The First Step

The first step to financial independence and security is to save money.  While it may seem too simple to say, in order to save money you need to spend less than you earn.  This is called "living below your means."  You would be amazed to know how many people do not follow this very basic rule and accumulate massive debt through the use of easily available credit cards.  They use their credit cards basically as another source of income.  Not good.

Unless you are living below the federal poverty guideline, which for 2017 has been defined as income of $12,060  per year for a single person or $24,600 for a family of four, I am of the opinion that you can save money.  Heck probably even at that level, since you might be eligible for a whole host of federal subsidies, you can probably save money.  Why?  Because saving money is in its most general terms a mindset and a distinction between needs and wants.  Needs include things required for living - housing, clothes and food - and wants are everything else.  Society influences us into believing that many things we want are things we need (thank you media and marketing gurus, you are doing your jobs very well).  That is simply not true!

If you ask people to make a list of all their daily living expenses, a whole host of things on their lists will be things that didn't even exist back in my youth.  Things that people today think they can't or shouldn't live without.  Some examples of these things are -

-  Cable TV
-  Internet
-  Cell phone (talk, text, data)
-  Movie and TV streaming services
-  Book subscriptions for reading devices
-  Gym memberships
-  Satellite radio for your car

Are those things nice to have?  Yes, I think we would all agree that they are very very nice!  But they are not things that we need to live.  And even if we do "need" some of these things, we generally overpay for them.  Our service providers charge us an arm and a leg for things that we could shop around for and get for a much lower price.  Lets look at some examples.

Cable TV - Years ago, no one had cable tv but used aerial tv antennas instead.  Did you know that you can still use an antenna for tv reception? In fact, you can get HD reception by installing an HD antenna!  How do I know that? Because my husband has installed one at our house.  Seems that the cable companies take the tv satellite signals, encode (or compress) them, then sell you a box to undo what they just did.  If that isn't selling you nothing for something, I don't know what is!  It is very easy to access all of your local tv stations using over the air antennas.  So if you generally watch only local channels, reducing your cable tv service to "basic cable" or getting rid of it completely is a real money saver!

Internet - Having internet is all about convenience.  There are plenty of places you can go to access wi-fi for free including many restaurants and your local library.  In fact, plenty of cities are now establishing free "wi-fi" zones for their residents.  Check out the website www.wififreespot.com
Do your homework and save some money!

Cell phone service - Contracts and charges for talk, text and data are exorbitant.  If you don't mind shopping around and buying your phone outright, there are plenty of dependable low-cost, no contract phone plans available.  I know because I have had one for years.  These plans use the infrastructure from the big guys so it is basically the same as the service for which you are paying a bunch of money.  There is a limit on the amount of high speed data I can use per month, after which it goes to 2G, but frankly I have never hit the cap.  And I use my data plan a lot!  I just don't do much streaming on my phone.  Streaming can eat up data fast!

Streaming movie services and book services - check out your local library.  Chances are that your library allows you to borrow books and download them for a set period of time to your reading device.  Also, they have lots of Blu-ray discs, dvd's and old fashioned hard copies of books to lend out.  There are so many services that your local library provides that are underused by residents.   Libraries are one of the most amazing programs available to us in the US.  Check them out!

Gym memberships - Start walking, get a bike, use a jump rope, check out swim night and family programs at your local schools, save a bunch of money!

Satellite radio -  If you really need to have this service, never ever just agree to a renewal with these folks.  Call them up, and theaten to cancel, they will always give you a better deal.  Or follow through and just cancel!

In the end, everything is always a trade off between what you think you need and how much you want to spend.  The above ideas are just food for thought.  What things can you think of that people spend way too much money for?  How do you trim costs for these expenses for your own household?