Happy New Year!

Yes I’m a little late in greeting the new year on this blog, but better late than never!

I hope that you had a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and ended the holiday season with a happy start to the New Year. Thanks to all of you have been regular visitors over the year(s). I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your visits and the thoughtful comments that you leave me.

I generally don’t make new years resolutions, but blogwise, I’d like to resolve to be better about replying to comments and getting out and visiting many of your blogs. I do visit many of them regularly, but I don’t always leave comments, I’ll try harder to leave comments this year. My main problem in not keeping up with this is because we (my husband and I) have so many blogs and websites to maintain that it leaves very little spare time, but I’ll try harder to make the time.

Another, necessary resolution, is that I’m going to try to lower our regular monthly expenses! As I’ve said many times we’re going through tough times and have no money to spare, but if we can lower some of our regular bills it might help a bit.

For example – our cable, internet and cell phone bill all come from the same company. We used to get a 15% discount for having three services with them but they changed that in August and now we’d have to get a fourth service (home phone) in order to qualify for the nice discount. I’m considering moving from the regular telephone line we have with Bell Canada to the Rogers Home phone as it will cut our phone bill in half or more. The rates are just so much better with Rogers … plus there’s that discount, but I don’t full trust the service. So I’ll think about that one for a while longer.

The other thing I’m thinking about is to drop down to a lower cable package to save money. I do like my premium channels. Considering that I’m sick with Crohn’s and there’s times when I can’t do much else other than watch TV (reading while in pain doesn’t work well for me, can’t concentrate) that will be a hard cut, but I think we might have to do it.

Our electricity company, Toronto Hydro, has a new billing system where the price of electricity used is higher during the day and lower at night after a certain time. It’s called “Time of Use” so we’re making an effort to run the dryer on the weekend or evenings when we do laundry and run other appliances that use a lot of energy in the lower cost time periods. We’ve always been pretty good about our electricity usage, but we can probably lower our bill by a few more dollars a month. Maybe ..

I’m also going to go in search of low life insurance rates to see if we can get a better deal. Our rates are already pretty low, but I might find something a little better.

Did you make any resolutions this year? Are they practical and ones that you can probably stick to?