Frugal Enlightenment: Life's "Necessities"

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My family is embarking on a journey of enlightenment. We've spent the better part of the Summer simplifying and cutting back. From toys and books to kitchen equipment, clothing, furniture and even my husband's tools.

This is all part of a grand plan we have for the future.

In the process of doing this, we also started thinking about the miscellaneous expenses we had. Not the big things, we've already eliminated or seriously curbed major expenses (paid off cars and credit cards and limited random spending), but rather the services that we use from day to day that, despite reality, we feel are necessities.

We were spending a ridiculous amount of money on cable, Internet and telephone service.

Since we live 1400 miles away from nearly every person in our family and every friend we've ever had we really feel like some of these things are a necessity. We were slowly making steps to cut the bill earlier this year

For example:

• cut back our phone bill earlier this year by getting a Magic Jack (saved $20.month)
  
• we started borrowing more movies from the library rather than watching On Demand or renting them (saved $10/month)
  

Then my work schedule got a little hectic and we soon found we were again spending all of that money we'd saved, and then some!

Now that life has returned to "normal" for my family I can once again focus on cutting back hopefully in a more permanent way. We made some big changes this week and we are really looking forward to the savings!

As of last week we were planning to spend $460 a MONTH!

After a little research we have made changes amounting to savings of over $300 a month!

New monthly bill: $159!!

So, I know you're wondering what we gave up in this exchange. It can't be that simple right?

For us, the sacrifices were small and completely worth it. Things we didn't really even think about for more than a few minutes.

We gave up a few first-run TV shows that we enjoyed and football games...my husband was remarkably stoic about that! We found that MOST everything we watched was available on Netflix instant view (some on DVD) or through services like Hulu and Fancast where we can watch on our PC for free.

We gave up public television which may have actually been the hardest part of the decision. My kids watch a lot of public television but we decided we could borrow many things from the library and the lack of TV to watch would encourage us to find better more valuable things to do with our time!

We gave up HD/DVR. The trade off here is that we get to watch movies in Blu-Ray and we can stream any show any time so there's no need for DVR capabilities - everything is on demand!

We gave up a lot of cell phone capabilities but after 9 months of using a Blackberry, I had realized the sad truth: having more access to things like e-mail, facebook and the Internet DOES NOT make me more productive. It simply devalues the time I try to spend with my family!

We are VERY excited about the changes we've made and the money we'll be saving. I can hardly believe it's $300 a month...when I compare the value of the things we let go and the price we were actually paying the decision is so easy!