As they say, Allision, I have good news and bad news. If you are intent on replacing your printer, you are going to have to decide whether you want to pay up front to save money over the life of your printer, or go cheap on the printer and pay through the nose for ink refills. Several years ago, printer manufacturers figured out that the real money is in the consumables (ink and toner), not in the price of the printer. So they started (practically) giving away the printer so they could suck you in to buying their inks and toners for years to come. Nowadays, you can find reputable retailers like Costco who refill the ink tanks with the manufacturers' ink, and although this saves money, you can do better.
There are a couple options to look at if you want to save money; one requires an upfront investment, the other is free. Let's start with the free option. Based on the type of printing you described, your most logical first step is to change your default printer preferences on your existing printer to use less ink. Most inkjet printers have several print modes including "draft" or "fast print" mode, which uses considerably less ink per page than High Quality, Normal or Photo modes. this can save anywhere from 30-60% on ink, not to mention speeding up your prints enormously. The key is to make sure you change the default print mode. In Windows 7, click Start, Devices and Printers, and under printers, right-click on your printer. Click on Printer Preferences. Depending on your printer, the preferences box will be different, but you should be able to find the print quality drop-down box, and choose "fast" or "draft" mode. When you need to print a higher quality document, you can easily override the draft setting at the time of printing, without changing the default, cost-saving setting for future prints.
Depending on how much you print, it may be wiser to invest in a black & white laser printer. The savings over inkjet (even in draft mode) is significant over the life of the printer, but the printer is more expensive up front. Also, a typical laser toner cartridge is more expensive than a whole set of ink cartridges, but the yield is several times more prints per cartridge. Best of all, every print is crisp and clean. The only down side is that you can't print in color, but there's no reason you can't keep your current inkjet printer for occasional color prints. Just know that if you don't use the inkjet for long periods of time, the print head and the ink tanks can dry out. unless you have a need to print high quality color pages on a regular basis, I don't recommend a color laser printer because you will find they use up color toner even when you print black & white documents.
My personal preference is to combine a black & white laser printer, and a low cost color inkjet, which satisfies all my printing needs, and provides the best cost-to-print ratio. Good luck!