Cutting Costs & Saving Up!

To my random and yet loyal readers, might I once again bore you with one of my tyrants of life.

Whew I’ve re-written this 3 times so far because there is so much I want to say but how to say it without boring you all is quite difficult. So here we go again, trying round 3 for the “short and simple” version (ha ha who am I kidding). Perhaps bullet points are the best way to handle my brain right now.

- Did you know that there are such people as insurance brokers?
I didn’t and they are FABULOUS and I would highly recommend all of you to use them. They are a bit like progress car insurance. They do all the work, hunt out the best deals and then call you and offer them to you. Plus they are FREE! You don’t even have to fill out that stupid form online. J

- Ben and I recently (an hour ago) switched our car insurance company because our broker found another company that would cost us HALF of what we were paying! HOLY CROW! That’s a lot of money!! Yea…trust me, it’s a lot of money! So we immediately switched.

- Because we switched, we knew our home owner’s policy would go up. (we had a multi-policy discount with the house & cars) YIKES..but we decided that no matter how much it went up, it was going to be NO WHERE near as much as we would save by leaving! So to my GASPING and SHOCKING and BUG-EYE and CAN’T BELIEVE MY EARS surprise, it went up a lot less than we thought it would. A whopping $15 per YEAR. Why by golly jeepers, I think we can handle a $15 increase per YEAR for our home owners insurance to be saving what we are with our car insurance! (Let’s just say it’s over a THOUSAND DOLLARS we are saving PER YEAR!!)

- So point of the story is, if you’ve not shopped for car insurance in say….7 YEARS – you might want to see what the market is now offering. I was VERY happily surprised at what we found!

- Next, Now that we are no longer shelling out money to various companies, car payments, insurance payments etc. We are now planning our future out and building our savings into something that we can be proud of. Not to say we’ve not been doing this all along, but it’s not been a very organized method.

- I’d love to hear about some of the ways that each of you have found to save money in such a tight world and what methods have worked best for stashing cash for those rainy days. Right now, we’ve settled on a basic plan that seems to be working well but perhaps you have something better.

- Our basic plan – which you may want to implement in your own lives, is really really simple! We have multiple savings accounts. One for all the major things in our lives that may come up. This way we can save up for purchases/plans and aren’t tempted to spend what we don’t have within a certain account. So far we have 6 savings accounts. Future Mission, School, House Repairs, Car Repairs, 3 Months Savings, and Vacation. Each month, we stash a little in each account and slowly build them up. Our Mission is long term savings….meaning that we never plan to dip into it. Once it becomes large enough, we’ll bump it from a traditional savings into a long term secure, high interest account. The 3 month savings is long term, non touchable unless we lose our jobs but will always remains in an easy to access account. The rest of them are meant to be saved and spent. Meaning that in our house repairs account, we choose a job we are saving up for (currently a new roof). Once we save up enough for that particular repair, we dip in purchase the item(s) and then start over again building it up. I really really like this plan as it helps us to stay organized, truly understand where and what all of our savings are for and helps me to be less tempted to make random purchases.

So with this long and random post, my point is, that while we are in the process of cutting back, reexamining our spending and saving, saving, saving, I’d love to hear what great ideas have worked for you. Had someone told me about an insurance broker years ago, I would have had a lot more in my savings accounts than I do today!