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The easiest expenditures to overlook when thinking about finances are recurring monthly fees. You probably only think about them briefly when you go over your monthly bank statements, but these transactions can be a large drain on your finances. The small membership fees add up over the course of a year, and you may also be surprised at how much you spend on subscriptions that you don't value.

A 3-movie-a-month Netflix membership runs $15 a month, which doesn’t sound that bad until you realize it adds up to almost $200 a year. A $45-a-month gym membership will cost you over $500 for the year. Thinking of these two memberships as a $700 annual fee might provide more motivation to return those DVDs promptly and to stick with that gym schedule.

As ridiculous as it sounds, it's important to remember that you do pay for memberships. If you use the gym every day, it can be easy to focus on your workout routine and forget that you are paying to be able to use the machines and facilities. Here are some suggestions for keeping track of your memberships:

• Keep a small sheet of paper in your wallet with all the monthly fees you currently have. Whenever you sign up for something new, add it to your list. It might be beneficial to keep other monthly expenses that you often forget about written down there as well (such as student loans, insurance payments, etc.)

• Once a month, go through your list of memberships and write out a check for the cost (be sure to write VOID across it) and keep it filed with the other expenses for the month, even if they are paid on a credit card automatically. If you’re like many people, the act of writing things down will help solidify this information in your mind

• Track the per-use cost of the membership to evaluate its usefulness. If a gym membership costs $45 and you use the gym 4 times a week, then each visit to the gym only costs you $2.81, which is a great deal. On the other hand, if you only go once a week, it costs $11.25 a visit... not so hot of a deal

Every few months, evaluate your memberships and decide if you are still enjoying and using them. For example, you may no longer need a gym membership if you start bicycling and had only been using the membership for cardio.

One potentially large and easy to forget expenditure is a storage unit. Indeed, the very concept of a storage unit for most people is a place to put extra junk to forget about it. Unless you’re in a situation similar to a college student and need a place to store things temporarily, you should give a very critical review of everything in your closets if you hit the point that you need offsite storage. Honestly go over everything you've been storing. If you are keeping things because "you never know when you might need one," chances are by now that you probably never will.

You might also want to drop-off the items at a donation station and go for the tax deduction rather than trying to organize a garage sale. You'll save yourself time, hassle, and spare yourself having to wake up early on the weekend. Additionally the tax rebate is probably worth more than you would've made at the garage sale anyway.

If you cancel memberships and/or part with your storage unit, you will hopefully find that you have some extra cash on hand. Try investing in some P2P loans on Lending Club to put that money to work for you. Bonus: there are no dues when you join this particular Club!

After you read enough personal finance posts, one of their main themes starts to become apparent. Personal finance is all about frugality: identifying and removing unneeded expenditures from your life. You can learn how to make your own bread so that you don't have to buy it, how to maximize your fuel economy by accelerating slowly onto the highway, or how to pay off your debts in the most efficient order possible.

With all the excessive aspects of my everyday living brought to my attention through finance articles, it can get very loud in my head as my brain tries to optimize my finances. If I eat out, I think about how much I could have saved if I had made the meal at home instead. But then, when making a meal at home, I think about how much I could have saved on groceries if I had gone to the farmer's market or done some coupon clipping in the newspaper.

Then I remember I should only buy generic store brands. Why am I even buying produce? I should grow it myself. I like eggs... I should get a chicken.

*STOP!* I live in the city, so raising a chicken is not an option. The bottom line is there will always be a new way to save a buck, but there is a point for everyone that balances convenience with price.

Is consumer culture in our world out of control? Yes.

Is the $1,200 moisturizing lotion made from Dead Sea salts really going to make you look 10 years younger? No, sorry.

Will people really find you more charismatic in a $200 designer shirt versus the $20 no-name special? Unfortunately, no.

When you pull up in the deluxe edition of a new car are you going to be $12,000 more impressive than the person next to you in the standard model? Nope.

Think that fancy new PDA is going to take everyone’s breath away when you whip it out? Again, sorry but the answer is no.

Are we still going to pine for some material trinket in the next year? Yes, I'd bet my life on it.

The best way to improve your quality of life is to recognize the important things and separate them from what companies and advertisements tell you is important. Changing your shopping habits from excessive to frugal will certainly help you save money and get out of debt. However, don’t go so far that you push yourself to the point of being cheap and paranoid about your finances.

Take a look at your spending habits to identify your major spending categories. See how they line up with your personal priorities. Try guessing the percentage of your total budget for each category before you calculate it all. How accurate were you? If you were off by a lot, maybe you should try to reign in your spending.

Break your spending into two categories: routine purchases and impulse buys. Routine purchases are things like food, cosmetics, and gas. These are categories worth researching to find the best deals. Amazon.com and Safeway.com both offer grocery delivery services that might help you save money on food. eBay has amazing, jaw-dropping discounts on cosmetic supplies, while gasbuddy.com can help you find the cheapest gas around.

Whenever you come across an impulse buy in a store, wait 10 seconds and see if buying it would really make you happy or if you only want it for some unidentifiable desire. Is it just another thing you didn't know you just had to have? For larger purchase items, always check online to compare prices. There are deals online for everything, and paying full price for anything nowadays is just so old-fashioned. When you buy, just make sure it’s something that you want, and not something you've only been told you do. If it’s something you do want, you can always get a P2P loan on Lending Club!

Creating a budget is a great way to become aware of your spending habits and identify where you might be overspending. Too often, we only check up on our spending when our bank account balance is lower than we would've thought. We all make lots of little purchases that we may forget about: Tuesday's lunch, a couple drinks with some friends, a new CD, a poster, a magazine. These purchases add up, and banks are depressingly good at keeping track of them even if we aren't.

The best way to track these expenses and control spending is to create a budget. There are plenty of websites with information on how to start a budget, complete with spreadsheets to help you categorize your spending. Examples include Pear Budget and Get Rich Slowly.

Once you have created a budget, anticipate your daily spending and then focus on sticking to your plan. For many people, the small everyday purchases add up and can be detrimental to a budget, such as food and impulse buys. There are two common ways to help you control day-to-day expenses: either use only cash or only credit/debit cards. Both methods have their advantages and the best choice depends strongly on your personal spending habits.

As was noted in a previous post on this blog, using an all-cash system for everyday spending is the easiest way to keep track of your spending and realize the true cost of things you purchase. If you have a history of convincing yourself that you need something, only to regret or forget about it later, then a few months on an all-cash basis could greatly benefit you.

With the cash-only approach, you can see how much money remains in your wallet. Plus, having to hand over the physical money helps solidify the final cost of the purchase. This is a very helpful strategy for people who are just starting to get a grip on their spending and may need to double-check the validity of their budgets. However, it is necessary to retain all of your receipts in order to track your progress.

The benefit of using only credit/debit cards is that you receive statements listing all of your expenses. There are many sites and services that help you keep track of and categorize purchases. The credit/debit card approach is best for people who already have a solid understanding of their spending habits and can look at monthly statements and remember every purchase over $20. Wesabe and Geezeo are two great sites offering tons of free tools to help you visualize your spending habits over time.

Ultimately, keeping track of day-to-day spending is a personal choice. There is a delicate balance to negotiate: if your money is either too easy to access or too hard to track, it’s much less realistic that you will be able to stick to your budget. Whether you use one of these two methods or apply your own strategy to track your spending, we here at Lending Club recommend any method that will help you to better understand where your money goes.

I was talking with a friend who used to work at a bank, and he gave me a great tip on how to reduce your credit card interest rate.

Simply call up the credit card company and ask for a promotional rate. You'll want to call the number on the back of the card and ask to speak to the retention department. Politely ask the person for a promotional rate and slip into the conversation that you might leave and take your business elsewhere. The representative can easily give you a promotional rate that lasts for one year and can be as low as 1.9%!

Of course having a good history with them will help you argue your case -- being an established customer and having a strong repayment history will work in your favor. Also be aware that you can lose this promotional rate if you are late with just one payment, so now would be an excellent time to setup that automatic bill-pay feature you've been putting off.

It costs credit card companies usually five times as much to attract new customers as it does to retain existing ones. This is why the retention department has a strong motivation to work with you and keep your business. It's also why they can be so difficult when you are legitimately looking to leave.

You should also become informed about what your other credit card options are before calling them to request the promotional rate. Mention the promotional rates their competition is offering. Depending on your current credit card's features, you may want to follow through with the threat and leave if they don't lower your rate. Bankrate has a great tool to help you compare different credit cards to find one that works best for you.

As college costs continue to rise, many students are looking for additional ways to make ends meet, ways that don't require picking up another part-time job or using credit cards. Coping with rising tuition costs and finding affordable living arrangements can be challenging in many college towns. Textbooks are always outrageously expensive.

Even the amount of time it takes to graduate has been increasing. Many engineering degrees for example routinely take five years to complete instead of the traditional four, tacking on another year of tuition and expenses. Despite these rising costs, many students still expect themselves to graduate without any debt. For some reason, they only think of student loans as debt, and they have no qualms about racking up massive credit card debt. This is both a dangerous and backwards notion.

Student loans are an option that many students dismiss while trying to graduate debt-free because they don't differentiate between different types of debt. I'm not going to say that finishing college free of debt is a bad thing, It’s overrated and starting to become less feasible.

Luckily while in college you are in one of the best times in your life to take on debt. Not because you are going to be graduating and instantly making six-figures (a dream best to get rid of now), but because you will be able to do what it takes to pay off the debt. As an undergrad you are in an ideal situation to carry some debt because you have zero dependents to support, no mortgage, few monthly payments, and minor living expenses. You also have more mobility to find a good job when you graduate.

The news is full of stories about people that get in over their heads with credit card debt and then get eaten alive by the interest rates. You don't really hear about people becoming overwhelmed by student loans. As it stands, being in your twenties with a college degree makes it very unlikely that you will fall beneath the poverty line.

Debt is an important part of modern finances; it's how you build a reputation with financial institutions so that when you need the really big loans you already have a good history. Your game plan shouldn't be to avoid all debt like the plague. It should be to become aware of different kinds of loans and debt. It’s easy to avoid getting in over your head with debt; all you have to do is use your head!

Many of us were taught we should avoid debt entirely, we never learned to distinguish between “good” debt and “bad” debt. Good debt provides opportunities to build credit, while bad debt leaves you buried. Think of student loans as bicycle training wheels for the banking world; they have incredibly low interest rates and a lot of nice perks that help make repayment easy.

For most student loans, repayment doesn't start until 6 months after you graduate, giving you time to find a job and begin to save. They can be deferred if you go to graduate school and they feature different repayment plans, including plans that adjust to your income.

If you plan to become a teacher or serve in the Peace Corps, there are special repayment programs to help you repay your loans. A student loan can be a strong feature on your credit report and help bring up your credit score. With low monthly payments you can setup automatic payments to easily build up a strong history of repayment, something banks love. Student loans do all this while also helping to take off some of the financial stress that has been distracting you from the reason you came to school in the first place, to learn!