Vonage

Since buying our house our savings account has really taken a beating. It’s down to about half of what it was before we bought the house. I was expecting that to happen because we wanted a bunch of stuff for our new house.

Now we are pretty much settled in. There shouldn’t any more major purchases for a while. The other day we sat down and looked at all our expenses and tried to find things that we no longer use and could do away with. It’s amazing how much little things add up. From Netflix, Audible, my web host, DirecTV, phone, cell phones, and internet sure add up. We unsubscribed from HBO since neither of use could remember the last time we watched it, but we didn’t really want to get rid of any thing else. We were tempted to get rid of our land line. When we moved we had to change phone plans and out phone bill went up $15. We rarely use our land line. It is mostly used for incoming calls that we don’t want on our cell phone and it is also nice to have when we have family visiting. So last week I signed up for Vonage. I got it all set up today. I am a little nervous about the quality, I haven’t used it enough to tell how good it is, but for only $15 a month for 500 minutes of out going calls local or long distant and unlimited incoming calls is a pretty good deal. For $10 more I could have got unlimited minutes, but I don’t see us ever using more than 500 anyways.

So I guess we have saved $50 a month so far. Not much, but every little bit helps. I don’t mind paying for things we use, but I think we have a lot of waste. Next year our goal is to get our saving back up again to what it was before we bought the house. We feel much more comfortable knowing that if something major happens, we have enough in savings to cover most things.