Our Bills are Creeping Up

by Budgeting as a Couple 9 comments
Keep an eye your bills to make sure you don't have any budget busters.

In order to produce the podcast and keep content up free for you, I work with partners so this post may contain affiliate links. Please read my full disclosure for more info.

This last week had been a week of unpleasant surprises in the bill department.

For the most part, we pay our bills online and many of them are scheduled through our bill pay.

Our bills have remained fairly steady, but I noticed I've had to adjust a few of them this month.

I decided to double check our bills and call to see what was going on.

Home Association Dues

We have 2 home association bills – a monthly bill for the general maintenance, water & sewage, and landscaping of our places plus we have a quarterly bill for the community pool.

Both of them have gone up this year and while by themselves they're not a big impact, together it's an extra chunk of change out of our pockets.

I've adjusted our monthly budget and the scheduled payments.

Cable TV

Time Warner stopped itemizing the bills they send us. Now they just list the service we have along with total.

We can't tell how much we're paying for our broadcast cable or for our internet access. We keep saying that we'll cancel the broad cast cable when we put up the digital antenna, but we still haven't got it up.

The sad thing is we have it, we just need to anchor to the wall to get clear reception.

I decided to do something about our bills and motivate us to get this installed.  I called Time Warner Cable this morning (as I'm writing this post)  to:

  1. find out how much we're paying for our services and
  2. remove the broadcast cable.

After speaking to a wonderful customer service representative, I discovered we can knock off $20 off of our monthly bill.

Unfortunately the customer retention department was not in right now, but she lowered my internet bill $16/month.

I'll call their retention department in about an hour to see if I get get this cable removed from my bill. Hopefully it'll be easy and we'll cut our bill further.

Thoughts on Bills

How often to you review your monthly bills? Have you noticed them creeping up a bit? Have you've been able to get some of them lowered?

About Elle Martinez

Elle Martinez helps families at Couple Money achieve financial freedom by sharing tips for reducing debt, increase income, and building net worth. Learn how to live on one income and have fun with the second..

See all posts Visit website

9 comments add your comment

  1. Our cable bill keeps creeping up. Our contract is up soon, so I’m going to try and negotiate for a lower rate.

    • It doesn’t hurt to check- was surprised at the discount we got for internet – she volunteered it right away. Almost $200 saved!

  2. that’s annoying with your inspection bills – our cable kept going up and I realized we didnt really need it 2 years ago, so we got rid of it. Thinking about getting an antenna for when we move, but not sure.

  3. I do monthly budget tracking and keep an eye on all the bills. Lately bills have been going down, which is very nice to see 🙂

  4. We look at our bills about once per year, so we’ll be due to see if the creep is happening again in a few months.

  5. Our Time Warner bill was getting out of control and for the most part we have become cord cutters. I purchased a Roku at Costco $89 that with Hulu and Netflix we are very satisfied. We did keep basic which comes out to about $20 a month w/o the box just in case since we are in danger prone area (So.Cal). Over all TV-Entertainment expense has gone from $135 a month to just about $35-$40. Most importantly other then Two Broke Girls we haven’t felt like we missed a thing.

Previous Post:

Next Post: