a while (I was busy shopping for a new car, you can hear all about it in an upcoming post).

Now that it's the new year my wife and I have been going over our various expenses and seeing if there are ways to save a few dollars here and there. My wife and I already life pretty frugally so there aren't many places to save money, but I think it's still a good idea to at least take a look once a year.

One thing we did decide to cut back on this year was the newspaper. My wife and I would often have breakfast and read the paper so it was nice to have the Sunday paper delivered every week. Once we had a child we noticed that breakfasts aren't quite as leisurely as they once were so we don't have the long meals to peruse the paper, so some weeks we barely even look at it.

It's a very small expense but we decided to cancel it for now and add the money we save to our child's college fund. It's a small difference, but we figure that every dollar counts.

We plan on making this quick once-over of our spending an annual tradition. Just a quick friendly discussion over dinner one night to think about all of our expenses and whether or not they are still "worth it" to us.

We're hoping that this will keep us from falling into the trap of spending month after month on something we don't really need or want simply because we never actually sit down together and make the decision to get rid of it.