Little by Little

It's 7:07 pm as I begin this post and already Ella's been crashed out for about 20 min. Silly girl didn't want to take her afternoon nap so bedtime today was 645. She did the same thing the other day and slept 645 to 9 in the morning! Her usual hours are 8 to 8. We'll see about tomorrow :)
I feel accomplished! Over the past few months Sam and I have been seriously talking about getting rid of some unnecessary monthly expenses so we can build our savings faster. We looked at some of our bills that can be modified or completely cut out and set up a mini plan to make it happen.

1) We bought the Land Rover in Oct. with the intention of selling my Nissan Rogue so that we'd have no car payments. There were few repairs Sam's had to make to it and we bought all new tires. With him having school and work, the work on the Rover is almost done and hopefully very very soon we'll be selling the Rogue. Yaay- no more car payment and decreased insurance!

2) We have really not been happy with our current cell phone plan. I don't ever dicuss exact dollar amounts pertaining to our finances, but I'm sharing this one to prove a point. We have Verizon. Sam has a Blackberry with the unlimited data plan and I have a regular phone with Internet capability but I don't have a data plan because I don't use the web on my phone. We share 1400 minutes and have unlimited everything else: texting, picture messaging, no roaming... Well, we pay $195 a month for this "service". We've been trying to understand how in the world we're paying $200 a month for two phones and one of those doesn't even have Internet?! What?! Outrageous considering my parents still have my two sisters on their plan and pay less than $175 for four Blackberries (lol) with unlimited everything!! We went to Verizon today to see if we could lower our bill and I left completely unsatistfied. We're considering paying the early termination fee and switching to another carrier.

3) We went to our gym today (one of the 2-3 times in over a year, sad, I know). We realized what a waste it is to pay a membership fee for both of us every month when we never go. Seriously, this past November made 1 year that we hadn't been and our first time back was one day in January. Sucky thing is that when we joined, we signed a two year contract. Ugh, so wasteful, I know. Well, we went today and paid the early termination fee to get out of it and stop throwing money away. Finally. We should've done that a year ago. Oh well, it's done.

So I feel really good to say that we're taking steps at trimming some of the fat from our budget. All that money will be reallocated to savings or home improvement projects. There are still a few more areas we're going to be looking at and adjusting, but I feel more efficient, less wasteful, and overall satisfied with and proud of our progress.