Technology Changing So Quickly

Thinking back to when I was a young child, my parents had analog telephones scattered throughout the house. They started with one incoming telephone line, then when my sisters and I were teenagers and hogging the phone talking to all our friends, they got a second incoming line for us girls. Then we started getting online which tied up the phone line and no one could call us without getting a busy signal. So they got a third phone line – primarily for internet but also a backup line for us girls. After all, three teenage girls can do a whole lot of talking on the phone, between their girlfriends AND their boyfriends!

But now, we’ve grown and moved out, we all have cell phones and we get online using cable instead of the telephone line. So my parents decided to give up the home phone line and save $50 a month. I don’t blame them!

Another big technology change has been instant messaging and texting. What a great convenience that is! Especially when you just need to push a message to someone and not really talk to them or engage in a 2-way communication. I use texting all the time with my sisters and my parents, and I love the way they can get in touch with me any time, even if I am on the phone and on the internet, all through my cell phone.

I just love how technology is changing so quickly. Now if they will just start reducing the monthly charges. I don’t see how they can justify these high prices for phone service any longer – they are not spending money on expensive phone lines and cables – it’s all digital.

How I Plan to Save Money This Year

This year I really need to work on saving some money.   I started using a new website to track all of my spending.  It shows me exactly where all of our money is going.  I was a little shocked to see how much money we really spend going out to eat or on fast food.  I’m setting a budget for everything.  I know we can’t cut everything off cold turkey so I’m going to have us do a step down method for our spending habits.

Right now we spend about $500 a month of groceries.  I would like to get that down closer to $300 or less but I know we need to work towards that.  To start I’m setting  a budget of $400 a month or roughly $100 a week on groceries.  I think we can manage to cut back by $25 a week to start with easily, especially if I really work to use up what we have in our pantry.  The following month I’ll move it to $75 a week.  If we do really well with that I might even be able to move it down a little further but I’m not going to go crazy.

We’re taking a closer look at television and cable services along with movie rentals.  We purchased a few pay per view movies on demand this month.  This is really silly considering we pay almost $20 a month for Netflix, we just need to send back our current DVD  to get the next one on our list.  My husband and I are thinking about turning off our cable television because just about everything we watch is available online and we do have Netflix.  We pay about $100 a month for cable so that’s more money we could save every month.

I know groceries and entertainment aren’t the only way we can save but at least it’s a start.  I was able to easily identify these ways to save and will do some digging into other ways to save that I might not be soo obvious to me.