finances Archives — Beating Broke

What Will You Do with the Final Days of 2021?

November 22, 2021 By MelissaB Leave a Comment

I’m on several personal finance and healthy eating groups on Facebook. Routinely, right about now, newbies to the groups post about their big plans in January. In January they’re going to start paying down their debt, saving more, eating healthier. They jump right to January even though, as of today, there are 39 days left in 2021. That is 5.5 weeks left. Don’t throw in the towel on your goals just because we’re approaching the holiday season! You can still make a positive impact on your life in the next 5.5 weeks!

How We Self-Sabotage at the End of the Year

Let’s be honest. Many of us can do some significant damage to our lives in the last few weeks of any year. We tend to lose control and let loose. Then, we have to pick up the pieces in the next year. I used to exhibit that kind of behavior every year!

For instance, one year, my husband and I overspent on Christmas gifts. Our budget was extremely tight, and we needed three months of the new year to get out of the hole we had dug! Three months for one night of Christmas Eve shopping.

What Will You Do with the Rest of 2021? — Photo by Food Photographer | Jennifer Pallian on Unsplash

I used to do the same with my food consumption. Starting at Thanksgiving, I would give up and eat all of the good things with abandon. One year, I gained 10 pounds from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day. I was gaining at a rate of two pounds a week for five weeks. That’s ridiculous!

What Will You Do with the Final Days of 2021?

Luckily, I’ve gotten older and wiser. True, we are entering the holiday season, which can make reining in our budgets and our food consumption a bit more difficult. However, Thanksgiving is only one day as is Christmas. We’re talking two days in the remaining 39 days of the year.

You still have time to make this year different.

Mind Your Budget

Imagine that, for the next five weeks, you stick to your budget. You don’t overspend. Then, when you start 2022, you’re starting with a clean slate. You’re not in the hole from overspending. How great would that feel?

Enjoy on the Holidays

Likewise, feel free to celebrate on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Enjoy the drinks, the food, the company. But just enjoy the food and drinks on that day. If you love pumpkin pie, eat a slice (or two) on Thanksgiving, but then eat normally the rest of the days. Your body can handle one day of indulgence. It can’t handle 39 days of indulgence!

Final Thoughts

Far too many of us self-sabotage as we enter the holiday season. We worry that we’ll miss out. We think that we don’t have any self-control during the holidays. But that’s not true. Instead, we need a mind shift. Indulge on the actual holiday, but the rest of the days, live your normal, typical life. You’ll be so much happier on January 1^st if you do.

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2 Best Places to Start Fixing Your Finances

April 7, 2015 By Jeff @ Sustainable Life Blog 1 Comment

When I first started trying to get my finances under control, I had no idea where to start. I tried to follow a patchwork of ideas like pay yourself first and only spend X percent of your income on rent, but at the end of the month there would always be more month than money. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong until someone asked where my money was going every month. Aside from food, rent, cell phone and credit card payments, I had absolutely no idea. It was such a simple question and the answer ended up keying my turn-around financially but it took me a while to realize that mattered.

So if you’re trying to turn your finances around and save a bit of money every month instead of wondering where it all went, here are the 2 best places to start fixing your finances.

Track What You Spend

As I found out, the most important thing is tracking your finances. When I started turning my ship around, there wasnt a lot of good financial tracking software like their is now. I started with a blank sheet of paper and a stack of bills, working those and my online logins to figure out how much I was spending every month. It’s much easier now, with the online trackers for your finances such as mint and apps that are more investment focused, like personal capital. Once you start tracking your income and expenses, you’ll know where you need to cut and how much you can use to save or pay off debt each month.

Cut the Excessive Expenses

Once you get your expenses written down, I’ve found it’s most valuable to lower your structural expenses as much as possible at first. This includes things like rent, car payments, car insurance, electricity, water, cell phones and cable tv. I’ve found that many people way overpay for cable TV (Calling up and getting a discount usually works wonders) and if they switch to an MNVO like ting or republic wireless they can usually lower their phone bill by 66% or more per month. For a family of 2 if they switched phones and totally ditched cable, that’s an immediate savings of 200+ per month. Once that’s done, add all that money to your savings or debt repayment. Then it’s time to move on to your car expenses. Consider selling your car and trading in for a cheaper one that you own outright, and can carry less insurance on. This will get rid of your car payment completely and hopefully lower your insurance by a significant amount as well. Better yet, try getting a bike and getting rid of your car completely.

In my opinion, those are the low hanging fruit – things you can easily change and your day to day existence wont be changed much one way or the other. The best part about this is you can spend a day or 2 over the course of a week and you should be able to easily pocket 500+ per month in savings – that’s 6,000 per year! Like you, I could use the extra 6k per year.

Once you get your structural issues fixed in your finances, it’s time to move on to your habitual purchases. Is there anything that you spend too much money on and dont get a lot of value from? Do you spend too much on fast food, or alcohol? Or maybe you buy too many books you’ll never be able to read, or too many movies on blue-ray you cant watch?

Now is the time to deal with those, and the easiest way that i’ve found is to get a budget set up and spend that in cash every month. Say you want to limit your blu-ray purchases to 25 bucks per month – get that amount in cash at the beginning of the month, then when the cash is no, no more blu-ray until your cash re-ups at the beginning of the month.

What’s Your Financial Weakness?

January 19, 2015 By MelissaB 12 Comments

We all have a financial weakness. That one area where we struggle to do the right thing. We might even struggle with deciding what the right thing is. If we remain unaware of our financial weakness, it can wreak havoc throughout our financial life, as my weakness did mine.

However, knowing your financial weakness, your financial Achilles’ Heel, so to speak, can help you become a better manager of your finances.

My Financial Achilles’ Heel

Me? I like to squirrel things away for the proverbial rainy day, but when the rainy day comes, I don’t like to dip into my stash.

My husband and I have an emergency fund. True, it’s smaller than we’d like, but we do have one in place. Considering 28% of Americans don’t have any emergency fund (CNN Money), we’re glad to have our small one.

There are other ways I squirrel away things. We buy produce in season at lower cost by doing creative things like renting an apple tree. Then we store it away for the cold winter months. (It makes me feel a bit like a pioneer. A pampered pioneer, but a pioneer, nonetheless.) Right now we have a deep freezer in our basement that is filled with plums, grapes, blueberries, strawberries, and applesauce. If we didn’t have money for groceries, we have enough fruit to easily last us for two to three months.

Having an emergency fund as well as a stocked pantry doesn’t sound like a problem, right?

Right. I’m being financially responsible and preparing for a time when money will be tight.

Here’s the problem.

I don’t like to dig into my stash.

If I have a financially lean month and I’m faced with a large expense like a car repair, I don’t do what would be logical–dip into my emergency fund. Instead, my first inclination is to put the repair on my credit card and leave the emergency fund intact.

If I have a month where I don’t have as much grocery money, I’m more likely to put groceries on my credit card than make a significant dent in our food stash.

My behavior makes.no.sense. No sense.

And yet it took me years to figure out that I do this and to realize that I have to fight the natural inclination to go in debt rather than dip into my reserves. Part of why my family struggled with credit card debt is because of this irrational behavior. Now the credit card debt is paid off, and I have a chance to start anew, well aware of my weakness.

What’s Your Financial Weakness

So, what’s your financial weakness? What completely irrational behavior do you exhibit? Are you even aware of what it may be?

Honestly, finding the chink in your armor, so to speak, may take years. I think it took me nearly 15 years to figure out mine, and I made a lot of financial mistakes during that time. I’m not sure why I exhibit this behavior except that perhaps growing up, I always saw my parents struggle with money. They never had money to create an emergency fund. Credit cards were their emergency fund, and they had to use them frequently.

I’m guessing for most of us, the experience is the same. Financial behaviors we saw in childhood and learned as normal become the basis for some of our adult decision making.

What is your financial Achilles’ Heel?