One percent at a time

So, one thing that I've been really working on lately is increasing my savings rate.  At the end of last year, I adjusted my W-4 withholding, cut cable, and increased my retirement contributions by 9%.  I was able to get an additional 1% in February when I received a COL adjustment to my paycheck.  I'm currently at about 30% between my work plan and my Roth IRA.  During next open season, I'm going to add a HDHP and HSA to the mix as well.  But is there anything else I can do?

The idea of optimization is that you can make little steps in your every day life to get closer to your goals.  So, my goal has become to decrease my expenses and/or increase my income 1% at a time.  I mean, why not?  It's "just" 1%.  A few dollars a day, really.  Enough to feed one of Sally Struthers' kids.  Or buy Alex Trebek's life insurance.  But that 1% can be huge.  I'm only about 4% away from maxing out my work plan.  If I can find money that can be better optimized as savings then I want to do it. 

Because 1% seems like such a small amount, I started looking at the things that can be cut easily.  The low-hanging fruit, if you will.  So, I started reading articles with titles like '15 Simple Tips for Saving Money."  And what I found was....that I'm already a cheap bastard.  Seriously, tips like "Don't buy $5 coffee" and "Make a budget and stick to it."  In all my searching, the only tip I found helpful was one about keeping your car tachometer below 2000 RPMs to improve gas mileage.  That shit works, yo. 

So, back to the drawing board.  I started looking at what my expenses were vs. what I had budgeted for them.  I found that on average I was budgeting about $5 too much a week for gas and $10 per month too much for electricity.  Now we're getting somewhere.  When I run the 2020 budget in a couple of weeks I'll be able to budget less for those two items. 

I've also cut the amount that I spend on groceries down about $10 every two weeks.  My grocery bill is already pretty bare bones, so after this, there's not a whole lot of room to cut it down anymore.  I've got a post planned for my shopping strategy, so I won't go too much into it here. 

Finally, I took a look at my utilities and realized that my Internet company had introduced new plans.  The plan I'd been on was for 600 GB per month at 150 mbps.  The new plan was 600 GB per month at 200 mbps....for $15 less each month.  I couldn't make that change online...I did have to actually call and talk to an actual human being...the horror!  No, actually she was very nice and didn't give me any grief about switching plans. 

All of those little tweaks gave me the 1% I needed to increase contributions again.  Just three more percent to go...