Reply to What are you cutting back on during furloughs?

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[quote=Anonymous]We cut out eating out. Which I find mildly frustrating as it was really our only "vice" other than a few bottles of wine here and there. We have no cleaners, no lawn service, etc., we already do that all ourselves, so there was nowhere else to trim unless we wanted to reduce/cut out 529 contributions or TSP contributions which seemed like a more drastic move given the tax consequences and long-term benefits of allowing that money to be invested.  For us, it has amounted to about $600 a month reduction in my take home pay so far. Cutting eating out doesn't cover nearly that much, so I renegotiated our cable/internet package and got it reduced by $60 a month and we've also scaled back on discretionary spending, so where I never used to think twice about picking up a couple new books for DC or grabbing a new nail polish color while picking up a prescription at the pharmacy I've stopped all that.

$600 a month has been a rough pill to swallow, but I feel fortunate that making small changes that don't impact our future financial planning has been all we've had to do so far. If furloughs continue into the next FY, as I expect they will, we may have to re-evaluate our savings to see if we can free up a little money for the short term at the expense of our long-term goals. Or maybe we'll cancel cable altogether and look at reducing charitable contributions a bit.

At the same time, we got hit with a couple large expenses as our HVAC system died and had to be totally replaced and our garage door mechanism also gave out. Which is a little harder to stomach at this point.[/quote]

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