Out with the Old and... Well, Just Out with the Old

One of my new year's resolutions is to stop wasting money / be more intentional about the ways we spend and save money. To this end, I have accomplished several things already this week.

1. Cancelled our 13 year relationship with DirecTV. We were spending over $200 a month on DirecTV and watching maybe 5 channels plus the Eagles games on the football package. I told Joel that next season he and Ben are going to have to find a bar to watch the Eagles games at. We signed up for Hulu Live TV instead, which is $40 a month and gives us live TV for most of the channels we used to watch on DirecTV, as well as access to Hulu's library of TV and movies. It's definitely going to take some getting used to, but considering that we already have Netflix and Amazon Prime video as well, I don't think there's any reason why anyone should have any difficulty finding something to watch :) While I was at it, I called our internet company and got them to increase our speeds while simultaneously dropping that bill by $40 a month as well. I also asked my boss to increase my internet stipend from $55 to $70 a month and he increased it to $75 a month :) I wanted to get rid of our landline phone line, but Joel wouldn't let me.

2. Cancelled our 20+ year relationship with American Express (sorry Dad!) We switched 95% of our spending to the Chase Sapphire Reserve card over a year ago, and since that experiment has gone well, there's no need to be paying a $175 annual fee on a card that we were using very little. The other up side to that is that the random monthly expenses like consumer reports, kindle Time magazine subscription, and a few other things that were going to that card that we don't even use won't be able to get charged now ;) Also cancelled a couple other subscriptions like New York Times digital subscription that had been $8 a month when I signed up but now is $16, and the Guitarjamz online music lesson subscription Joel had paid $19.99 a month for the last year and never used (ugh).

All in all my goal is to save an extra about $300 a month with the above, which I am going to start putting in a fund for the girls' bat mitzvahs.

I also had been researching 529 college savings plans and came across a few articles rating North Carolina's plan as neutral at best and since there's no tax break any more for NC residents contributing to an NC 529 plan, I decided to move the kids' funds to a plan with lower fees and better average returns. So I picked California's plan, and opened the accounts and submitted the rollover paperwork.

The next item on my to do list is to review my 401(k) fund allocation and make some changes there. At the moment I believe I have about 60% of the funds in emerging markets in Asia and Latin America, which did quite nicely for me this past year but it's probably a little risky to continue with that long term :)