We’re well into the new year and that means I’m making progress on my challenge to live with more intention and to try to save more and spend less. I want to make sure I’m being wise with my money and spending it where it matters and not wasting it on junk or mindless purchases that I’m not even going to care about in a week or two. While I was looking into our budget for last year, I thought we had pretty much cut out all the unnecessary spending, but I found some ways that I was able to cut back and actually save quite a bit of money this coming year.
Here’s a list of things that I looked into to help save our family money and that may be helpful for you as well:
1. Switching the payment method for daycare: We went from paying with a credit card to paying by check for my daughter’s daycare. I don’t know if other places present the option to pay via credit or debit card for childcare, but our daycare does and when I really looked into it, we’re paying a $5.78 fee every week for paying online with a card. That doesn’t sound like much, but over the year that’s a $277 savings by simply paying with a check!
2. Removing AppleCare on my husband’s phone: This one will definitely be more of a case by case basis, but for my husband’s phone, we definitely didn’t need AppleCare. When something happens to it, we would simply upgrade to a new one. This is definitely going to depend on your family and the age/condition of the phone, etc., but we cut that out this year. This was $10 a month and that’s saving us a total of $120 a year.
3. We cancelled YouTube TV: Let’s be real, my kids are watching Peppa Pig on YouTube kids (for free) or Ms. Rachel (for free) at any given time. We barely turn the tv on to anything other than that unless it’s a sporting event which we can usually find on ESPN (which we have through our Disney+ bundle). We got an email saying the price was going to increase to $82 a month starting this month and I decided to just go ahead and cut that out. There was no need for it for us. We are saving $984 a year from cancelling that.
4. I said goodbye to Kindle Unlimited: This one is hard for me as it was near and dear to my heart. I wanted access to all the Kindle Unlimited books and there is a huge offering to choose from at any given time. However, I can also use the free Libby library app to get the same books (I may just have to wait for a little bit) or go check out the book at the library for free as well. There are also tons of free ebooks you can find on various days of the year called “Stuff Your Kindle Days” where you can find thousands of books for absolutely no charge at all. I decided to go ahead and cancel this subscription; that is going to save us $180 a year.
5. No more Amazon Prime: This one was equally as hard as Kindle Unlimited because I always want it there in case we need it but the truth is, we barely use it. We definitely use it for birthdays and Christmas presents, but that’s pretty much it. We can also get free shipping usually on Prime with orders of $35 or more without a Prime subscription. We pay for this yearly and this is going to save us $130 a year.
6. Target ban: Did you read that right? You certainly did. This girl is a Target fanatic and I was easily going 2-3 times per week. When I looked back on 2024, the average I was spending in a month at Target alone was $600. Sure, some of that was groceries or diapers, but definitely not all of it. Let’s say half of that spending was on essentials and half was on things I didn’t necessarily need. By cutting out Target trips, we’re saving $3600.
The grand total we’re going to be saving this year JUST from making those changes alone is $5291. That’s an insane amount of money that was being spent on things we didn’t even really use. It’s almost become a fun game to see what else we can save on. I know that doesn’t sound very appealing at first, but once you start looking at what you can cut back on and realizing you’re able to actually save so much more because of it, it becomes really freeing.
