March Spring Clean: Day 13

It’s Day 6 of our personal finance week as part of the March Spring Clean. Are your finances starting to feel a bit more organised yet, after taking one small step each day? I know mine are!

Today we are going to look for some waste to trim out of our monthly budgets. It’s good to do this a few times a year, as our needs and wants change, and tariffs rise or fall.

In the last Jump Start Month, which was back in January, lots of us found regular expenses to cancel or renegotiate. The most common activity was to cancel magazine subscriptions – they were always magazines which we’d once liked but no longer read, so the money was effectively going to waste.

I cancelled a mag subscription too, and was really happy when the last seven months of subscription were refunded to me. Today I’m cancelling an arts membership which I hardly ever use. I’m a bit sad about it, but seeing as I rarely use it any more, the cost-per-use is actually working out at double the cost of simply turning up and buying tickets.

Therefore, it has to go. I’ve promised myself to still attend a few events here and there, and paying on an ad hoc basis is almost certainly going to work out cheaper.

Which bill or standing order are you thinking about cancelling or renegotiating?

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If you’d like a full month-long Jump Start programme with lots of extra activities and resources – including a comprehensive Tenner Week – we’ve made one in ebook format that can be downloaded from Amazon. Find out more about the Jump Start 2013 ebook.

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