It's no secret that in this day and time, we all need to save as much money as possible. Everything is so expensive these days and it's hard to make ends meet, especially when you live paycheck to paycheck like we do. You get to a point that you are tired of struggling, so you decide to make some changes in your spending habits. Here 7 changes that my family has made in order to save money.



1) We cut the cord on Cable- Yep! You heard that right. We were so tired of paying money for cable, especially when nothing was ever on. It wasn't worth paying the extra money a month for us to maybe get to watch one or two shows that we liked. So we cut the cord, and we are now saving $90 a month. We stream Netflix and Hulu from our xbox 360 and watch what we want. We pretty much watched Netflix all of the time before cancelling cable since nothing was ever on anyway. We do not regret our decision at all.

2) Lowered our cell phone bill- I realized that we were not using as much data or talk as our plan allowed, so I had the plan dropped to a lower plan. Keep in mind, there have been a few times that we went over on text and data usage, but for the most part we closely monitored how much data we were using and realized we were not anywhere near going over, so why not step down to a lower paying plan. By doing this, we have saved $40 a month.

3) Using Cash- Other than automatic withdrawals for bills, we use strictly cash. It's so easy to swipe a debit card and then forget to keep your receipt or write down what you spent. This results in spending more money than what you have and sometimes costly overdraft fees. I leave the amount in the  account for monthly bills to be automatically be taken out and use cash for everything else. I find that we do so much better this way. We definitely realize how much money we have left that we have available to spend.

4) Dining out less- Eating out can get expensive fast, so I cook more at home. We try to only dine out at a nice restaurant once or twice a month. If we eat out more than that, we try to choose cheap places such as Wendy's 4 for $4 or Papa John's $5 Pizza's.

5) Meal Planning- This one is very very important! My husband gets paid weekly so I plan out our meals every week. In this plan, I allow for what we will have for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. This also includes my husband's food that he packs for lunch.  To be honest, most of the time breakfast consists of cereal, scrambled eggs or oatmeal because it's much cheaper. I write down everything that I need for each meal and categorize it. Meal planning is the only way to go. If you go to the grocery store without a list or plan, you always end up spending so much more money.

6) Coupon- I am not a pro at all and I do not extreme coupon. I only use coupons for the things that I need. For example, I needed laundry detergent this week and I used a coupon for that. Rite Aid had Arm and Hammer Detergent on sale for $1.99 I used a $1 off coupon as was able to get it for 99 cents. I stocked up on a few so that I wouldn't have to buy it again for a while.

7) Shop the cheapest- Our area has been opening a lot of liquidation stores lately, so I have been shopping there for a lot of necessary items such as toilet paper, paper towels, deodorants and etc. I find that it is much cheaper to shop there than the dollar stores. This has saved us quite a bit of money.

These changes have been an adjustment, but they have not been hard. They have been worth it to save the extra money. You get tired of struggling after a while and realize that some changes need to be made. Hopefully we can get of of debt soon. What money saving changes are you currently making?