There’s an expression, Low Hanging Fruit, which is a term commonly used in business to mean the simplest things one can do to achieve a goal. For a salesperson, it can mean the easiest sales he’s going to make. With that in mind, I’d like to offer what I view as the low hanging fruit for places to cut some expenses:
Coffee/drink habit – at the coffee shop, $3-$5/cup, the ground coffee Jane buys – 40 cents/cup, the brand I buy – 8 cents per cup.
(I applauded the misses for reducing her coffee vice cost by a factor of 10. She doesn’t need to drink the sludge I do.)
Home phone – You and your spouse have cell phones? Time to cut the land line. This can save $15-$35/mo depending on the service you’ve been paying for. (If you fell you still need a land line, why not try Magic Jack ($20/yr) or other VOIP service?
Cable TV – You really need those premium channels? You need cable at all? If you are in or near a large city, the OTA (over the air) selection of channels may be enough. If not, online streaming such as Hulu may fill the gap.
Bring lunch to work -This may be a tough one, if you are used to going out with coworking. But if you just eat at your desk or in the office lunchroom, there’s some money (and calories) you can save by brown bagging it.
Dry Cleaning – A reader tell me she saves about $15/week by forgoing dry cleaning. (thanks)
What simple things do you do that save you some money?
Joe
I cut out the unneccessary dry cleaning which saves about $15 per week.
Nice! (added to text of post as many don’t read comments)
thanks /Joe
I coupon. I fanatically coupon. I think you might even say I’m a bit crazy about coupons.
I went to Publix on Monday and bought almost $60 worth of stuff and only paid $7.41 — my current personal best. I got 5 bottles of Tylenol – 24 ct for ‘better than free’ because they were less than the value of my coupons. I got 5 boxes of Barilla pasta for ‘better than free’ because THEY were less than the value of my coupons. It was awesome!!!
I also cook at home as much as I can manage. It’s my one area where I’m trying to focus for improvement.
Very sensible advice. When you look at the amount of money wasted on coffees and lunches, it’s horrifying. Also, it’s much healthier to bring lunch from home. About dry cleaning – we don’t use it at all because of the chemicals! The home phone is a necessity for us for internet access, but shop around to get the best deals.
I was driving by a dry cleaners on Sat and thought the same thing. I haven’t been to one in a few years, but I see people walking into them with a weeks worth of laundry, something you can easily do at home while working on other things, and can only imagine what the weekly bill for that is.
Let’s see, we pay other people to do our laundry, clean our houses, cut our lawns, cook our meals (restaurants) and we wonder how it is that we ever got into debt! Are we a lazy lot or what???