I recently created a new category on the blog entitled “Simplicity & Saving” with this entry being the first one placed under that category.  Often times one of the most practical aspects of voluntarily simplifying your life is that you get to save money.  The more money you save the less ‘nose to the grindstone work’ you have to fill your day with.

I know, the idea is to have your work be so aligned with your life purpose that you just love, love, love working.  That’s true and yet that doesn’t mean you want to be in a position where you need to work, work, work.  There’s this thing called living a balanced life.  As I describe it in my life purpose statement — “a life of mindful abundance balanced with simplicity.”

Now, Ann and I don’t claim to be masters at this. We’re really operating more from the premise of ‘you teach what you most need to learn,’ even though we’ve been voluntarily simplifying our life for the past 20 or so years.  Yes, it’s an ongoing endeavor. And yet we continue to learn and so, we’ll be learning along with you. In fact, we strongly encourage others to share their simplifying and money saving tips here as well.

Here’s one that we instituted just recently. In fact, it’s a work in progress.  We reduced our monthly phone bill. Since Ann handled this, I’ll let her tell you how she did it:

“We previously had 2 phone landlines: one for Brad and one for me. The phone bill every month was approximately $130.00. So after thought and consideration we decided to have only one phone line and use the other phone number as a ring tone. This reduced our monthly phone bill to $58.51 per month. That is over $600 per year.”

Now you may be thinking, but won’t you have an issue with just one phone line, especially during business hours?  Not really, because at the same time I started using Skype — the internet-based phone service — as an additional line.   

We had two landlines, one for our home and the other for our home-based business.  It seemed like we just needed to keep both phone lines, even though we also have a cellular phone family plan with 3 phones.  Ann didn’t want to release the home phone number that we’d had for over 15 years, and it didn’t make sense to me to not have a separate business line.  After all, there’s plenty of time that we both need to be on the phone.

I knew about making free Skype-to-Skype calls to anyone else that has a Skype account, but how about all those billions of other people not on Skype?

I then learned that you could get a Skype account for $2.95 per month and call to anyone in the USA or Canada — that’s landlines and cell phones.  And on top of that I could get my own ‘Skype Number” so people could call me through Skype for about $4.00 per month. So, for about $70 per year I have my own computer-based phone service with great audio quality, and it’s convenient and great fun to talk to people from my laptop.  (My new number is 252-654-0477.)

Okay — your turn. How have you simplified your life recently and saved money in the bargain?  Let me hear from you.