Search Results for: budget

The Expensive Produce Myth

June 7, 2010 By Shane Ede 10 Comments

When many people discuss buying more produce (fruits and veggies) the most common complaint is how expensive it is. How can they afford to pay that much for fresh produce and still feed their family?!? Well, I think it’s a myth.

Based on my recent visit to the grocery store, the price of produce is actually pretty good. Let’s compare for a minute. A quick trip down the meat aisle will tell us that a chunk of meat of whatever shape or size will likely cost us about $3 a pound. And that’s the cheap stuff. No t-bones here. How about the other aisles. Hamburger helper? About $3. Plus a pound of hamburger, a cup or so of milk, and some margarine or butter. Chips? Doritos were on sale for about $2 a bag. I think that’s about a 10 ounce bag. Frozen Pizza? I saw some that were 5 for $10. Smaller ones, sure, but pizzas.

Now, lets take a look at produce. Apples were $1.49 a pound. Oranges were $1.89 a pound. Potatoes were about $1 a pound. Onions were $1.38 a pound. Broccoli was about $2 a bunch. The list goes on.

Sure, none of those, by themselves, is a meal. Very little of the first list is either. But, if you eat an apple before dinner or as an appetizer, it makes you fuller. Which means you’ll eat less of the other, more expensive stuff. Maybe you replace 4 ounces of steak with a 9 ounce apple. Even at a 2:1 ratio, you break even. If you manage to cut the meat even further back and replace it with other veggies, you’ll save even more!

And I won’t even go into the savings on medical costs that could be gotten from eating more fruits and veggies.

The bottom line is that expensive produce is a myth. It’s only when you don’t stop to consider that it’s replacing something else in a meal that you realize that. If you replace something, you can buy less of it at the store. And you will spend less. Sure, costs might stay the same, or even go up, if you don’t reduce what you buy based on your new eating habits. But, that food will last longer. Give it a try and then compare your budget sheets from before and after. I think you might be surprised by the outcome.

Advice for College Graduates

May 14, 2010 By Shane Ede 7 Comments

When I entered college, I had no debt. Well, I guess I had some as I’d already signed the papers, but hadn’t received the money, for the loans I was going to be using to partially finance my education. When I finally graduated, 7 and a half years later, I had mountains of the stuff. Nearly 30k in college loans, close to 10k in credit card debt, a car loan, and a mortgage.

For the high school graduates: If you learn nothing in college, learn to avoid debt. That single thing will make the rest of your life so much easier. It allows you to start ahead of every single one of your college peers, and will make it so much easier to achieve the goals that you want in life.

If you’re reading this, and you’re a college graduate that never got the above bit of advice, you’ve likely ended up like I did. Lots of debt. Here’s my advice to you (and roundabouts to my past self).

Learn how to budget. Creating and maintaining a budget opened my eyes to the ways that I was spending (and wasting) my money. Create a budget for yourself and stick to it.
Learn how to avoid debt. Very few of you will be able to completely avoid debt. Minimize it. Pretend it’s your leprous uncle. Instill an aversion to debt.
Learn the meaning of appreciation. If you’re going to add debt, only do so to buy something that you expect to appreciate. New furniture doesn’t count. Houses sorta count. Cars absolutely, positively, do not count.
Learn the value of shared costs. Just because you’re a big boy (or girl) now with a fancy diploma (with fancy calligraphy), does not mean that you’re above having a roommate. In fact, I would encourage it (unless you’re married, because that’s just a bit weird). It doesn’t even take a calculator to figure out that rent/2 is better than rent/1.
Learn the value of patience. Just because you can get a mortgage or a car loan, or whatever, does not mean you should. Statistically speaking, you’ll change jobs several times over the first 5 years of your career. Do you really want to be tied down to a house if you need to move to another city? Slow down and ease yourself into your adult life. It’s not all that it’s cracked up to be anyways.
Learn the word Retirement. Sure, your all excited about your newly earned earning potential and your fancy new career, but, if you’re like every other person on the planet, you’ll want to retire at some point. Start saving now to make that dream come true later.
Remember to have fun. Just because you’re all grown up and joining the “real world” doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun. Your hobbies and activities are what make the “real world” worthwhile.
Wear sunscreen. None of you will get this reference as you were probably 8 at the time. The rest us do and it’s not that important. (in case you’re curious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen)

The preceding is, by no means, an exhaustive list. In fact, it can’t even really be considered a quick and dirty list. It is, merely, a list of a few things that I have come to think of as some tenets for post college life. Some, I have learned, others I wish I had.

Congratulations on your graduation, and best wishes as you join the rest of us in the real world.

Money Management Software Changes

May 10, 2010 By Shane Ede 3 Comments

As you’ve probably gathered, I’m a bit of a budget enthusiast here. It’s a budget that got our finances back on track and it’s a budget that keeps them headed in the right direction. Our budget tells us when we’ve overspent and helps us adjust to bring us back to balance when we have overspent. For our budgeting purposes, we have a pretty simple excel-like worksheet that has our income broken down, and has our expenditures broken into categories. We don’t get super-duper detailed, but it has enough detail that we know when we’re running low on budgeted funds for something.

For years, I’ve used a copy of MS Money to do our check register keeping. For some time, I even tracked our retirement portfolios in detail. I still use MS Money, but it’s recently been dropped from the Microsoft list of current software. They aren’t going to make any more versions, and they are ending the support for it at some point. So, at some point, we’ll need to switch to a newer software and from a new vendor. There are several choices. Quickbooks is a business favorite, but I feel that it’s a bit too much for our personal records. GnuCash is a free software, but is very similar to Quickbooks and for the same reasons would be a bit of an overkill. The most likely choice is Quicken by Intuit. But what version?

My first thought was to try and use Mint.com. They were purchased by Intuit and the service was integrated with and finally replaced the Quicken Online that they offered. The nice thing about Mint.com is that it’s free, and it’s online so you can access it from anywhere. The service connects to all of your accounts and updates them for you. They’ve got some pretty nice tools. A budget calculator, and a nice budget worksheet that really are nice. I might still give the service a try, but it can’t connect to my local Credit Union account, so I’d still have to enter a lot of the stuff manually.

And, if I have to enter stuff manually, I will likely end up purchasing something like Quicken Premier and utilizing it’s more robust feature set to do reporting and tracking of investments and such. Another pro for having the actual software is that I have control over where my info is and can easily backup my files. I’m sure that Mint is very secure, but I still get a bit leery about having one place that has that much access to all of my financial data.

What about you? What software am I missing? What do you use? I don’t mind being proven wrong, if there’s a better software out there, let me know!

Disclaimer: The links in this post are a mix of affiliate links and paid links. Neither of those facts changed the content of this post and the thoughts are mine and mine alone.