Search Results for: budget

Ask for the Special

January 24, 2011 By Shane Ede 4 Comments

I’m not a very outgoing person. I have a hard time going up to people I’ve never met. I have a hard time even talking to people I’ve never met. So, I have a very hard time following the old advice that you have to ask for the real discount. Luckily, not everything has to be done in person, so I can send emails for some things. Which is exactly how I proved that old adage true.

For Christmas, instead of receiving gifts from all of our relatives, we asked them to put in the money that they would normally have spent to a mini-vacation fund for us. We all have set spending limits for our Christmas presents, so it was pretty easy for them to do that. Then, we took a nice little weekend trip the day after Thanksgiving.

We wanted someplace nice that would be within the budget, but would still count as a vacation. In other words, Super 8 just wasn’t going to cut it. We had originally settled on one place, but, being the curious fella that I am, I kept looking for a better deal. And, as luck would have it I found one. In fact, for what it would have cost us for one night at the original place, we stayed for two at the next place. And, if you want my honest opinion, I think the place I found was a lot nicer. How did we get such a deal? I asked for it.

Simple really. I emailed the manager who was listed on the website. He forwarded my email on to the guy in charge of reservations. In my email, I simply told him what days we were planning on staying, and asked if there were any specials that would be active for that weekend. At this point, he could have easily just said no. But, he didn’t. And he earned a customer.

The place was very nice. (Here’s a link and a picture of the living room area if you’re curious: Chase on the Lake, I highly recommend it.) They called the room we stayed in a “condotel”. Basically, it was a two bedroom, two bathroom, suite with a full kitchen and living room. Everything was way above the typical standards that we have for a hotel room. Overall, it was incredible. We spent the whole weekend relaxing (kid-free, thanks to Grandma) and came home refreshed.

We would have gone on the trip in any case. But, because I asked for the special, it became a lot cheaper than we had planned on it being. And, if we plan on doing it again (we will), I think we’ve found our place. Next time you’re making plans for a trip, or just trying to buy something special, make sure you at least ask for a special. You might just surprise yourself and get one!

Beating Broke Rules: Bonuses

December 8, 2010 By Shane Ede 11 Comments

Beating Broke Rule: Spend your Bonuses wisely.

Every year, many of us are lucky enough to receive some sort of bonus from our employer. (If you’re self employed, that’s bonus enough. 😉 ) And when we do, the inevitable question arises. What do I do with the money? And then, how to budget for it?

The simple answer is to spend it wisely. In a more complex answer, it depends on what your goals are for your financial life. Using your bonus to buy Christmas presents may make you feel good for a month or two, but will you feel guilty afterward? You’ll feel much better, in the long run, if you spend the money wisely towards your goals.

Here’s the downside to that, though. You’ll also feel guilty if you use it all for debt repayment. Each of you will have a different situation, but here’s how we usually use our bonus here in Beating Broke.

Consider taking 10% of the bonus and blowing it. Buy some presents. Take your family out to dinner and a movie. Whatever you want. Give yourself 10% in cash and free rein to do whatever you want with it. You’ll feel better when you do.

With the remaining, take a look at your situation. Do you have a purchase that you’ve been saving up for, or putting off until you could afford it? I’m not talking about those gifts, or the television upgrade, but things that you really need. Maybe some costco eyeglasses? For example, a portion of my bonus (if I get it) will go towards buying new tires for one of our cars and paying for a repair that one of them needs. It won’t take the whole bonus, but a good portion of it. And it will be extremely relieving to not have to come up with that money out of my normal paycheck. If the bonus doesn’t come, I’ll still have to pay for those things, but it might take a little longer to pay for them.

Maybe your situation doesn’t have a purchase like that that you need to pay for. But, maybe you’ve got some debt that it could help retire. What we don’t spend on tires and repairs, will likely go towards paying off a debt. It won’t pay off any of them all by itself, but it will cut the payoff by several months. And, while that doesn’t give me the same feeling that just blowing the money on stuff does, it will leave me feeling much better for a far longer time.

The bottom line is this. Think about how you spend your bonus and spend it wisely. You’ll feel much better for it.

photo credit: jypsygen

Is Personal Finance Really Important?

November 19, 2010 By Shane Ede 2 Comments

In case you haven’t noticed, this site is all about personal finance. Well, mostly. We certainly talk a lot about personal finance. But, is personal finance really all that important?

How much time do you devote to your personal finances? To your budget? To coupon clipping? In the end, does any of it make a difference? Or are we merely just going through the motions because of some larger issue? Ever since my Junior year in high school when my english class went through a whole section on propaganda, I’ve (rightly so) questioned anything and everything. We don’t deal with propaganda on the level of that they did in war times, but we still deal with it on a regular basis. And at it’s root is the necessity by those companies who are spreading the propaganda to further the consumerism society that we’ve become.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the subject of breaking free of what you are, and becoming what you should be. Books like “No More Mondays” and especially “Early Retirement Extreme” have brought me to take an even closer look at the consumerist lives that we live. Jacob (the author of Early Retirement Extreme) lives on somewhere around $10,000 a year. A Year! Could you even make it 3 months on that? I know that I would have an incredibly tough time even trying to come close to living on 10k a year. It would take some very radical changes for me, but I might try working towards that by reducing my consumerist habits.

And, when you reduce your consumerist habits, a funny thing will likely happen. Your expenses will go down. And you’ll be able to “live” on less and less. And another thing that will happen, is that personal finance will become less important. We worry about the most frugal way to do this or that, or the proper way to save for retirement or buy a house or pay off debt, or even the best way to negotiate a better deal on your next car when what we really should be worrying about is why we are living the lives we are. How many of you are working jobs you don’t want to because you have all this debt from your house and your car or from all the fun “stuff” you bought on credit? I know my hand is raised. How LIBERATING would it be to walk out of your office today and not look back. And not have to worry that someone was going to come and take your house away.

Do me a favor. Take 15 minutes and watch this movie that Adam included in his post on focusing on what truly matters.

*direct link to youtube video if my embed doesn’t work for some reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cakm2nIQWo

Now, tell me. Could you stop and not keep going if you had to? Or are you so tied to your “career” and “job” that you have to “keep going”? Take the steps today to free yourself of the consumerist lifestyles that we live. Free yourself from the eternal “going” that we experience every day. You likely won’t accomplish it in a day, or even a month or year, but if you take a little step every day, you can get there. I’m taking that journey, step by step, and it’s difficult. It’s difficult to give up some things that we don’t really think about. But, if we want to be able to stop whenever we want to, we need to be able to do that.