Economic Endeavors

Before working on my new budget, I decided that it would benefit me more and make the most of the new budget if I re-evaluate my monthly bills and try to lower them where possible.
This is my current budget, soon to be changed:
$400.00 - Rent
$208.04 - Car payment
$172.00 - Insurance
$135.00 - Cell phones
$130.00 - Cable and Internet
$ 75.00 - Electricity (this will go up when we start using the AC soon)
$130.00 - Gas (this will go down as we start using the heat less soon)
$ 30.00 - Credit Card payments (this is an estimated amount, but it's usually pretty accurate)
$214.00 - Student Loan payment

That's it. Doesn't seem like much, huh? Well, with just my husband working and only making $13 an hour with no option for overtime, it's almost all our income with not much left over after food and gas.
So I try hard to stretch what we have and come up with new ways to earn money at home and new ways to save what we have.
So looking at the bills, there isn't really any way to reduce our lot rent, unless we got rid of our dog, who we pay $20 each month for in our rent total. But that's not an option, so we'll leave that alone. Actually, it will change with the new budget, because we got a notice in April that the rent will be increasing $20 starting May 1. This increase affects everyone who lives in our mobile home community.
Car payment can't be changed, either.
Insurance , however, was a different story. We had Progressive, and at the time we got the policy 2 years ago, it was as low as we could find after shopping around. We still felt we were paying too much when we compared our ages, good driving records, and type of vehicle (Scion XB, which is considered a station wagon, I believe) to friends of ours who have lower premiums, sports cars, and accidents and tickets on their records. A friend of ours referred us to his mom who works for State Farm, assuring us that she could get us lower than we're currently paying. Well, yesterday I finally got around to making the call. She got us a rate that is $30 less per month, which is fantastic. While I still think $142/month is high and I don't really understand why, I'm thrilled to be saving our family $360 a year in insurance payments alone.
I also took a look at our t-mobile account. We were on a 1000 minute shared family plan, plus extra for blackberry internet service one each of our two blackberry phones. The internet service can't be changed, because t-mobile requires it for blackberry phones with their service, but I realized that in the last 6 months, we haven't come close to using all 1000 of our minutes. We haven't gone over 600, and usually are much lower than even that. So I dropped our plan down to 800 shared minutes (Tim didn't want me to go lower than that for fear that if we do go over, we'll be paying $0.40 a minute). This will save us $20 a month, and $240 over the course of the year!
I also called our cable company, Comcast, and told them I'm thinking of canceling our cable service and switching to the Dish (which Tim and I have been talking about) and just keeping our internet service through Comcast. The representative negotiated me down to an internet plan that is supposedly slower (I haven't noticed a difference at all since switching) but costs $20 instead of $40 a month, so now I'll be saving $20 a month there!
Needless to say, I'm thrilled that I'll be starting my budget with lower bills, and I was able to save our family $840 a year just by taking an hour of my day to make a few phone calls.
Now if only I could figure out a way to negotiate my gas and electric bills!

I would encourage all of my readers to set aside some time one afternoon to look and your bills, call your companies, and find out where you can cut back and save!