The Rewards of Saving | NY Zone Exchange

The past few years have been a challenging time for many people here in the U.S. Many folks have been trying very hard to cut costs across the line. Cuts are being made at every level from the small business owners on main street, to the big corporations lining the street of NYC, to the everyday regular citizen. You might not be able to do all the little things that used to do like go out to dinner or buy those nice shoes you’ve been peering in the window. But you don’t have to suffer tremendously through these times and it won’t be necessary to get a paycheck advance to afford the simple luxuries of life, if you just cut back on a few unneeded things. In addition to minimizing your costs, there are plenty of ways to make your money stretch so that you can still enjoy some of life’s pleasures.

One of the first things I did when gas prices started to rise, was get rid of of my SUV. It was pretty hard to let go, I loved that car, but every time i filled the tank it cost me $80.00. Seeing that much money coming out of my account on a weekly basis convinced me to downsize to a compact car. It now only costs me $35 bucks every two weeks, I went from spending $4200 a year (or probably more from vacations and extra driving) to $1800!! A total savings of $2400 a year! That’s incredible when you think about it. The other cut back my wife and I made was getting rid of our digital t.v./ internet/phone package. This entire service was costing us about $120.00 a month, and I know that most all Americans have cable t.v, it’s become a household staple. The average household in America today, pays on average of $150.00 a month in cable, internet and phone services. That’s $1800 dollars in a year! My wife and I thought about it realistically, we normally just ended up sitting on the couch clicking through the channels a billion times complaining that we had nothing to watch. We have a digital t.v. so we went out and got an antenna that works perfectly fine and gives us 10 HD channels, funny enough, I don’t even miss the 100′s of channels I had before, I get everything I need from these few channels and we save a ton of money. We kept the internet though, that’s a tough one to live without. But if you need to be extra tight, you could get rid of that too, and just head over to the nearest library to check your email.

Doing all these little things to save money is great, it becomes like a game we play to see how much we can save and put aside in a month. Those were just a few examples of some cut backs we made, there a plenty more. After all of our bills are paid, savings put aside, we allow ourselves some money to go out and enjoy ourselves, with a nice dinner and a movie date. Because let’s face it, after all that hard work, we deserve a reward and we need to make sure we enjoy life, cause in the end that’s all that really matters.