Recently I shared how Bronson and I have saved $3,024 by making some very slight changes to our lives. There are a few more money-saving ideas we’ve adopted that helped us save another $5,441 in five more, non-earth shattering steps.

Even with health insurance, there are certain PRESCRIPTION DRUGS that aren’t covered or on the formulary. One of these is PROPECIA, the male pattern hair loss drug, which costs about $2.22/day. Both Bronson and I take the once daily, 1MG pill, ($2.22 a day, each). That’s $4.44 every day, or $133/month for both of us.

Last week while having my annual physical, I mentioned to my doctor I was taking PROPECIA, and he asked me if I’d like to save money. Turns out, the same ingredient in Propecia is available as a generic, Finasteride, at a 5MG/day dosage. I have to buy a pill cutter and split them in half, then half again, but a generic, 30-day supply of 5MG Finasteride tablets is $10, when cut into four pieces yields 120 doses, (a two-month supply for both Bronson and I). I just cut our per-day cost from $4.44 to just over 16 cents/day.
$128/month saved = $1,538.40/year.

I spent a lot of time pulling all of our FREQUENT GUEST/MILEAGE membership information into a spreadsheet and discovered to my pleasant surprise that we’d accrued about 90,000 unused miles/points in all our various accounts between us. While the value of a point or mile is somewhat subjective, most “point” experts concur the “average value” of a point or mile is about 4 cents. I still have some “mileage housekeeping” to do in order to get all of these points into one place, but by finding these 90,000 points, it basically yielded us approximately $3,600 in redeemable value.

We receive a lot of DVDs from friends and family, so Bronson canceled our NETFLIX membership, which we rarely used. That’s $12/month saved = $144/year

We have an extra XM RADIO tuner laying around the house. Turns out it was also costing $6.80/month in subscription fees for this tuner we don’t use. I canceled it tonight, saving $81.60. I also asked XM if they could give us a better deal on Bronson’s $12.95/month XM car service. They agreed to reduce our payment in order to keep us as subscribers, saving us another $77.00/year. Added together, that’s $13.27/month saved = $158.60/year.

That brings our grand total savings so far up to $8,465, just by making some minor changes to our lives.

This process illustrates how easy it becomes to get tangled up by small financial commitments (like monthly subscription fees). They all seem manageable at $6 or $12 a month, but as I’ve begun to analyze what they’re costing us, it’s staggering.

Think of what you’d do with an extra $8,465 a year.

© 2008 SAM PAGE

Tags: budget, family, how to, Money

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 5th, 2008 at 6:30 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.