I want to share this time about the expenses we cut that, not only reduced the budget but made life better. “Cutting expenses” is often presented as an act of sacrifice. As a loss. As if you have to say no to everything just because you need to spend less.
The most common advice is to skip everything you enjoy. Say no to small comforts. Tighten every category until it hurts. It’s no wonder we resist cutting expenses. And no surprise that when we try we can’t keep up with the changes.
But cutting expenses doesn’t have to make you feel deprived. When done well, it can actually feel like relief and make life better.
Don’t Cut, Create Space
The problem with most advice about saving money isn’t the numbers or the intentions, it’s the framing, that looks amazing in paper but it is not helpful for real families.
We’re told to cut the things we like and the conveniences that helps us everyday. Including those that bring joy to our lives and the things that make our life easier. We don’t want to just cut expenses and tell our kids no to everything they ask for.
We don’t want the cutting to create more stress or even confrontation between family members, when one is more strict than the other in making the cuts. Learning to live on less, should bring joy and contentment.
The goal of reducing expenses isn’t to make life smaller. The goal is to make a simpler life that we can enjoy. And this goal can be complicated, but here’s how to change the approach to the expenses.
Instead of asking: “What can we cut?”
Let’s ask: “Which expenses don’t actually improve our daily life?”
This small change is going to help us not only to reduced the necessary expenses but also to make progress in that reduction and other life goals, whether they are financial based or not.
How We Approach Expense Reduction as a Family
When we look at our spending, we don’t ask how to remove everything extra and just pay the bills. Because we should be able to enjoy life and have hobbies and treat our kids. When we knew our budget was going to be reduced, we did look at all of our expenses, but we didn’t started to zero out the “unnecessary” categories.
We started asking:
- Does this expense reduce stress or add to it?
- Does it support our current season of life?
- Does it align with what we say we value?
Based on those answers we started to make changes, they were small changes, as I have share before but they created the momentum to manage our finances better. I’ll share how we tackle some of the most common advice of cutting to create space for a better life.
Eating Out That Didn’t Actually Feel Restful
Most recommendations put this one on the top so let’s go there. If you are a family, eating out can be a joy or it can be exhausting, specially if you have little ones.
We noticed that many of our meals out weren’t intentional family time. They happened on busy days when we didn’t plan for cooking or none of the adults had energy to cook. With that often came that someone didn’t enjoy their food or the order was incorrect if we order from a delivery service.
Frustration, food not so good, long waits, rushed conversations, higher checks than expected. The problem wasn’t only the amount of money we were spending eating out, it was that in the end we felt the same or worst if we had had a bowl of cereal or some air fried chicken nuggets at home. Not to mention when the kids want to eat the same things (Mac n cheese, anyone) but they wan’t to go to restaurant.
Instead of eliminating meals out, we reduced the ones that felt draining. For example we started with delivery services, because 75% of the time there was something wrong with the order. We either picked it up, save on the fees and tips or went inside to sit down and have a quality time together at the table, better if we went on a time with deals for extra savings.
Later when we needed to reduced more we limit the amount of times in a month we would go out or pick up food. Also we make a huge deal of birthday dinners out, and special celebrations.
You don’t need to only eat at home, but I’ll share more in another post about how I’ve been able to cook more at home even on the busiest days.
Convenience Spending, does it actually helps?
Convenience spending often is made when we feel that something is going to make life easier or bring some sort of satisfaction. Either because we saw a very good ad, a trend in social media that sold us this idea, or a “good discount.”
When we started to pay attention to these purchases we noticed that many of them, only solved a short-term problem, that was going to resolve it self. The items created clutter, they didn’t last, didn’t work as expected and some didn’t even help to achieve the idea we were searching for.
Again we didn’t zero the category, but we started to take longer before pressing the “buy now” button. We started to do research in all those items that were too good to be true. And when something was a good option, we started to save to be able to buy them. While waiting to save all the money, most times we ended up deciding the purchase was not going to improve our life.
Less money left our account, but more importantly, fewer things entered our home that didn’t serve us.
Recurring Expenses, not only subscriptions
This is another popular one, subscriptions because they are easy to justify and easy to forget to both use them, or cancel them. We didn’t cancel every subscription, but we did looked at all of them to determine if they were needed or not, even if we were using them.
In that evaluation we found free TV streaming services. I don’t watch much TV but Tubi is my favorite, you have to wait a few more days, but you can even watch new series from Fox without paying. We found out that the online gaming with 1,000’s of games didn’t had the ones my teen actually wanted to play. Just to mention some examples, we paused some subcriptions and then noticed we did actually used them enough to activate them again.
I challenge you not to only evaluate the subscriptions but the recurring expenses that aren’t bringing anything valuable or real to your day. Those expenses that have become habits, like getting a snack at the gas station or buy a coffee when running errands. They are small expenses that add up quickly and aren’t necessarily bringing the real things you want in your life.
Benefits of the expenses we cut
None of these changes were dramatic, and they didn’t reduce the budget by the 47% we were about to loose, but it helped us to be intentional and aware of our situation both financially and emotionally. There was less guilt when looking at our spending, we were able to free some money to be save as an emergency fund.
Monthly we could tackle small unexpected expenses and it helped us to actually use and enjoy what we have opportunities like going out to eat or the things we own. It was also a great step to create the habit of evaluating our expenses, when it was time to tackle a more complex category like groceries.
Try One Small Reduction This Week
You don’t need to overhaul your budget or cut everything at once. Remeber here we are all about small changes that we can commit to. This week, try this:
- Look at one recurring expense
- Ask whether it truly improves your daily life or not
- Adjust it slightly, do not eliminate it yet, and notice how it feels
If the reduction brings relief, keep it. If it creates tension, reconsider.
