Mostly, people's biggest expenses are housing, utilities and food, in that order. All of those things can be adjusted and trimmed, unless you are locked into a mortgage or have to stay in a particular apartment, for whatever reason.

I have the lowest possible mortgage I was able to find and I both have food stamps and use food pantries for my food, as well as doing the super-coupon thing. So for me, food is a really minimal expense.

Utilities is the thing I have the most control over and is the most interesting thing to save for me right now.

I am also guessing that for most people, health care is a big chunk of the bill, too.

What are your biggest expenses? Do you have control over adjusting any of them?

I would say my biggest expense is our rent. We'd like to find a cheaper place, but then we'd need money to move.

What I'd really like to do is buy another house. We saw this one house for sale, and the monthly mortgage payment would have been $500 less than the house we are renting.

I was shocked and stunned to receive our last electric bill and see that it's over $200. I have NO idea why it jumped so from the month before.

We trimmed lots of stuff last September when my hubby lost his job, and even now that he's working again, we are not going to add all that back (like cable tv). We find enough to watch online for free, and we do have netflix.

Deanna - rent can be very expensive. My mortgage is definitely my biggest expense. In this area, apartment rent can be more than a mortgage payment.

Deanna, i think that is a super idea about moving to a place with a far cheaper mortgage. That would be a savings of $6,000 a year!

Of course there would be other expenses - maintenance, improvements, closing costs, taxes, interest and so on...but then the house is YOURS. You can do so much more to save costs over the long haul when you own your own place.

The key is you buy it and stay there for a long time. Buying and moving a bunch of times is never cost effective, but living in your own home, tweaking your insulation and energy use and being able to expand or contract as per your own needs - that's a great thing.

I agree no one really needs cable. I wrote about using the internet instead here: Cancel your cable - watch TV online

Netflix is probably going to push cable out of business eventually. Probably soon.

About your electric bill - have you started using the AC yet? What was your bill last month?

Oooh, I'll have to read your cable article!!

I haven't looked at last month's bill yet. I will do that later - we don't have a regular air conditioner, we use a swamp cooler, and we only ran it one day this month.

One day we did have friends over, and the kids ran their Wii for like 5 hours! But I don't know that that would make that much of a difference. I need to go look at that bill - I may just be hallucinating the whole thing LOL.

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okay, two of my posts disappeared. What the heck.

I am lucky to be living rent free at the moment, but that will change next year. My biggest expenses now are feeding my two horses and paying down credit card debt I am stuck with because of my divorce 2 years ago.

Jilly, One of my posts disappeared a couple of weeks ago. The line still showed in "my posts", but when I clicked on it, it went to the forum, but still did not show my post.

I have not turned on the AC yet, I'm hoping not to have to for a couple more weeks.

Diane, did you turn the AC on yet? Mine is on since every day now is over 100, but i am using it on the lowest setting and energy saving mode, and supplementing with fans. So far it's not using significant amounts of watts - since my place is so small, a tiny window unit goes a long way.

I got my electric bill this week and apparently the fridge is using the most energy of all my appliances. It's seven dollars a month for my small dorm sized fridge, which makes me wonder how much a month the conventional fridges cost per month.

$7 a month is $84 a year, BTW. I am sure it's well worth that to have fresh unspoiled food, and yet I still keep wondering if i can do better...

This gets obsessive.