Expenses You Can Look to Cut this Year

While sure, taking the time to figure out is lyft or uber cheaper may save you a few dollars at the time, and hey it beats driving and putting yourself at risk for a huge ticket cost if you’re even having a few drinks, but it’s a good idea to first review all of your finances to see where every dollar is going so you know where you can start making cuts.  If you take last month’s credit or debit card statement you can actually go line by line and really work on cutting expenses this year.

Stop the Gym Membership

While I’m not saying that you should let yourself go, but let’s face it, are you still going a few times a week?  Sure, when you first sign up for the membership after Christmas when you are looking to better yourself physically you go regularly, and then the visits start to become less frequent, and pretty soon you are paying when you haven’t gone since last summer.  By cutting that out of your monthly expenses, sure it’s not saving you a fortune, but It’s certainly a start.

Avoid Going Out to Eat

Sure, we all like to go out to eat.  We get to order whatever we want, have someone do the cooking, serving, and cleaning up after us, but doing that more than a meal or few a week really starts adding up.  If you can cut out going out to lunch at work, picking up carryout or going out to dinner even down a few days, not to mention even picking up coffee in the morning, can really start to make the savings add up.  If you can go grocery shopping and prepare your meals at home, you will save hundreds of dollars every month.

Cut the Cable Cord

If you are looking to reduce expenses even further, this is where you may have to make a few sacrifices.  Cutting the cable cord is a popular trend these days as many are favoring streaming services instead of flipping around with nothing on, having to sit through commercials.  Let’s face it, you probably DVR everything on TV and watch Netflix anyways, so would you really miss cable for what it costs each month?  Try it and see, you could probably get used to it pretty quick and will probably end up keeping busy with projects around the house and less laying on the couch.

Get Out of Debt

Now the last part could be the most important and that comes in the form of getting out of debt.  Paying back a credit card statement balance is ok if you are using that for your primary purchases each month, but you have to ensure you’re paying off the full statement balance, otherwise you start to be charged interest, which could be upwards of 16%, so depending on the balance, could really be some serious money you are spending each month just to pay back what you have previously charged but are having trouble paying back.

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