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With all the spending in your life, you can be overwhelmed just thinking about where to start. I have a place for you. It involves getting financially FIT, an acronym I invented that stands for food, insurance and telecommunications. These are three areas to make painless spending cuts and quickly reap the biggest savings. And they are categories of huge wasteful spending.

These are large topics I’ll be spending entire posts talking about, but here’s a preview of how to get financially FIT:

• Food spending comes from eating in and eating out. Eating in is far cheaper. While grocery shopping, save 50 percent by matching store sales with coupons to stockpile cheap food for immediate use and the near future. Find your store sales flyers at www.mygrocerydeals.com. Find printable online coupons, which are often worth more than newspaper coupons, at such Web sites as SmartSource.com, Coupons.com, CoolSavings.com and Eversave.com.Dine out for special occasions and because you want to, not because you’re a poor meal planner. When cooking, make extra batches and freeze, for use as leftovers. When you do eat out, get discount coupons from Restaurant.com and buy and use an Entertainment Book, www.entertainment.com. Buying seemingly harmless beverages out can be an insidious dollar drain, from morning lattes to afternoon softdrinks to happy-hour drinks. So, pay special attention to beverages.

• Insurance. Devote time to lowering your insurance premiums for home, auto and life insurance. For home and auto insurance, compare prices at such online sites as www.insurance.com, www.instantquote.com or www.insweb.com, and raise deductibles to $500 or even $1,000, which will lower your premiums substantially. Ditch collision insurance on cars worth less than $2,500.If you have term life insurance, apply for a new policy. Premiums have plummeted over the past decade. Compare premiums at AccuQuote.com, Term4Sale.com, InsWeb.com and Insure.com.

• Telecommunications. You’re probably overbuying on everything from landline phone service to wireless service to television service, paying for features, minutes and channels you don’t need. Service “bundles” from major phone and cable companies probably aren’t saving you anything. Paying a la carte for only the services you need might be the way to go.Ditch your landline altogether if your wireless phone suffices. Or get cheap Internet-based phone service, called VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol.) One the cheapest is MagicJack, www.magicjack.com, which costs just $40 for the first year and $20 for the second. I’ll blog later about my own experiences with MagicJack. For wireless, consider getting rid of service altogether or switching to a prepaid plan, especially if you have dozens or hundreds of minutes going unused each month. Lighten up on the extras, such as mobile Web service, text-messaging, ring tones and games.

Of course, you’ll have to tailor spending cuts to your own life, but starting in these three categories will have you on your way to becoming financially FIT.