Cutting the Budget!

From Jenna:

The first thing my husband and I did when we decided that I would be a stay at home / work from home mom was to seriously cut our budget. We ended up saving $500 off our monthly expenses. Here's some ideas that helped us do this:

• Refinancing our mortgage
  
• Increasing the deductible on homeowners and car insurance
  
• Start doing our own "dry cleaning"
  
• Decrease the amount of my personal money coming to me each month since I wouldn't have to be buying lunches out, etc.
  
• Less commute means less gas money!
  
• Removed "extras" from our cell phone package
  
• Cut down on entertainment money
  

Before we made this decision, I had been convinced that we were at our minimal household budget. There are always creative ways to continue to cut the budget though and I'm committed to finding new ones. The best way to do this is just to be really honest about what's important to you and budget only around those priorities. Everything else is trivial.

What this did essentially was to buy me more time. The less I was responsible for bringing into the household, the more time I could spend "out of work" and figuring out how to work from home instead.

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step".