How to save money each month - Reduce your fixed expenses

Go over your fixed expenses such as rent, food, phone service, mortgages, transportation, insurance, memberships, cable, and any other services you may have.  Start eliminating, reducing, negotiating down the price, or searching for competitors with lower rates. Reducing your fixed costs can make more of your income available to you for investing or saving. It's like hidden income that all of a sudden becomes available to you.  We had AT&T for $60 per phone line and switched them all to MetroPCS for $25 each. With five phone lines, it saved me $2,100 a year. With that extra money, I bought additional solar investments with Swell Investing. Shopping around periodically for car insurance, mortgage, fire, and health insurance can save you thousands a year as new insurance companies or existing ones are always competing for customers.  

    With this in mind, don't try to save money by being underinsured or trying to go without things you need.  My friend James wouldn't buy WiFi, because he wanted to save money and drove instead to the library close to his house to use the WiFi whenever he needed it.  These types of strategies are a terrible idea and will end up costing you more money in lost productivity.

    I see people of all ages in hospitals every day who tell me about the financial disaster that their stay in the hospital is going to cause them.  No one expects to get hurt or sick; it just happens, and if you're not insured, it can be a disaster and end up costing you much more in the long run.  

    I once saved over $300 a month, because I did some reading and discovered that, if you have over 20% equity in your home, you can call and have your property mortgage insurance (PMI) removed from your mortgage payment.  I had to remind some of the banks I dealt with that I had the option to call the State Insurance Commissioner's office or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) if they couldn't assist me. Most of the banks were very accommodating; some checked the value of my home online, others made me pay $500 for an appraisal.  Either way, it was worth it. Once they establish that your home is worth at least 20% more than what you owe, also known as the loan-to-value ratio (LTV), they will remove your property mortgage insurance (PMI) from your payment. PMI is mandatory for Federal Housing Authority (FHA) loans, which are the majority of mortgage loans people have in the USA.  PMI is 0.5-1.0% per $100,000 a year. So, if you have a $500,000 loan, your PMI would be $2,500 to $5,000 a year on your loan or $208.30 to $416.17 a month added extra to your loan for the life of your 30-year loan, unless you call to have it removed. I once took a credit card loan for $20,000 at 3% for 18 months and paid it towards my mortgage. This allowed me to remove a $350 a month PMI, saving me $4,200 a year for the life of the loan.  I saved up and slowly paid back the $20,000 on my credit card over the next 18 months.

    There's also a free website called AskTrim.com which is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that will analyze your expenditures, find ways to save you money, and even negotiate down your bills for you.  Billshark.com will also help negotiate your bills down by you sending them a copy of your statements, and they'll negotiate down your bills for you. They get 40% of the savings that they save you on your invoice.

For more entrepreneurship tips, check out my latest Amazon book.

How to Become Rich and Successful. The Secret of Success and the Habits of Successful People.: Entrepreneurship and Developing Entrepreneur Characteristics