Febusave – 1.5 weeks in.
Posted by: Liz at 8:16 pm, February 10th, 2010
I’ve been meaning to write an update on Febusave for a little while now, but it hasn’t been very adventure-y at all yet!
So far…
- I’ve reduced the amount of money I spend on buying lunch by taking my water bottle with me so I’m not wasting money on a drink.
- Our last weekly shop (every Friday) was much cheaper than usual. We made sure our list only contained things we actually needed. No chocolate, no snacks, no random treats. Yes, I have been missing them, but I figure if I’m too lazy to bake something with what we have in the house, then I don’t need it *that* much.
- We were doing really well with not eating out until tonight. We were both exhausted and figured that Jarod’s last day required a celebratory pizza be delivered to us. Oops.
- I haven’t spent my money on anything other than the aforementioned lunches. It probably helped that we didn’t really leave the house last weekend.
As I start to get called in for interviews more money is being spent. Any time I need to attend an interview in the city costs me $7.20 for a return ticket. If I get off at Central, that’s only 3 stops from my starting point (Newtown). But it can’t be helped – unless I want to be like Jarod and start riding everywhere. And we all know that’s not going to happen any time soon. Fingers crossed I may impress someone with my mad skillz and get a full time job soon which would make travelling into the city worthwhile!
One thing I want to mention is that when I went to part time work, Jarod and I went through all our expenses and made sure we were not wasting money. This included our internet, phone, electricity and mobile bills. A few things we discovered:
- We were one bundle too high on our internet. It was only $10 extra a month, but we could (and did) easily move down a bundle on our Broadband and VoIP usage. We consistently use all of our allocated limit now, but that’s better than paying for something that we don’t use in full.
- Before I left full time work we looked at our mobile phone plans. We were both with Vodafone, but found by moving to Virgin Mobile that we could text and call each other (and other Virgin Mobile users) for free. I’ve not worked out how much we’ve saved, but it’s so much easier to be able to pick up the phone without thinking about how much we’re spending by calling or smsing each other.
- Our phone line is one thing that we should really get rid of. When I first moved into this unit, Naked DSL wasn’t an option. Now that it is, we could be saving $30 a month on line rental… if we’re willing to survive up to 10 days without the Internet. It’s pretty silly – we don’t even use that Telstra line. All of our calls are done with the VOIP line because it is cheaper. It’s something that we need to talk about further… no Internet is a big deal ;)
There’s always opportunities to save money… sometimes you just need to look for them.
