A high phone bill

A couple of days ago I received an email from the phone provider of my daughter that she exceeded her data bundle and I had to pay for the extra data she used.
My oldest daughter is in the 1st class of high school and these teenagers use their smartphones many hours a day.
The bill wasn't even that high, but it was a trigger for me to take a closer look at the the expenses of our family.

A Regular check

Every couple of months I check our bank account on recurring payments. I do this to get an overview of where our money goes. Most services nowadays are paid by direct debit. This way some things may go unnoticed and you might be paying a lot of money for things you don't use anymore.

Phone subscription

The first thing I noticed that since my daughter went to high school she started using more data on her smartphone. She doesn't always have access to wifi, she quickly uses all the data from her data bundle. When the bundle is finished, they will charge you extra for each megabyte, which can really add up in the end.
That's why I decided to upgrade her phone subscription. I will pay more each month, but she will have more data to use, so she will probably won't go over her data bundle anymore.

Other subscriptions

When I finished changing the telephony provider I took another look at the expenses. Especially the recurring ones are good to look at. This way I noticed a couple of subscriptions we don't use anymore.
My wife once subscribed to a fitness channel which she had used for a couple of months, but she forgot about it and hadn't loggged in for a couple of months.
I stopped the subsciption saving me about 10 dollar a month.
A lot of subscriptions are automatically renewed.
I also noticed I still had a VPN client subscription that I hardly use. Since I can also use a Tor browser for this I also stopped this subscription.

Energy provider

Energy prices are going skyhigh at the moment with the war between Russia and the Ukraine. I usually check every year wether I should switch from energy provider. These providers usually have great discounts when you switch.
The subscription usually is for one year, so you could change providers every year so you will get a discount every year.

Charities

We're lucky the live in a wealthy country, so we also donate to charities. We try to distribute it to different catagories of charities like third world countries, children in need, research for diseases and nature.
Charities work the same way as other subscriptions. Collectors go from door to door to try people to donate a certain amount each month. They always tell you you can unsubscribe after a few payments if you like.
We do like to donate to charities, but at a certain point this got out of hand.
We now select a couple of charities from the different catagories and change from time to time.

Conclusions

It can really pay out to take a closer look at your expenses. Automatic recurring paymements can easily be forgotten over time. Cancelling some subscriptings and upgrading the telephony subscription of my daughter will save us tens of dollars in the coming months.

Sources:
All pictures in this post are license free images from Pixabay