Budget cuts to become a SAHM

Daniel and I have lived a really comfy lifestyle. Two incomes, a mortgage, two car payments, lots of eating out, and vacations. When we first got married we lived off of Daniel’s income, saved all of mine for a house, invested 30% into retirement and were still able to buy/do whatever we wanted! We thought we had it all figured out. This adulting thing was easy! Until we bought a house.... draining a huge chunk of our savings account. Then I needed a new car because mine was the one my parents bought for my 16th birthday. The older we got the more things we had to add into our budget, and eventually it seemed like we had to have two incomes to survive. We laughed at the idea of being able to afford living with one income. Not because we had actually done the math, thought about what we could cut out, or even really discussed it, but we were both certain that it wasn’t possible for us.

Once Daniel felt God telling him that I should stay home, we crunched the numbers. We both expected the worst. That we would have to sell the house, move in with my parents, drain our savings account. All the things we had worked so hard for didn’t seem quite as important anymore. Based on our budget we are making a few changes that have made it possible for me to stay home!

One Car
We are selling Daniel’s truck. My husband is so incredibly selfless! By selling his truck we are able to pay off his truck loan, and my car loan! That means NO MORE CAR PAYMENTS! We will start saving for another car when we are able to, but for now we are a one car household. No car payments is around $10,000 a year back in our pockets. This also saves us about $1200 in gas!

No Cable
We cancelled our cable! We still have Hulu and Netflix so the only show we can’t watch anymore is Big Brother. 😭 Cable was costing us over $1000 a year! Not worth it.

Insurance
We found a better deal for home and car insurance! Every year your insurance rates increase without any call or notice from the company. Shop around for insurance whenever you feel like your bill is getting too high! This is saving us almost $2000 a year.

Phones
Daniel and I got suckered into one of those pay for your phone monthly deals with Sprint, which was costing us a TON of money. We went ahead and paid our phones off, and are canceling Spring to switch to Walmart Family Mobile. Both of those adjustments save us over a $1000 per year.

Food
Sorry friends, but we will not be going out to dinner anymore!! We will just have to go to eachother’s houses instead. 🤣 We are sticking to a very strict food budget each month. Which means I have to cook a lot.... I’ll let you know if my skills improve. I’m embarrassed to say that this change is saving us around $4000 a year. 🙈

Shopping/Random Luxury Expenses
I don’t have an exact number for how much this is saving us, but it’s a lot. We are habitual Amazon Prime users. It’s an addiction. It takes all of the effort out of spending money so that it almost doesn’t even feel like we are spending any! We agreed to $25 each every month to spend however we’d like. I’ll be using mine on Chick-fil-A waffle fries which are $2... so I can have 12.5 large waffle fries a month. 🤣

Subscriptions
We found ALL of our random subcriptions and cancelled the ones we could. Including Amazon Music Unlimited, Cinemark Movie Club, CBS, and a lot of others that I can’t remember. Canceling those uneccesary subscriptions is saving us around $500 a year.

Just from those changes we are saving close to 20,000 dollars a year!!! We decided sacrificing some of the luxuries is totally worth me staying home with our kids. I’ll be sharing about Financial Peace University soon. It has been a life saver to us when it comes to financial planning.

Obviously these changes wouldn't work for anyone, but we really had no idea that we were wasting so much money every month! Even if you don't have to make financial changes, it's worth looking over your budget to see what you are willing to live without.