Click, Save: More than 1,100 bloggers are devoting their Web space to family frugality
Illustration: Alex Nabaum for Newsweek
Sara and Michael Brady, new parents in Springfield, Pa., are wearing this season’s new fashion: tight belts. She’s a systems analyst, he’s a CPA, and together they’ve squeezed $200 a month out of the family budget. They’ve halved their grocery bill, cut their landline and cell-phone bills, and negotiated a lower interest rate on their credit card—just for fun, because they never actually have a balance. Now Sara is posting her tips at bethriftylikeus.blogspot.com. She’s one of a crowd of more than 1,100 bloggers devoting their space to family frugality.
Cheap is the new cool, and just in the nick of time. Economic worries, $4-a-gallon gas, a weak job market and stuck salaries are scaring everyone into taking another look at their expenses. Happily, much of the belt-tightening can be painless if done right. Here’s how to run your own squeeze play.
Go for the big bucks first. Insurance is in a category that Greg Karp, author of “Living Rich by Spending Smart” (FT Press. $17.99), calls “low-hanging fruit.” It’s easy to pluck big savings from your policies by raising your deductibles, comparison-shopping all your policies at least once a year, turning to one company for your auto and homeowner’s insurance, and using all the safe-driver, good-student, home-security-system discounts you have coming to you. Raise the deductibles on your car insurance from $200 to $1,000 and you can save as much as 40 percent on your premiums. Do the same with your homeowner’s insurance, and set the savings aside to cover the higher deductibles.
Control your electronics. If you “need” a full menu of cable channels, a home phone and high-speed Internet, you can probably save hundreds of dollars a year by bundling all your services and getting competitive quotes from your local cable and phone companies, says Consumer Reports. You can often find a $99-a-month deal for all three. But if you break up that bundle and really focus on the services you need, you might save more. You can cut your cell-phone bill with a prepaid phone deal, or ramp up your cell-phone use and cut your landline altogether. You can use an Internet-based phone service like skype.com ($3 per month) or magicjack.com (a one-time $40 device fee) instead of placing long-distance calls from your home phone. Every six months, call your phone and cable companies to ask if they have cheaper plans.
Focus on food. There are two different approaches to saving on groceries. The Sara Brady way involves downloading coupons from sites like hotcouponworld.com, shopping the local sales and pairing coupons to low prices in a way that’s so artful she’ll get $21 worth of goods, plus $17 in coupons back, for spending $11. This requires spreadsheets, a couple of hours of comparing items, three to five shopping trips a week, and the discipline not to stock up on stuff you don’t want just because you have a coupon. Mary Webber of frugalfamilykitchen.com goes the other way, advocating a less-shopping-is-better approach. She goes to the grocery once every other week and steers clear of packaged and processed foods.
Cut your restaurant budget. It’s one of the biggest money pits. The average household spends almost half its $6,000 annual food budget eating out. Put prepared meals in the freezer and skip the stop for rotisserie chicken. When you do eat out, use coupons from sites like entertainment.com and restaurant.com. And, you’ve heard it before, but here’s one more try: brew your own coffee. You can buy a nice travel cup for the cost of two overpriced lattes. By the end of your first week, you’ll have $15 extra that you can take to the bank.
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