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KELLEY’S MARKET TRENDS 33 FLOOR SPACE 33 Real Estate
Give Up Splurging and Have a Down Payment
BY ANGELA COLLEY
The presents are unwrapped, the holi- day decorations are packed up (or not, we won’t tell), and the ball has dropped on the end of 2015. It’s time to make some New Year’s resolutions—homeowner-style.
You can make 2016 the year of the down payment. Really.
By cutting a few things from your budget this year, you can speed up your progress toward having a down payment by the time those holiday decorations come back out of the closet. You probably knew these were splurges eating up your discretionary income, but did you know just how much? Don’t worry – we’ll do the painful math for you so you know what to kick to the curb in 2016.
Skip the Latte (ANNUAL SAVINGS $876)
A medium latte at Starbucks costs $3.65. If you stop by every day before work, that adds up. So, su er through the free co ee at work and think instead of the new kitchen where you can create
your own co ee bar.
Cut the Cord (ANNUAL SAVINGS $1,189) Cable gets more expensive every year. In 2015, cable customers paid an average of $99.10 a month, or $1,189.20 for the year, according to the Leicht- man Research Group. If you drop the cable in favor of, say, Net ix at $7.99 per month, you’ll save $91.11 per month – or $1,093.32 for the year – and get commer-
cial-free original shows.
While You’re at it, Drop a Streaming Service (ANNUAL SAVINGS NEARLY $100)
You don’t really need to subscribe to all the streaming channels at once. If you have Net x, Hulu and Amazon Prime, you’re paying roughly $25 a month. If you drop Amazon Prime, you could save $99 a year. If you drop Hulu or Net ix, you could save $95.88 a year. Tip: Hulu allows you to put your subscription on hold. So if you nd yourself having less time for binge-watching, try suspending your Hulu account until you have more time for it and save yourself that dough.
FOTOLIA.COM
Lower Your Mega Smartphone Plan
(ANNUAL SAVINGS UP TO $300)
Did you get one of those unlimited everything plans when you bought your phone and never changed it –even after you realized you don’t talk on the phone that much and Candy Crush Saga doesn’t use much data? If you switch to a lower plan – or at least drop a couple gigs of data – you could save $10 to $25 a month.
Pack a Lunch (ANNUAL SAVINGS $1,714) Taking a sack lunch to work might make you feel like you’re back in elementary school, but let’s do the math on how much it saves on your lunch costs. The average daily cost for the American worker who
bought lunch from a restaurant in 2015 was $11.14, according to Statista. That amount adds up to about $56 a week, or $2,674 a year. If you can make a sack lunch for $4 a day, you will spend about $20 a week, $80 a month, or $960 a year — an annual savings of about $1,714.
Quit Drinking (ANNUAL SAVINGS $3,168) If you’re an avid social drinker, you may not realize how much those $10
cocktails are adding up.
Say you go out three times a week,
ordering at least two cocktails at $10 each plus the standard $1 tip per drink. That adds up to $66 a week, $264 a month, and – wait for it – a whopping $3,168 a year.
Go to the Cleaners Less
(ANNUAL SAVINGS $1,354)
Are you still taking most of your clothes to the cleaners? Costs of dry cleaning or laundering items can vary a lot. A survey by Consumers’ Checkbook determined the average price of launder- ing a men’s dress shirt was $1.87, laun- dering men’s khaki slacks was $5.57, and dry-cleaning a two-piece suit was $11.13. If you take in two pairs of slacks ($11.14), ve shirts ($9.35) and a suit every week, you’ll pay about $31.63 a week before taxes, which can add up to about $1,645 a year. Based on those numbers, if you wash your own slacks and shirts and reduce by half the number of times you have your suit dry cleaned, you could save up to $1,354 a year.
Best of all, you won’t miss the things you cut (OK, maybe some), but you’ll rack up a truckload of money in 12 short months.
WORKOUT for Charity!
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