It’s a new year and I’m newly inspired to do housekeeping and penny saving. Sometimes a small behavioral shift can save significant amounts of money over the course of a year. I just did my year end accounting and got to look at all the numbers for 2005. Some of them I’m proud of ($312 to clothe a family of six all year), some I’m not (did we really spend $11,000 on our vehicles?! Yipe!). I look at the numbers, take a big breath, and move on. At least now I know a little better where to focus my efforts to bring our expenses down. And they must come down if I want to make ends meet through the end of the year.
So, I’ve been cleaning house. How does cleaning save me money? If things are organized around here, then I know what my resources are and I can lay my hands on them quickly when I need them. I need to have working systems for laundry, food inventory, kitchen cleaning, and meal preparation. Fortunately I’ve already got each of these about half done, I just need to clean up the spaces and implement the other half. I’ve been practicing on it this weekend and feeling incredibly domestic. If I succeed in these goals I will have turned into a Domestic Goddess who cooks three healthy meals a day, keeps her kitchen spotless, always has her line-dried laundry done, and tracks her food storage religiously. “Domestic Goddess” is not something I ever really wanted to be. It has a negative connotation to it because it seems somehow “holier than thou.” On the other hand, being that person allows our family to run smoothly on a small income, so like it or not, Domestic Goddess here I come. I hope.
I can believe the $11,000 number. I spend $6120 on a single car, fuel, and insurance per year. This doesn’t count the $250 or so for accessories, oil, etc. A large portion of that is the actual car payment though…
The nice thing is, once the car payments are over with, that $11,000 should drop precipitously.
Another side benefit is that with no lienholder, you’re free to adjust the insurance coverage for collision & comprehensive stuff. Most finance companies want to see no more than a $500 deductible, because they know the higher the deductible, the higher the chance that damage doesn’t get repaired. If you can stomach the chance of getting hit with the higher deductible actually coming into play, you could end up saving another $20-40/month by upping it to $1,000.
With our older truck, we just dropped comp & collision entirely. Book value is under $2,000; and to cover it with a $1,000 deductible means $30-$50 more per month. Didn’t make sense given that any accident is likely to result in the repair costing more than the book value, so it gets totaled, and after deductible we end up with a check for less than $1,000.
Hopefully you’re already seeing a drop in the routine maintenance costs, with Howard not putting commuting miles on a vehicle. Hubby’s car mileage dropped > 80% when he switched jobs: it’s driven to the airport once a week and that’s about that. Now we will actually hit the 3-month interval for oil changes before we hit the 3,000-miles.