Last week I started a short series that I’m calling Monday Money.

At the end of October, my wife and I decided to look at our monthly expenses and see if there were any ways to live more frugally.

In the next 5 days, I found a way to save over $2500 over the next 12 months.

We still have 2 cars, the same house, cable TV and Internet, and phones.

In other words, we didn’t need to make big lifestyle changes to save over $200 a month and perhaps some of these changes you can do too.

First was how I trimmed our car insurance by $1102 over the next 12 months.

Today the subject is Cable/Internet/Homephone.

We have been Comcast subscribers for years. My Comcast bill was around $147 a month for Cable TV and Internet Service. Several years ago I switched our homephone from a Verizon landline to Vonage.  My Vonage bill has crept up to $38 a month, for a total of $185 coming directly out of my checking account each month.

We were willing to drop the Vonage and not have a homephone, but I found an even better way to save.

(The Vonage number was being used by a few friends and family and had become the business line for my wife’s TheSimpliedLifeCoach.net business.)

I found that by upgrading from 2 Comcast services to 3 Comcast services, we would qualify for a new customer discount. Comcast Triple Play includes 80+ TV channels, Internet and Comcast phone.  By going to a basic cable tv package, (they call it Starter), we are losing 65 channels.  Of those 65, only one or two were being watched and my wife can watch those shows on her laptop.  This switch will cost us between $100 and $120 a month instead of $185 a month. Saving $85 for 12 months = $1020.

Thanks to Dennis at Apex Wireless for setting this up. (260) 471-9100 is their number.

Add the $1020 to the $1102 I mentioned last week in savings with auto insurance and now we trimmed $2122 from our annual budget.

Next week on Monday Money, I’ll show you how we are saving another $912 each year for a total savings of not $2500, but $3000 per year.

Here’s a couple of footnotes.

We have 5 TV’s hooked up to Comcast and they charge about $2 a month for each TV beyond 2, so there’s an extra $6 that we pay, but may cut back on each month.  Remember $6 times 12 months is $72 a year and since there are only 2 of us living full time in our home, we may make this move.

Also Comcast charged me $25 dollars to come to our home and hook up the phone, but it was worth it.

The basic price for the Comcast Triple play was $99 a month for the first 12 months on a 2 year contract.  I know that my Comcast bill will go up $20 a month for months 13 thru 24.  Even with that increase a year from now, I’ll be paying less than I am now.