As I have discussed several times on this blog, we have been making an effort to simplify our lives lately. This entails not only physically decluttering our house, but also just trying to cut down on the number of distractions and complications in our life.

A lot of these things are cascading: we get rid of one thing, and that makes another thing less important, so we get rid of that thing, etc. An example of this was dropping satellite t.v., which eventually led to drastically downsizing our television, which made our Netflix subscription expendable. (You could argue this was a a chicken and egg thing, because really it was the decision to watch less t.v. that made all three of these expendable, but this is sort of the order we went in.)

Anyway, just like getting rid of junk from your house makes you want to find more things to get rid of, canceling services does the same. The more things you get rid of, the more you start to question other things that you paid for. And the more things you start to cut, no matter how small, start to add up.

Between canceling cable, switching our cell phone plans, getting rid of our land line, canceling Netflix, and a few other non-essentials, we realized the other day that they all add up to roughly a 2-3% raise! It’s kind of amazing how much you spend on all of these little things, and how much you take for granted that you just have to have them.

I can verify we’re doing just fine without them. Better, even. (2-3% better, give or take)