This past six months has been quite difficult for me in some ways. Our business revenue dropped by about 20%, and as a result, we faced a drop in our personal incomes of about the same amount. It became my mission as a result to find ways to cut unnecessary expenses, and to my surprise, these ways have been effective. So what did we cut!?

We cut two things: financially related expenses and incidentals.
1. We took a large knife to our insurance bills that worked effectively. We found we were over insured in some ways, or overpaying for insurance in other ways. We saved about

2. We were quite aggressive in reducing our mortgage payments when we had the chance. The temptation when you are superbusy is to avoid dealing with financial issues. You forget that you are busy making money, so you end up wasting money on bad financing deals, higher expenses, poor financial products, etc..

3. I spent time looking for higher interest rates and a more efficient current account this past year. Again, I decided to optimize my income resources as a way to ease the pressure on our finances. It worked well. I managed to double my average interest rate (also thanks to rising rates).

4. We have a car loan that is currently nearly 60% paid up. The interest rate and payments are fixed so there’s not much we can do there. Since we don’t carry any personal loans, we have no room for any improvement on that score, at all.

5. But, we were spending quite a lot of money on credit card expenses, including interest payments. So we took action by paying off our credit cards completely, which took a few months, and then making a resolution to NOT run credit card charges of any kind. EVER.

It’s difficult to figure out how much we saved as a result, but we know we saved quite a bit. I’d guess that we probably saved more than $3,300 over the course of a year or more. Not bad. So, if I can do it, you can, too.

This post was saved and sponsored by The Thrifty Scot.