My husband and I have been determined to lower our monthly expenses and have found some easy ways to go about it that I wanted to share. Hope there’s at least one that will work for you!

1. Refinance Your Home: By refinancing our home we just saved over $130 monthly. The amount you can save is tied to your current interest rate and mortgage amount. We also only have a mortgage of $100K, so if you owe more, you have potential to save even more. Another big reason to refinance is to get rid of any monthly mortgage insurance amount you may pay. To refinance you will need to have equity in your home, let me know if you want to look into it and see if it’s a good option for you!

 2. Shopping Different Insurance Companies: This is a quick way to save usually a couple hundred a year. I simply choose 3 companies that I trusted to get quotes from for our home and our cars. You can easily get quotes online too! Just remember if you’re going to move you house, you probably want to move your cars as well because of multi policy discounts. About 20 minutes of phone time and I saved us over $700 a year!

 3. Cable and Internet: We cut out cable 3 years ago and it’s amazing the difference it made in our monthly expenses! Instead we have Netflix for $10 a month and have never regretted our decision to ditch cable. I can’t speak for other providers, but if you have Cox keep a close eye on your monthly bill. If you see if go up take your bill to your local cox store. I’ve gone in and told them I would switch providers and they lowered it $20 monthly right there. Another trick is to switch the bill back and forth between people living in the house. By doing that you always get their new customer promotional rates which are always at least $35 less monthly, and that’s just for internet!

 4. Pay Off Loans: This is one that’s not worth it for everyone. My husband and I HATE debit and paying monthly interest. We decided to hit our car payments hard with any extra funds we had at the end of the month. It forced us to be a little tighter with our money, but with both cars being paid off in a little over a year (at different times) it was 100% worth it! Make sure if you’re making extra payments though that you’re putting it towards the principle only. That way it pushes out your next mandatory payment further just in case funds get a little tight.

5. Look up Utility Options: Many utilities have options to help you save. We decided to go to equal monthly payments to soften the blow of summer electric bills. It’s technically not saving us any money yearly, but it helps to keep our monthly expenses more balanced which helps. There are also different usage plans you can look into to save money. For us those don’t make sense as we both work from home but for most it can help save monthly.