Going to One Full Time Income – Tips on Ways to Cut Your Monthly Costs

Are you working full-time, and you want to quit? If you’re thinking about going to one income, we have ideas to cut your monthly costs!

Going to One Income

I’ve always enjoyed working. I spent my career as a police and courts reporter for two newspapers before ending up working as a news reporter and anchor at a local radio station. To say my jobs were fun would be an understatement. I seriously never saw myself leaving the media.

My husband and I got married in 2006, and our daughter was born in 2009. At first, my schedule seemed perfect for saving on daycare costs. I typically went in around 2-3 p.m. since I worked the evening shift, and my husband was done by 5 p.m. That meant there was only 2-3 hours a day when Lucy wasn’t with us.

But, my schedule eventually started to take its toll. I didn’t get home some nights until after 10 p.m. By that point, my husband was ready for bed while I need to wind down for a bit. And, I was up early in the mornings with Lucy. After a couple of years, I knew I wanted to make a change, so I quit my job and entered the world of freelancing.

I Quit My Full Time Job

Once we made the decision that I would be quitting my full time job, we sat down and took a long, hard look at our finances to see where we could cut to make sure that we could still survive if I lost any freelancing jobs. Freelancing was nervous. I was never guaranteed a specific income a month, so we had to make sure my husband’s paycheck could cover all of our bills. And, it’s a good thing we did because as the years went by, I lost more and more of my freelancing gigs thanks to publications going out of business and other things.

I had a few friends that mentioned Dave Ramsey, so I checked out his Seven Baby Steps. This is the first place you will want to start because once you have an emergency fund and have payed off all your debts, your finances will be much less stressful. The first four Baby Steps are:

1. $1,000 Emergency Fund

2. Pay off all debt using the Debt Snowball

3. 3 to 6 months of expenses in savings

4. Invest 15% off household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement

If you are wondering, the last three steps are – college funding for children, paying off your home early, and building wealth and giving.

In addition to these four steps, I started to look at our monthly expenses and see where we could cut back or what I could do to save more money.

Here are some things that we did:

1. Got rid of cable and subscribed to Netflix, Hulu and Sling TV. And, we already had our Amazon Prime account. This really cut our bill from our satellite service down a lot! There are a lot of great free apps you can add to your Smart TV, Amazon Fire Stick or Roku like Tubi, Yippee (we love this for VeggieTales) and Pluto.

2. Started couponing and shopping differently! By couponing, I was able to stock my house for next to nothing. Couponing has gotten harder as stores have cracked down on their policies, but you can definitely still save.

3. Limited our discretionary spending. We stopped going out to dinner, shopping when not necessary, extra activities and our subscription boxes. Some of those were HARD!

        4. We cut services we didn’t absolutely need, like our garbage service. My husband started            taking our trash to the dump himself.

My part time income is much less than it was when I first quit my job. Thanks to these money saving tips, we’ve been just fine.

Have you gone down to one income successfully? How did you do it? Share your tips with us in the comments!

Find more Money Saving Tips on Become A Coupon Queen.