As a businessperson and single parent, I've noticed that it's harder than it seems to simplify and cut out all the unneeded, unwanted expenses so that you get to a point where you understand where the money goes and why.

What I've been working on in the last few months is understanding all of my recurring monthly bills and evaluating whether they're really worth the money or not.

For example, I pay about $60/month on my cable bill, which includes some premium movie channels. Is it worth it? In this case, yes. Since I occasionally rent movies at Blockbuster, I know that it's about $5/movie and so the math is easy: 60/5 means that if I watch more than 12 movies each month I'm coming out ahead and, well, I watch a lot more than three movies a week.

On the other hand, I was looking closely through my credit card bill and noticed that when I dipped my toe in the dating scene with a subscription to Match.com for $55/quarterly, I had failed to cancel it when I decided that wasn't for me. Not worth it.

Now I'm chewing on whether keeping my own merchant account and paying $99/month for my backend services is worth it since I rarely actually sell any of my information products online and could probably retain 75% of those sales by hooking it up through Paypal instead, which has a high transaction fee but no monthly maintenance charges. $99/month probably doesn't seem like that much, but it's important to *12 it so you can think about annual costs. In this instance, I'm asking whether it makes sense for my business to pay almost $1200 annually for a mostly defunct merchant account.

Tracking all of these expenses can be tricky too if you have lots of credit cards and other ways that recurring costs can be covered. That's the first step towards sanity, understanding and tracking down every recurring cost.

Then take a long, hard look at where the money's going and ask yourself is this really worth that much money?

If it's not, don't think twice, jettison it and put the money in the bank instead. Y'know, for that rainy day...