Search Results for: budget

Saving Money by Cooking at Home

November 17, 2010 By Shane Ede 4 Comments

On the long list of things that you can do while saving money, one thing that invariably makes it’s way to the top 10 is to brown bag lunches and to cook at home. If you’ve ever sat down and figured out how much you spend eating out each month (we have, it’s in the budget), you know that food, and dining out in particular, can be a real drain on the budget.

One thing that really holds many people back from cooking at home and even from taking bag lunches to work is that they never really learned how to cook. Either their parents never brought them into the kitchen to help, or their parents just never cooked at home either. Either way, many of the simple skills that those who do cook take for granted are a complete mystery to others. Some of those skills are being replaced with machines and such that can do the task, but those are usually expensive and if you’re trying to save money, aren’t really an option.

But, it’s not an excuse! You can learn those skills rather easily. Need to know how to boil an egg? Search for “boil an egg” on the internet. Anyone who can read, can make their own food. With the internet at our fingers, you can easily search for recipes. Stuffing? How about Pineapple Stuffing. Chicken? Here’s a whole list of chicken breast recipes! Here’s instructions on how to make beef jerky! Most have pretty detailed instructions. And, besides, what’s the worst that could happen? You ruin some food? I’d bet you could try at least once or twice more and still not equal what the same meal would cost at a restaurant!

The bottom line is this. Not knowing something isn’t an excuse. Some things will take time to learn, but you can learn many of these basic skills, with repeated practice, in less than a month. Challenge yourself! Take a month off of eating out. Only eat in for those 30 days. And, no, I don’t mean delivery. Or Digiornos. Start with raw ingredients and go from there, using a recipe. After a while, you get to know how certain things taste and how they go together and you can even forget the recipe.

Photo Credit: thatedeguy, on Flickr

Want to Save Money? Eliminate Some “Needs”

November 5, 2010 By Shane Ede 8 Comments

One of the key parts of any successful personal finance strategy is to save money. It’s a two-prong thing. You save money by putting it away in a savings account and you also save money by reducing the money that you would be spending. Each plays a very important part in your financial life.

Often, when you talk to someone about saving money, they are quick to exclaim something along the lines of “but, I’ve already squeezed as much as I possibly can out of my budget and spending! There’s nowhere else to save!” And in nearly every single one of those cases, they are completely wrong. And in almost every case, that person needs to have a very serious discussion with him or her self and think about what is really a “need” and what is actually a “want”.

What you think are needs are not. Do you really need a car? Two pairs of shoes? Two cars? Three bathrooms? How about the ever favorite whipping post that is cable t.v.? How deeply are you willing to cut. How much unlike everyone else are you willing to live so that you can save money and work towards financial freedom?

What extremes are you willing to go to? Are you willing to go so far as to exist on Ramen and Rice for a year? How about walking to work? How about cutting back to only one pair of shoes? How about selling your house and moving into something much smaller? Yes, those are all sacrifices. And, yes, they will all take a lot of adjustment to get used to. But the savings could be a potential boon to your personal finances. What other money saving ideas can you come up with?

2004-10-03 Newport, RI - Cliff Walk, Carey Mansion
You really need to decide what you really “need”. Many of the things that we think we need are really things that we want, but that have become so ingrained into our lives that we feel we need them. For instance, in our family, we have two cars. My wife needs a car for her work, and it’s easier for us if we don’t have to try and coordinate our schedules. So, we have two cars. We don’t have to try and figure out how to rearrange so that one of us can get home at 5 when the other has to be at a meeting at 4:30. Could it be done? Perhaps. We’ve made it work for a few days at a time when one or the other of our cars has been in the shop. Another more personal example would be books. I like to read. I get a few here and there for review that I usually don’t have to pay for, but otherwise, I buy my books or trade for them on Paperbackswap.com. Once I’ve read them, I usually put them back into the paperbackswap system, but you can sell used books for cash too. Even trading for them, it still costs me the cost of shipping to send them to whomever requested them. It’s way cheaper than buying retail, but it still has a cost. I certainly don’t need those books. I could just as easily borrow books from the library. But, would they be the exact ones I want to read? Not always.

In our case, there are many wants that have been elevated to a level of need. Deep down, we know we don’t really need those things, but we want them bad enough and they give us enough value that we’re willing to keep them and the expense that goes along with them.

Yes, if we decided that we wanted to be rid of our debt now and not a minute later, we could eliminate a lot of things and be rid of it. We choose not to go to that extreme, however. Part of that decision is that we just don’t feel that we need to. We’re making advances in our finances, and, while it’s slower than it could be, we’re happy making that compromise.

But, what about you? How extreme are you willing to go to get rid of your debt. And what compromises, like us, are you willing to make at the risk of delaying your debt payoff? If you’re paying off debt, take a close look at the things that you think you need. If I were still a betting man, I’d bet that a very large portion of those things aren’t really needs at all.

Image Credit: 2004-10-03 Newport, RI – Cliff Walk, Carey Mansion by QuiteLucid, on Flickr

Psych Yourself Rich

November 3, 2010 By Shane Ede Leave a Comment

Psych Yourself Rich

By: Farnoosh Torabi

As a personal finance blogger, I read a lot of books on personal finance. These books range from the simplified budgeting and saving books to more complex books (like Early Retirement Extreme, which I’m reading now). In all honesty, Psych yourself rich lands somewhere in the middle. Parts of the book are over-simplified. Other parts seem to make things more complex than they should be.

One of the biggest things that I had against the book was that it wasn’t written for me. What does that mean? Well, the book was written for the younger folks out there. The 20-somethings that are struggling with their careers, relationships, and money. I’m a 30-something (just barely, though) that is pretty secure where I work, married, and have a pretty good grasp on my money despite my money being a bit unruly at times. Many of the topics just didn’t apply directly. I certainly could take the general lesson involved and it could apply, but at the surface, it isn’t the same. Also, it’s more of a primer. It doesn’t go in depth on a lot of the topics, choosing to cover more topics, but shallowly.

The one thing that I really enjoyed about this book. Yes, enjoyed is the right word. Even for as strange as it may seem to use that word with a non-fiction finance book. I’m a sucker for the psychology of things. The why we do what we do. Torabi did an excellent job of exploring the psychology behind many of the financial moves that we make. Speaking from experience, she wrote extensively on the psychology of the layoff. I, personally, have never experienced a layoff. I’ve been lucky. I know there are plenty who have in the last few years especially. More important than the psychological effect of the layoff, she takes on the attitude you need to take once you’ve been laid-off in order to quickly recover and gain your feet again.

The psychology aside, this is an excellent book for a beginner in personal finance. Someone who finds themselves deeply in debt, or facing repayment issues based on a layoff. It’s also aimed at those (like me) who like to know why they are doing something, or why they are feeling the way they are about their finances. The book is well written, with some very nice asides that give it a personal touch.