Go A La Carte: Get Rid of Recurring Bills

I Will Teach You To Be Rich has a nice post on Subscriptions and their cost on your budget. Subscriptions are basically the inverse of David Bach's Automatic Millionaire idea:

Subscriptions are a business’s best friend: They let companies make a
reliable, predictable income off of you — with no action on your part. Without
doing anything, you invisibly pay money each month.

On the A La Carte Method:

Here’s how you can use the A La Carte Method for yourself. Cancel all the
discretionary subscriptions you can: your magazines, annual Rhapsody plan, cable
— even your gym. (It would be totally ridiculous to cancel your Internet,
though. I’d cry like a little girl if I couldn’t get online from my house.)

Next, buy what you need a la carte:

Instead of paying for a ton of channels you never watch on cable, buy only the episodes you watch for $1.99 each off iTunes
Buy a day pass for the gym each time you go (around $5-$10)
Buy songs as you want them for $0.99 each from Amazon or iTunes

These are some nice ideas. Other things that I have done is change our cell phone plan from a $39.99/month plan (plus the multitude of taxes) to a pay as you go plan with Tmobile. You get voice mail, caller id, long distance and a great national network for the average cost of around 7 to 10 cents a minute depending on the cost of the minutes that you purchase. (I have seen Target run ads for a 1000 minutes for $80).

On the internet, I have Comcast Cable internet and pay one year at a time to get a decent deal on my internet access.