19. Establishing Areas of Potential Savings

The first, easiest, and most accessible means of increasing your ability to save is reducing your spend. Many people find this stage of savings to be stressful or tedious but this is an incredibly important and simple first step to take to better control your finances.

Although you may buy a large of number of items in a given month and your spend may be spread across a variety of credit or debit cards, for the vast majority of people your sources of spend are relatively simple. As we outlined in a previous blog, your sources of spend are relatively straight forward. 

Sources of Spend

1. Housing (Rent or Mortgage Repayment)
2. Utilities (Water, Gas, etc.)
3. Phone Bill & Cable
4. Discretionary Spend (Credit Card Bill)
5. Car Payments or Car Expenses
6. Loan Repayment
7. Medical Bills

If you are going to succeed in lowering your monthly spend you are going to need to explore each of these areas in detail. Over the next few blogs, you will learn to negotiate, organize & analyze, and revisit your previous decisions to reduce your monthly expenses substantially to accelerate your savings. Consider the above list a checklist to reduce your spend and the following blog strategies to extract additional savings out of these common expenses.

Our first blog in this journey is how to reduce your housing costs.