Search Results for: budget

Giveaways: Budget Stretcher or Waste of Time?

April 20, 2015 By MelissaB 3 Comments

Giveaways are nothing new. Just read a handful of blogs and you’ll likely find plenty of giveaways. But are they worth the time and effort? Can you ever win something good?

I’ll be honest, my husband and I are digging out of a hole of debt. The good news is that we’ve paid off over half of our debt. Yeah!

However, we’ve reached a point where we firmly refuse to acquire any new debt. Meanwhile, our car is 10 years old and has 150,000 miles on it, our 10 year old needs braces, and we’ve just had nearly $2,000 in medical and dental work. . .

Our money is stretched to the max.

So, I decided to try my hand at giveaways.

Right now, we just don’t have a lot of extra money to pay for presents and fun items for the kids, so I thought giveaways could be a good way to get some of the luxuries we can’t afford.

So far, in three months (December through February), I’ve won 5 prizes:

A $50 Visa gift card
A board game for my 10 year old ($29.95 RV)
A $10 bookstore gift card
A movie
A book

During these past three months, I entered 47 giveaways, meaning I won 10% of the giveaways I entered. Not bad.

How Much Time Do I Spend Entering Giveaways

I know there are some people that spend A LOT of time entering giveaways, but I don’t have time for that. Instead, I enter giveaways once or twice a week for 30 to 60 minutes at a time. I often enter the giveaways when my kids are watching television in the afternoon (they get an hour a day of tv time), or in the evening when I’m too tired to do anymore work. (Unlike just vegging and watching Netflix, entering giveaways has the prospect of giving me something back.)

I don’t enter giveaways just to enter giveaways. Instead, I focus on ones that offer cash or gift cards (though these are the most competitive and difficult to win), ones that have products my kids would like or that would make nice gifts, and ones that offer homeschool curriculum.

If you want to start entering giveaways, deciding what you would like to focus on winning is a good way to limit the amount of time you spend entering giveaways.

Where I Find Giveaways to Enter

To maximize my time entering giveaways, I try to enter ones that have low entries.

I have found some Facebook groups to join where people advertise their giveaways.

Another site I love is Tightwad in Utah. She lists low entry giveaways that are ending in the next week.

If you’d like to enter giveaways and don’t really care if they’re low entry or not, you can use this link or this link to find linkies for giveaways from a wide array of bloggers.

Finally, if there is a blogger who routinely offers the types of giveaways you’d like to win, make sure to come back and visit the site regularly. Chances are that entry requirements for the giveaway are to like the site’s Facebook or Twitter pages. Just do this once, and for every subsequent giveaway on that blog, you’ve already met those requirements.

I don’t expect to get rich from entering giveaways or even to be able to supply all of my kids’ presents. However, it is nice to get free stuff in the mail, especially if some of it can be used to offset the expense of Christmas and birthday presents.

Do you enter giveaways? Why or why not? If you do, how much success have you had? How much time do you spend entering giveaways?

Killing Debt? Have a Realistic Budget

September 24, 2012 By MelissaB 9 Comments

Do you have debt? Does it drive you crazy? Do you stay awake at night wondering how to pay it all off? Does it feel like you will never pay it off? Do you argue with your spouse about your bills?

While debt can at times be a useful tool (student loans, for example), when it comes time to pay it back, debt can be a heavy burden no matter if it is good debt or bad debt. Debt can cause marriage problems and even affect your health.

If you have decided enough is enough, and you want to be free of debt once and for all, you might be tempted to slash your spending and put all of your extra money on your debt. Be careful, though, because this type of plan can lead to a quick crash and burn much like a person on a crash diet will only follow the plan for a few weeks before giving up.

Before you even begin to put extra money on your debt, you must first create a realistic budget.

What Is a Realistic Budget?

A realistic budget is one in which ALL of your expenses are taken into account. Perhaps you pay your car insurance every 6 months, and it is $400. If you want to create a barebones budget so you can pay off debt, perhaps you don’t consider this payment, which can be a mistake. When the car insurance payment is due, where is the money to pay it?

We have been paying down our debt aggressively, and we made the mistake of not having a realistic budget. We did have a $1,000 emergency fund, but because so much of our extra money was going toward debt repayment, we continually hit months where we had expenses such as the semi-annual car insurance payment and no cash to pay for it. We would rob the emergency fund to pay it, and then we would have to stop our extra debt repayment for awhile to build up the emergency fund. This cycle creates its own stress.

A Realistic Budget May Mean Hard Sacrifices

When you add up all of the payments you have to make in a year that don’t come in regular monthly intervals, you may be surprised. There is car insurance, house insurance, license plate tabs, vet bills if you have animals, car repairs and maintenance, children’s athletics, and clothing for the family to name a few. Add up how much you spend on these, and you probably easily have a total in the thousands.

That is thousands of dollars that are unaccounted for in your budget.

Almost a year into our debt repayment, we finally made a realistic budget. We were shocked to see that when we set aside money each month for a portion of our annual or semi-annual payments (like $67 for our semi-annual car insurance payment), we didn’t have enough income to cover our realistic expenses. As a result, we had to make some hard sacrifices such as cutting cable completely and pulling our daughter out of her expensive preschool. These sacrifices weren’t easy, but making them did relieve some stress. Now we no longer have ups and downs in our money flow. We set the money aside, and when the bill is due, the money is there to pay it.

We may not be able to put as much on our debt every month, but we have a set amount for repayment above the minimum payment, and any extra money that comes in also gets put on debt.

Creating a realistic budget can help you avoid the stress of not having enough money certain months to pay all of your bills when semi-annual and annual payments are due. However, you will feel more in control of your money, which can create a positive cycle. The more in control of your money you are, usually the more money you find to pay on your debt.

What irregular expenses give you financial difficulties?

Creating a Simple Budget the Beating Broke Way

February 13, 2012 By Shane Ede 36 Comments

One of the most important parts of paying off your debt and becoming financially independent is creating a budget. At the very least it gives you an outline of where your money goes and where it should go. At it’s most extreme, it serves to create strict limits for your spending. How lax or strictly you adhere to the budget is up to you and how die-hard you are about your budgeting.

One thing remains constant however. When the end of the month comes, the ending balance should be 0. Money in – money out = 0. If you have a deficit, you overspent and need to compensate for that by either reducing budgeted amounts in another category or by reducing the available money for the next month. If you have a surplus, (good for you!) then you need to budget that money until your end result is 0. Most of us looking to become debt free will budget any surplus towards excess debt payment.

Here’s how we have things set up at the Beating Broke household.

Income. We keep a very simple income spreadsheet. It lists the sources in Column A. The amount in Column B and any notes for the income in Column C. All of that gets totaled at the bottom. That’s all we do with our income. It’s the expenses that we really need to focus on anyways.

Expenses. The expenses spreadsheet is a little more complex. I have a field for the income that I carry over from the income sheet. I also have a field for a total of all budgeted amounts. I then have a few calculated fields. The first is a field that gives me the budgetary deficit or surplus. I get that by subtracting the total budgeted amount from the income. A second calculated field gives me the true deficit or surplus. This is calculated by subtracting the actual amounts spent from the income. This field is really only useful for balancing at the end of the month, but if you’ve done your budgeting properly, the amount should be small and easy to take care of.

The meat of the expenses spreadsheet is everything else. Column A holds the categories. I’ve broken them down into header categories and sub categories. For instance, the Health header category has sub categories for Health Insurance, Aflac, Prescriptions, and Medical Bills. I could go even further and list each bill, but that would greatly increase the amount of time I spend on my budget. I want it to do it’s job (keep my money in order), not take up hours of my time. Column B holds the budgeted amount for that sub category. Pretty simple really. Column C is the amount that I’ve spent to date on that category. Column D is the % the budgeted amount is of the income/budget and Column E is the % that the actual spent amount is of the income/budget. I’ve also thrown in some totals for each header category as well as the % of total for those as well.

Each week, we go over our checkbooks, credit cards, and all other financial happenings and enter them in the appropriate places. By doing it every week, it keeps the task down to a half-hour or less which helps with reducing the stress level of working with your finances. Especially if they are a little wonky to begin with.

Budget deficit and surplus. Occasionally, we get to the end of the month and we have a surplus or deficit. We’ve either spent less than we budgeted for or we have spent more than we budgeted for. The latter is a little rough, but the first is always fun. Because we don’t usually figure out the overall surplus/deficit until the month has ended, we can’t budget for the surplus/deficit in that month. So, I’ve thrown in a field on the Income sheet that is titled “Carryover” and one in the expenses sheet that is titled “Shortfall”. If we have a deficit, the carryover value is 0 and the shortfall amount is the amount of the deficit. And vice versa. This helps with taking the surplus and budgeting it as an extra debt payment or in accounting for previous months deficits.

Most of these ideas are pretty basic budgeting principles. We’ve tweaked them around a little to fit our financial style and to be loosely based on the Dave Ramsey system. If you’ve got questions on budgeting that we might be able to answer, drop us a line and we’ll try and answer them as soon as we can.