Do An Annual Review of Your Expenses

In this video, I’ll tell you about my big review of all of my regular monthly expenses.

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Hi, everyone! This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll tell you about my big review of all of my regular monthly expenses.

I think I established in a couple of my other videos that I am a bit of a budget nerd. I like setting up a budget, tracking expenses, and maintaining the system. But, as with any project, I’m always most excited about the setting up part. The problem is that, as you live your life, you add new things to your monthly expenses and expand your budget to accommodate them, but if you are like me, you rarely take a good, hard look at everything to determine if you REALLY need to spend that money, or if you might be paying too much in each category. In this video, I am advocating doing this process once a year.

Now, this can be a pretty big project depending on how trim your budget is or how good you are about researching things before you sign up for them. For me, it had been a while since I had taken a hard look at each category, so it was a fairly size-able project.

The would recommend starting a spreadsheet for this. I use Google Sheets, but you can use whatever spreadsheet program you feel most comfortable with. The first tab should be a listing from your monthly budget of all of your budget categories and how much you generally spend each month. I would go through each and make some notes on whether you think you can reduce costs, get new quotes, or cancel your service. So, for example, for my cell phone category, I’m thinking about switching providers, for Utilities, I made a note that a better thermostat may help to reduce costs, and so one. For any category that you think is okay right now, you can move it to the bottom of the list. For every other category, I would make a separate tab just for those costs.

Let me give you a example of a particularly bloated category for us — TV/Internet/Phone. We have Verizon Fios for all of these services, so I keep them together on my budget. In addition, we have added a bunch of other stuff onto this category over the years — namely our streaming content services like Netflix, NFL Sunday Ticket for Steelers games, HBO, etc. I renegotiated our rates for Fios about a year ago, but now we were thinking about cutting the cord.

The very first thing I need to do on my spreadsheet is understand my current service, what I’m paying for, and then do some thinking about whether we still need it. So, break out your latest bill. Make every line item on your bill a line item on your spreadsheet — well, maybe you can combine taxes, fees, and surcharges, but basically, you want to try to understand exactly what your vendor is charging you for, so that you can make comparisons to other services. In my case, we were paying a bundled price for all 3 services, plus a pretty steep rental fee for the 3 DVR receivers, another rental fee for our wireless router for Internet, and some taxes and fees. Now I went looking online for other services that could provide us what we need. What about cable? Do I need my phone line? How much extra am I willing to pay for that? Can I reduce my Internet speed? I make some notes on my spreadsheet based on what other options I find online and make a note of any questions I may have for each option. So, here are some of my questions: what is my early termination fee since I’m in the middle of my contract? Can I switch to only two services and for what cost? How much would i pay if I got Internet only? What is the cost for a higher speed Internet?

Then you start making calls to vendors to fill in the details of the other options (which are represented by columns) on your spreadsheet. Laying it all out in one place helps you to see everything you are paying for, to compare apples to apples, and to brainstorm on other options that might not be obvious. Based on this exercise, we ended up cutting the cord, reducing our Verizon services to only Internet and phone, subscribing to YouTube TV for steaming services, and sending back all of those receivers. This saves us about $60 off our monthly bill. Also, I love just having one remote for every TV in the house!

For some of your budget categories, it’s not important to compare services . . .

[wsgarland]

I want to become more of a budget nerd! Love your videos, thanks so much.

[bcrtve]

Too time-consuming for me with all those manual entrys. I agree a spreadsheet is excellent to compare if upgrading or downgrading but I prefer Quicken for reporting. Once Quicken is set-up, charges are auto-downloaded. Categorizing, memos and tagging are key.
Quicken reporting can be customized so its ideal for a spending history.
Quicken runs specials, I think they are 40% off now.
I'm not a budget nerd but I do like to know where my $ go. Quicken makes it easy to see if a bill or charge is out of line.
I enjoy your videos.

[RameshKumar-ngnf]

Hello, Ver helpful info .. love your channel. Can you please make a video on using truecaller for iphone users ? If you have idea on it... I already installed truecaller in my new iphone 11 pro, but whenever new calls coming, i dont see the users name in truecaller.... I checked all the settings in youtube, but still dosent work. Nobody is listening to my request. Thought to request you and try if you have a iphone and can make a video on truecaller how it works in your phone .. Many thanks.

[Spriteomatic]

I have watched most of your budgeting videos on Mint, YNAB, etc. I have used both. Have you looked into Tiller? They use google spreadsheets.