Consumer Reports is out with a new article via Yahoo that shows you several tactics to shave off $500 from your monthly expenses. They highlight the following items and corresponding amounts that you can target for cost reductions:

Find Cheaper Auto Insurance — $65
Optimize Your Life Insurance — $110
Shop Smart for Food — $200
Stop Paying Bank Fees — $25
Find Cell Phone Savings — $35
Pay Off your Credit Card — $65
Increase Your 401k Contributions — $125

The article includes lots of interesting tidbits including this fact on bank fees:

The American Bankers Association says 52 percent of consumers spend nothing on bank fees each month. But somebody’s paying fees, and lots of them, because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. says banks collected $39 billion in account fees and penalties last year. That works out to an average of $28 per month per household. But with some planning, you can pay zero.

The article mentions increasing 401k contributions as a way to lower your tax bill. Another way to save even more is to see if your employer offers a flexible health spending account that lets you put aside money on a pre-tax basis for medical expenses that come along during the year. One note of caution is that flexible health spending accounts have a “use it or lose it” like provision in that you forfeit any savings that were not used on health related expenses during the year. So you need to make sure you set aside an amount you are sure you’re going to use during the year.

Overall this is an interesting article that gets you thinking about several tactics for lowering your monthly burn rate

Consumer Reports: Cut Your Spending by $500