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Track your finances, and get insights on your financial outlook, with Personal Capital …Having a little bit of money is nice, but it's not all fun and games. The more complicated your financial picture, the more involved it is to track your finances.

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Looking for ways to cut expenses? Here are three things we did to cut expenses by $123/month, every month …

Spending less than you bring in is critical to achieving financial independence.

The two ways of doing this are (a) cutting expenses and (b) increasing income.

This article focuses on three things that we did this past year to cut our expenses.

We cut our cable and internet charges

We hardly ever watch TV, so it's a small wonder why we kept paying for it as long as we did. Actually, I know why. I like watching the ball drop on New Year's Eve and watching the Super Bowl. But that's really it. In 2016 we watched the Olympics (my daughter is a swimmer, so we watched Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky kick some butt.)

Our cable TV and internet bill, combined, was $112 per month. After we got done slashing things we were down to $58/month. Here's what we did:

Refrigerator repair can be a frugal option over buying new. But there's a point where it's just not worth it …

Right now we're wrestling with our side-by-side refrigerator and freezer.

(Well, I've only wrestled a little bit with it. My wife and father-in-law have wrestled with it a lot more over the past few days. They're the handy ones.)

My wife noticed that the blueberries in the freezer section were getting a bit soft. She measured the temperature with a thermometer and it was in the 20-degree range, which was way too high.

Refrigerator repair for DIYers

So, my father-in-law and wife cracked open YouTube and got to work diagnosing what was happening. A lot of what they learned was from the videos from RepairClinic.com.

With zero-based budgeting, every dollar that's spent or saved has a name. But when do you actually spend the money? I'll explain

My wife and I went through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University over the past couple of months.

We needed to hear what was in the program. We're not in dire straits by any means, but we did need to tune up a few things.

Part of the process is creating a zero-based budget each month, every month. This involves giving each and every dollar that comes in a name — that is, deciding in advance what every dollar it will be used for, whether it's for the mortgage, for giving, for clothing, for food, for investing, for debt repayment, or for saving.

Budgeting with discounted gift cards

There are tons of ways to reduce expenses.