How to Reduce Your Bills to Save Money Now!

you are in the midst of a special thing we're doing and we call it back to basics where I address topic areas where if you really want to grab hold of what's going on with your wallet and make a difference in it you dig deep today I want to deal with the concept of more month than money it is an American problem and although not uniquely American amplified heavily in our culture we in the United States are overwhelmingly a consumption oriented society it is for a number of reasons one the tax code in the United States is not set up specifically to reward people for spending less than what you make and we as a nation would benefit enormous Li if we went to what are known as consumption-based taxes that would reward you for money you hoarded money you did not spend we in the United States have an extremely low savings rate we as Americans tend depending on the month to be saving somewhere between two and four percent two cents of each dollar four cents of each dollar of what we make where in order to create real financial security in your life it needs to be a minimum dime of each dollar you make and in Asia it's customary that people save a third of what they make and it creates a lot more financial security than we have here all these things take time to turn the ship around and one of the areas that you can make a difference is in your monthly bills what you accept is just fact with your monthly bills I want to divide this into topic areas right now I want to address the bills that each individually may not seem consequential but add up to an enormous amount of money examples let's talk about technology cell phones internet service pay TV streaming services those kind of things and then there are others that are not necessarily tech oriented which are paying for utilities do you pay for like a gym membership do you have a burglar alarm what are you paying for it I mean all these monthlies that feel like they're automatics like you can't do anything about them one by one you can tackle them and come up with potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars back in your pocket we give you an example I talked to people all the time that are paying huge monthly bills for cell phone service and they tend to be creatures of habit they are in a plan with the two original dominant players AT&T or Verizon nothing wrong with either of the companies just that if you've been in a plan with them a long time odds are you are way overpaying for your cell phone service then you could make a big difference I was talking with a couple where one of them is over 55 and I said you know if you switch to t-mobile you could be paying $70 a month for unlimited everything as only one has to be over 55 to make that happen turns out she's paying on a legacy plan with Verizon for three people $270 a month so she can't save all 200 of that difference but she could save most of it by jettisoning third person and putting them on a cheap plan with somebody but making that change even when you have the information isn't easy you can break into the thousand dollar range or more for a family that you'll save just by making a change I have a cell phone plan guide at Clarke comm that we continually update because the cell phone choices have proliferated for service and there are so many alternatives that can be so affordable depending on your pattern internet service at your home you know most of us only have a choice if we have a choice of the monopoly local phone company and monopoly cable company whoever you're with put them in competition with the other one and every time a special deal with the one you switch to expires start the process over again yeah it's a little bit of hassle make sure you always got the quote in writing emails fine text is fine but you can save significant money usually 500 dollars or more a year by putting the two monopolies and competition for Internet one area that is not apples to apples is pay TV a lot of people are cutting the cord or cutting back what you get from traditional pay TV their satellite phone company or traditional cable company for pay TV and going to streaming services and I have a guide to the streaming services at Clark comm because if you are happy with the streams and you're judicious and how you pick them you should be able to reduce the typical pay TV package of right around 100 bucks a month to around 40 a month it won't be truly equivalent you might not have quite as many channels but you're going to save over the course of a year somewhere around six seven eight hundred dollars a year that's real money an item-by-item you pick up real money and if you do want to stay with striated traditional pay TV you just put them all in competition with each other satellites versus the phone company versus the cable company see who's willing to make the best deal at that moment and when that special deal expires you start again depending on where you live in the country you may have the ability to shop for utilities more and more places in the country you can go to a competitive provider for natural gas and or electricity and the more you pay attention to the offerings in the market the more money you can save and that depends on local rules and if you shop in gym memberships I was in a shopping center if it had one of those no-frills gyms ten bucks a month it's not fancy I went and looked in the window but it's ten dollars a month what are you paying for a gym membership do you even go to the gym and remember never join a gym that you have to sign a long-term contract with period and speaking of long-term contracts never never never not ever sign a contract with a burglar alarm company never never not ever you need to be a free agent on monitoring because the cost of monitoring varies so much month-to-month depending on who you're with and the quality will vary from company to company but there are a couple of companies that sell burglar alarms that have made them so that they are incompatible with anybody else monitoring them and when you call to get a quote on monitoring from another company they'll be able to they'll ask what brand do you have they'll immediately know if they'll have any trouble hooking up to it but when you re own a system you should not be signing a contract for monitoring you should be looking for monitoring in the price of somewhere 15 18 no more than 20 dollars a month for your home security monitoring system and what I suggest is if you still have a Yellow Pages accessible to you look in the back of the ads for security systems and start calling those companies first the other change with burglar alarms that's so different than that advice I've given all through the years is now the technology has improved so much you can do any of the many self-install burglar alarm systems that are much much cheaper to own and operate with extremely low to no cost each month for monitoring and I do have information about some of those Clark comm I'm going to get into how you deal with the big money that you spend every month eating out is so frightfully more expensive than eating a home and don't try to go from 70% out to zero start slow so you know the person you see you always brings his or her own lunch they're spending probably five dollars a work week and you're spending thirty that alone is gonna bring a hundred bucks back into your life and come up with a plan my oldest daughter makes a meal plan every Sunday which she's going to make herself for lunch all week long and then she makes her lunches Sunday evening and has them available for her you know she keeps them in a refrigerator just grabs each day's lunch and take it takes it into work and you don't need a budget you just need to do that this part of this is the much tougher part because all those little things you can say add up and they do and they can end up being in the hundreds or thousands in a year that they put back in your wallet but facts are facts and the big money that we spend each year is in the two areas that once we've got those expenses it gets harder to stop while using on them and that's housing and cars this is more about them as expenses in your life they don't give you any breathing room in your life and housing the most expensive part of our monthly budget for most of us cars the second most expensive the easiest change to make in your life isn't what you spend on transportation each month I say it's easy because even if you are choking on some loan those car loans pay out and then the greatest way you reform your budget is by not getting in another car payment for as long as you can avoid it because the big hit to your wallet on owning transportation is the depreciation that you pay in the early years you know the drop in value each year the high cost of the financing on it and the high cost of insuring a newer more expensive car so if you will change for the rest of your life your relationship with transportation and think of doing this if you like to buy new cars that you only buy one with a contract with yourself that you will keep that new vehicle a minimum of 10 years or if you buy used cars that you'll keep a used car a minimum of four years why is the choice so start use versus new because the great level of depreciation loss and value in a car happens when it's brand-new for the first really 40 months and then after that there's much less loss in value month after month so if you buy used cars you're already ahead of the game as long as they're in good shape but then if you drive that vehicle for even as little as four years you will event the cost curve of transportation in your life most people never get out from under a monthly payment and think about all that money you're paying month after month that if you owned a car free and clear month after month you have no payment that's money you're not paying that the person in the next driveway is paying and so the car thing is very easy to do if you'll make that psychological change in your life let's talk housing housing can be an albatross there's a philosophy a lot of people were raised with that you buy the biggest house you can possibly qualify for a loan for and fortunately there are a lot of people who are first-time homebuyers who don't think that way because think about how much square footage in a home we really don't use I think how many rooms in a home you don't use and the more you will temper the square footage to what you actually need versus what you're looking at because you're excited remember less to take care of Leicester repair less to maintain is so much better an idea than big bigger and biggest now I want to talk rent for a minute because a third of us rent and rents have caused a lot of people to wheeze financially in apartments or being incredibly over built in most the country if you are a renter and you're feeling squeezed by rents know that all the construction is your friend and if you will avoid being a creature of habit and staying where you are and go shop the market who knows what you're going to find because if you stay where you are odds are the rents gonna go up but the more you survey the market and the more you're willing to walk the more you're willing to move from the rental you're in with overbuilding rife and so much of the country the better a deal you're going to get I'm giving you homework for that homework generates potentially thousands of take-home dollars in your pocket tax-free dollars that you keep hold up you have to be willing to stop inertia and start something better and cheaper [Music]

Channel: Clark Howard: Save More, Spend Less

Views: 23,914

Keywords: save money, how to save money, money saving tips, how to save money on food, how to save money on electric bill, how to save money on bills, how to save money on a cell phone plan, how to save money on internet, how to save money on tv, how to save money on utilities, how to save money on utility bills, how to save money on gym membership, how to save money on an alarm system, how to save money on transportation, how to save money on an apartment, how to save money on rent

Id: -TIuQDLMkzo

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 24 2020