Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Get Your Phone Service for Less with These Two Programs

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Phones.  They’re a necessity for keeping in contact with others, having access to emergency services, and getting directions when you’re lost.  Yet, if you aren’t careful, the convenience of a phone can cost you anywhere from $50 to more than $200 a month.

My husband and I have cut corners with our phone service, and we couldn’t be happier.

Ooma

save money on phones
Save Money with These 2 Phone Services

We chose Ooma for our land line.  Ooma is a system that operates through our internet connection.  We pay $14.99 per month, which includes call waiting, caller ID, and free long distance.  Oh, and that free long distance?  Apparently that means anywhere because my husband has been able to call his family in Japan at no extra expense to us.  Sweet!

While we love Ooma and the price we pay, there are sometimes glitches with this service.  For instance, when our internet goes down, we don’t have telephone access.  Occasionally the connection is not as good as I would like.  However, these inconveniences are not regular occurrences, so we happily stay with Ooma.

Ting

My husband and I have had cell phones for a few years, but they were flip phones from Tracfone.  While they served us well for a few years, we got frustrated with Tracfone’s customer service whenever we had an issue.  We also wanted to upgrade to smartphones.

When I won a giveaway for a free Ting smartphone, we decided to also get my husband one and switch our service over to Ting.

Ting is a unique company that charges based on the services that you use.  Our average bill is $34 a month for both of us to use our smartphones.  I love that price!

Billing is based on how much you use.

Each line costs $6 a month.

Up to 100 minutes a month costs $3.  One hundred to 500 minutes is $5 per month.  (This goes all the way up to $35 for 2100 minutes.)

Up to 100 text messages a month is $3.  Up to 1000 is $5.  (My husband and I primarily keep in touch during the day through texting, and we never get close to 1000 texts.)

Date is $3 for 100MB, $10 for 500MB, all the way to $20 for 2GB.

In addition, you can set limits on how much usage is available.  I imagine this is very important if you’re on a budget or if you have a teen with a phone.  You can ask for notifications when you reach a certain level of minutes, texts, or data.  You can also choose to suspend service when you hit a certain limit or someone else on your bill reaches that point.

The best point?  There is no contract with Ting.

We’ve had our phones for about 6 months now, and we’re pleased.  In addition, any time I’ve had questions, their customer service has been fantastic.

Ting has also branched out to providing Internet service at the same great value.  Unfortunately, that services is only available in a handful of towns in five different states.  I hope my location is available for Internet service soon!

Have you tried either of these services?  Did you like or dislike them?  What do you do to keep your phone bill low?

Save Money on the Grocery Budget by Reducing Food Waste

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Behind a mortgage, groceries are often the second most expensive line item in the budget.  If you’re looking to save more money this year, a good place to look is to reduce the grocery budget.  But don’t stop there.  Make sure to also look at the other side of the grocery budget—reducing food waste.

Whenever you waste food, you’re essentially dropping money into the garbage.  Instead, learn to reduce your food waste to stretch your grocery budget even further.  Here are some of my favorite strategies:

Save Money by Reducing Waste
Save Money by Reducing Waste

Look at your calendar before you shop.  Do you have a busy week coming up?  If so, don’t plan labor intensive meals; you just won’t have time to make them and you’ll likely have food go bad before you have time to cook it.  Instead, make some meals on the weekend to eat during the week when you’re busy or plan simple recipes and buy simple ingredients.  Rachael Ray’s Week in a Day is a great springboard for finding recipes you can make on the weekend to enjoy all week long.

Alternatively, you can choose simple meals to make on busy weeknights.  Fresh spinach can be sautéed in minutes.  Paired with a microwaved baked potato and a simple meat like a polish sausage that can be cooked quickly, and you have a fairly healthy, inexpensive meal.  Another option is to keep frozen vegetables on hand to cook quickly and pair with an easy meat and minute rice.

Buy foods your family likes.  Too often, people buy a bargain that turns out to be a waste of money because their family won’t eat it.  Buy the foods that your family will eat, not the foods that are a bargain.

Use leftovers!  Do you eat leftovers?  Some people don’t like them, but I love leftovers because they offer me one meal I don’t have to cook!  Eating leftovers can be a great way to stretch your food dollars.  If your family refuses leftovers, try to cook only as much as your family will eat in a meal so you don’t waste extras.

Create new meals with the leftovers.  Another idea is to creatively repurpose leftovers.  For instance, if you cook a whole chicken or buy a rotisserie chicken, keep the leftovers to turn into other meals like chicken enchiladas or chicken noodle soup.  Thanks to the Internet, you can find plenty of recipes for reusing leftovers.  Some chefs, like Robin Miller of the Food Network, specifically look to make meals out of leftovers to help you better utilize your time and food.

Utilize the freezer.  One of my favorite ways to reduce food waste is to use the freezer.  We recently bought a large box of individual serve guacamole.  I still had 8 left close to the expiration date, so I put them in the freezer, and now we just pull them out as we need them.  Many meals that you make and don’t want to eat all at once can be frozen for later use.

What are your favorite strategies for avoiding food waste?  Do you waste a lot of food or a minimal amount?

 

The Importance of Fixing Things Sooner Rather than Later

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A few years ago, my brakes started making noise whenever I pushed the brake pedal.  I procrastinated quite a while before I took the car into the shop because I didn’t have the money for the repair.  However, because I waited so long, the brakes had worn down to the rotors, so my repair was much more expensive than it would have been had I come in right away.

But Wait! I Hadn’t Learned the Lesson Yet!

You would think I’d have learned my lesson, but no, I haven’t.

We own a minivan that is 11.5 years old and has 167,000 miles on it.  A while ago, one of the back sliding door handles broke, so we could no longer use it from the outside.  No worries.  We simply herded all the kids in through the other side door.  Was it a pain?  Just a little bit, but we didn’t want to spend $200 to $300 on a door handle repair when we had so many other pressing expenses.

But, then the other sliding door broke.  The wire coil started to fray, so we couldn’t open the door.  The repair for the outer wire coil?  A cool $900 to $1,000.  Ouch.

Fixing Things
Fix it now!

So, we started opening the driver’s side door and reaching around to open the side door with the outside broken handle by using the inside handle.  By now, we were starting to feel a bit, um, special, I’ll say, because of our unusual way to open the door.  Still, we put off the repair because we had other expenses like a $210 garage door repair and a $90 air conditioning tune up along with a $900 deposit for braces for our son.

All was okay until the inside door handle broke.  Now, the only way the kids can get in and out of the car is through the front doors.  The special meter has gone up enormously, and even the kids are talking about how embarrassed the are to get in and out of the car.  Now that the repair is inevitable, I called the shop to find out the repair will likely be $400 to $500 because they’ll have to remove the door and replace both the inside and outside door handle.

Lesson learned.  When a repair is needed, make the repair.  If you don’t, you’ll likely end up paying more in the future.

How to Get the Money Together

If your budget is tight like ours is, there are ways to get the money together to make a smaller repair immediately so you don’t have to pay more for a larger repair later:

Raid your emergency fund.  This is the easiest.  If you have an emergency fund, use the money and then rebuild the emergency fund as quickly as possible.

Have a pantry challenge for a week.  We spend approximately $150 to $200 a week for groceries.  By taking just one week to eat only what we have in the house and not going to the grocery store, we could have had the money for the handle repair before it got worse.  Lesson learned.

Sell stuff.  Everyone has stuff around the house that they don’t need or don’t use.  Sell things at second hand stores, sports resale stores, or eBay or Facebook.  You’ll be surprised how quickly the money will add up.

Do you procrastinate on repairs because your budget is tight?  If so, like us, has that rationale ended up costing you more money?