Our savings is starting to dwindle, so it was time to figure out where we can save some money in our monthly budget.  We’ve already stopped going out to eat for the most part and are making weekly meal plans which helps us avoid the “what do you want for dinner?” trap that usually ends in us going out.  Since we’re upgrading our super cheap, bare bones cell phone plan to add a lot more minutes as well as data, we thought we might drop our land line.  So I called Windstream this morning to figure out how much that would save us.

Unfortunately, not enough.  If we drop our phone service, our Dish network bill goes up by $5/month, plus our DSL goes up by $20/month.  There goes that savings!  Ugh…it’s so frustrating!  And we HAVE to add minutes to our cell plan…our bill last month was more than double it’s normal rate because my husband is using his cell exclusively for business calls.  So if I can pay double the bill we have now and either pay an insane amount for overage or pay a bit less than double and get 1500 minutes + unlimited data, then it only makes good sense to do that.  We’ll eventually be billing it to the business, but since there’s no income there yet it does present a minor obstacle.

I did drop some of our phone services, as well as dropping our Dish plan down a notch.  I wonder how long it will take before people start to notice the missing channels and I get complained at?  (Yes, I know that’s terrible grammar.  Deal.)  It will save us $30/month.  Which really isn’t much when your income is zero, but it’s a start.  Our electric is currently on an equal pay plan, so I can’t do much better with that, and we’re already pretty conservative with the water use.  I guess if the income doesn’t start in a month or 2 we’ll have to get really crazy…maybe drop Dish completely (I think I might die if we did this!) and eat the expenses involved with dropping our land line.  We wouldn’t save a ton, but it would save us a bit anyway.  We had really gotten spoiled with the good income and when it suddenly disappears, it hurts.