What you need is to draw up your budget carefully at the
beginning of each month. Decide how much money you absolutely
have to spend and, if possible, try to save as much as you can
from what is left after you subtract the expenses. By planning
everything well, you can easily avoid being short of money at
the end of the month.
Consider using debit or credit cards. More than being just a
convenient way of making payments, they can help you save
money. On the one hand, the savings kept in the bank account
will accrue interest. On the other hand, since it’s not always
very comfortable to walk over to an ATM for withdrawing money,
you might give up many unimportant expenses. Make sure to
choose the bank that offers you the most convenient terms.
Speaking about withdrawing money, some banks will charge a
fee every time you do that. The fee may be a percentage of the
sum you withdraw or a fixed amount. In the latter case, it
would be wise to make as few withdrawals as possible. Have a
regular ATM day once a month, for instance, and withdraw all
the money you will need for that month. Budget it well in
separate envelopes and you can stop worrying about paying more
than necessary.
If you try these simple solutions for a few consecutive
months, you’ll be surprised to see how much you have saved.
It’s all about being aware of the money you spend.
- 5 Practical Tips for All-Season Energy Savings
Replacing windows and doors is the fourth most common home-remodeling project and experts say it can dramatically reduce utility bills. Yet when it comes to choosing more energy-efficient options, consumers might be overwhelmed by the whirlwind of technology, terminology and options on the market today.
Homeowners need to be armed with accurate information in order to make the best choices about the many available options. That's especially true as energy costs continue to climb. The Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program estimates that the savings from replacing single-pane with Energy Star-qualified windows ranges from $125 to $340 a year for a typical home.
Since this is the time of year when many homeowners embark on remodeling projects, here are five basic tips for selecting the most energy efficient windows and doors for your home.
* Use Low-E glass. Select windows with Low-E glass, which controls the amount of heat transferred through the window and prevents heat loss in the winter. Jeld-Wen, a window and door manufacturer, now offers Low-E glass as a standard for its wood and clad wood windows and as an upgrade option for its vinyl windows.
* Update technology. Replace older single-pane windows with dual-pane units, which insulate the home from both cold and hot weather. Using both Low-E glass and insulating glass units will reduce home energy costs.
* Consider how they're made. Choose doors with energy-efficient cores, sills and frames that provide a barrier to energy exchange. Dual-pane, Low-E glass helps ensure that they will be weathertight and energy efficient. For example, studies show that over time, steel doors made with polystyrene maintain energy ratings better than doors made with polyurethane.
* Understand the standards. Efficiency ratings are based on U-factor, which is the amount of heat flow through a product. The lower the U-factor, the more efficient the product. Efficiency also is measured by Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC), which indicates the ability to block heat generated by sunlight. The lower the SHGC, the better. Finally, experts evaluate Visible Light Transmission, which is the percentage of sunlight that is able to penetrate a window or door. Higher percentages mean more light will enter through the glass.
* Focus on efficiency, not bells and whistles. Manufacturers achieve efficiency in different ways. No matter what technology is employed, one of the easiest ways to identify the most energy-efficient products is to simply look for the Energy Star label.
- Fun and Frugal Family Outings
The time we spend with our families is priceless. But most popular family activities are quite expensive. Even a simple night at the movies can put a serious dent in the budget by the time you buy tickets, popcorn and drinks for everyone.
Fortunately, there are cheaper alternatives to expensive family outings. They provide the opportunity to have just as much fun at a fraction of the cost. Some are even free.
Movies and Music
Kids are often itching to see the newest releases at the movie theater. Doing so even once a month, however, can get pricey. One alternative in some areas is the drive-in. Admission is usually much cheaper than it is at a regular theater, and some let you bring your own drinks and snacks. Drive-ins usually show fairly new releases, so the kids can say they saw something that's not out on video yet.
Some theaters offer reduced-price matinees during the day. Some even have free kid-oriented movies on weekend days. These options offer the theater experience without the outrageous cost.
Kids often want to go to concerts, but tickets to see the most famous bands are far from cheap. Check your local paper for free concerts in the park. Many areas have them during the warm months. Young children can enjoy the music without the huge crowds and deafening sound systems, and older children might gain an appreciation for less well-known bands.
The Great Outdoors
Nature offers a wealth of possibilities for family outings. Camping is a wonderful activity for families, and it doesn't have to be expensive. It can be as simple as pitching a tent in the back yard, or you can spring for a camper and rent space at a campground. Bring the grill and some hamburgers or hot dogs, or catch some fish to fry.
Parks are great for day trips. Those with playground equipment can keep youngsters entertained for hours on end. Hiking trails offer opportunities for exercise and exploration. Most parks have picnic facilities, so you can pack a lunch instead of eating out.
- How to Create a Family Budget
For singles, creating a budget is relatively easy. They tend to have a good handle on how much money they have coming in, and when tracking expenses, they only have their own to think about. But creating a family budget is a whole new ball game.
Most families have multiple sources of income. And when there are multiple spenders, that makes things much more confusing. This is one of the main reasons that families lack a formal budget. But having a budget and sticking to it can greatly improve a family's financial outlook.
Making a family budget may be tricky, but it can be done. Here's 7 steps how.
1. Take inventory of all income. If a certain source of income fluctuates from month to month, use the lowest amount or average it out.
2. Keep track of all expenses for a month or so. Keep all of your receipts, and ask all family members to turn theirs in to you each day.
3. Add up your monthly expenses. Be sure to include bills, debt payments, groceries, and everyday expenses such as lunch money and transportation costs.
- Every Little Bit of Savings Adds Up
Living on a budget is the key to financial freedom, but getting started can be frustrating. When we look at our expenses and see all of those bills we're paying every month, it's easy to throw our hands up in disgust. But what about all those little expenses we incur? You might be surprised to find out just how much they amount to.
It's easy to dismiss cutting back on little things. A few dollars a month won't make a significant difference in the big picture. But a few dollars here and a few dollars there adds up to a few more dollars. When you cut back in a lot of small ways, you could end up with a lot more money at the end of the month.
Waste Not, Want Not
One thing we can do that is good for the budget is stop wasting so much. This can apply to many areas in our lives. From eating to home heating, waste equals money going down the drain unnecessarily.
Cooking for the family instead of eating takeout or dining out is a great way to save money. But if you're throwing food out, the benefit is reduced. So if you have leftovers, don't let them end up in the trash. Some dishes freeze well, and this makes for easy dinners when you don't have time to cook. You could also eat dinner leftovers for lunch the following day.
- Developing a Successful Home Budget
This is probably the most requested topic that I receive, normally after someone gets a large unexpected expense, or they start thinking about retirement and realize that they have saved a woefully inadequate amount of money.
I recommend using a monthly time-frame to look at your cash inflows and outflows, because most bills are monthly and four weeks is a short planning period that most people can manage. The first thing to do is determine your monthly after-tax income. Usually, this is the amount of money from your paycheck that gets deposited into your checking account. If your income is variable, then use an average of the last three months. (Any savings account interest income would be a bonus.) Next, list out your fixed monthly expenses, such as rent, mortgage, car payment, phone, electric bill, etc. All of these numbers can be changed in the long-term, but first you need to determine a baseline budget of where you are right now.
Make sure you include all of your utilities; some are only paid quarterly or annually, like car insurance, the water bill, or an association fee. Take these expenses and calculate what they would be on a monthly basis. For example, if your water bill comes quarterly, divide it by 3. If you have semi-annual car insurance, then divide it by 6.
- Bargain Finder Secrets
Want to be a bargain finder? Want to be the one that always finds the deals and has money left over? Start by learning the secrets of opportunism.
Do you know that you can eat a wider variety of fruit than your neighbor, and spend only half as much to do so? How? By buying fruit in season, when it is at the lowest price. As a bonus, it is also of the highest quality at these times. This is opportunism.
Notice that this means not always getting exactly what you want when you want it. You get more variety this way, and you spend much less, but you go with the flow. If oranges are cheap, you'll be eating oranges. If apples are in season, you'll be eating apples. Whatever the case, you'll always be finding bargains.
- Avoid Financial Disaster with Good Planning
It's tough to get by financially in today's fast-paced life. With mortgages, car notes and massive amounts of credit card debt, most people struggle to get by from month to month. With most people doing what they can just to pay their bills, few people are prepared for the unlikely event of a financial disaster. They come in many forms; a storm like Hurricane Katrina, a loss of job, or a sudden illness can break anyone who isn't prepared for an unexpected interruption in their financial life. But it isn't all that difficult to make preparations that will help you in times of a money crisis. All it takes is a bit of planning ahead of time.
Here are a few things that will help you be prepared for the unexpected:
Get an ATM/Debit card - You may not regularly use cash or have a need for a debit card, but there are some circumstances where it may be necessary. People from New Orleans who were temporarily displaced by Hurricane Katrina would have benefited from having access to cash even while away from home. If you don't use one regularly, get one anyway and keep it in a safe place.
Sign up for direct deposit - With direct deposit, you will know that your paycheck will be in your bank account even if you cannot, for whatever reason, physically get to your bank. This will help you in the event of illness or natural disaster that may have your local bank temporarily closed.
- 5 Easy Ways To Cut Your Household Expenses
Are you shocked when seeing your household expenditures every month? The expenses seem to increase every month. If you are in this situation, try these 5 recommendations before your extra paid money will accumulate to a significant amount!
1. Recycle those junk letters.
Each month, you will probably received a dozen or more letters from direct mailing companies in your mailbox. Some of these letters are printed on one side only. Collect these letters and combined them into a writing pad. You can also used them to print draft documents. Besides saving money, you are also saving a lot of trees.
2. Install water saving kit in your toilet cistern.
When flushing the toilet, the amount of water used is usually more than is required. By installing a water saving kit in the cistern, the amount of water saved can be as much as three gallons per month.
3. Use the fan
Whenever possible, use the fan. The air conditioner is a major contributor to your utility bill. By using the fan, not only are you saving on your utility bill, you are also building up your body's tolerance to heat. Your chances of getting heat exhaustion or heat stroke during the hot summer season are greatly reduced.
4. Do not throw away that old bar of soap yet.
As your wash your hands with soap on a daily basis, the bar will become smaller and smaller until it is almost unusable. Instead of throwing it away, simply stick the old bar of soap onto the new one. Just make sure both of them are wet when sticking them together.
5. Cut the tube of toothpaste into half.
When you can no longer squeeze out any toothpaste from the tube, just cut it in-half. There is some more toothpaste left that can last you for a couple of days if you have a large family. If you live alone or with your spouse only, the extra toothpaste can last up to five days or even more.
Start cultivating these useful habits today and make them a part of your daily life. You will be pleasantly pleased when you notice your household expense start to decline bit by bit as time goes on. More Information: Budget Stretcher
- 3 Ways to Save Money Instantly Online
In today's world, shopping in "brick and mortar" stores seems so backward, dated, and boring. Millions of people each year sit in their jammies while drinking wine and shop for clothes, household goods, gifts, and just about anything else you can imagine.
One of the great benefits to shopping online is the various coupon, rebate and dollar-back programs available. If you click through a link, or use a coupon code, your savings can be substantial. In addition, you get all the myriad benefits of shopping online - no children to drag through stores, no gas costs to get there and back, and no hassle of dealing with crowds.
So, once you're convinced to shop online, where can you find the savings? There are several ways to save money online. Let's start with coupons.
Coupons
This is a fairly standard. Go to one of the coupon sites (many will be provided below) and look for the store you want to shop with, or search by category, depending on your needs. Be sure to click "apply" when you enter the coupon during checkout.
Although in the early days of online shopping, coupon codes were plentiful and generous (frequently you could find $10 off a $10 purchase with free shipping), good coupons these days are hard to find. Some stores (like Lands' End) rarely offer coupons while others (L.L. Bean) often offer free shipping on any size order. When you order, or even if you don't order, be sure to sign up with the website either by registering or signing up for coupons. These direct-email coupons are often some of the best you'll ever find.
Here are some excellent coupon sites to get you started:
- 10 Quick Tips To Save Money
Money, according to a classical definition, is what money does. And truth, as they say, is like a rubber band. Stretch it and it can do wonders. So if we can really make money in order to do whatever we want, there is nothing like that.
To provide 10 quick tips to save money is almost like a first-aid approach to a very intricate problem perhaps faced by almost each of us. It is important to know how to manage money efficiently to ensure bulky savings. Whether to save some part of what we have to spend or whether to spend at all on a service or commodity should be the first question to be answered.
Firstly in case of large investments, the first step for a prospective buyer is to identify and correlate the valuable item or service with need or desire. It is better to test its utility first, for example, by borrowing it for a fixed time period. If you are satisfied and convinced about its necessity and think that you really need that, you may buy it. But to save money, you as a wise consumer must find the best seller in terms of comparative pricing, quality & market reputation.
- Run Your Home Like a Business
You need to run your home like a well oiled business. That is the only way that you will be able to get what you need with the income that you are earning and resources that you have available to you without increasing your debt.
A business cannot run and survive for any length of time if it constantly has to borrow more and more money to cover the costs.
Eventually the business will go under and that is precisely what will happen if your home is run in such a manner.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
Any successful business manager will understand that the income needs to cover the costs for the business to survive and you have to look at running your home in a manner that will help it to survive long-term and for that to happen you need to weigh up your income and expenditure and make sure that your expenditure doesn't exceed your income.
If you think along the terms of your home being a business you're more likely to take a better account of the money and see where it is getting lost and where it does not need to be spent.
You will be quite surprised at the amount of waste of funds in most homes and most successful business managers would be appalled at the finances of the average household.
Even people who successfully run their own business often have their own home finances in a shambles simply because it is not common practice for most people to run their home as a business and constantly monitor the flow of money.
By creating your own budget that sets out all the expenditure and the available income you are instantly creating a situation where your household will be able to be run in a more businesslike manner and the efficiency that you will obtain from doing this will ensure that you have more money available to cover your costs and in most cases without affecting the quality of your lifestyle at all.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
- Saving Money
At some stage you will want to begin saving money to cover costs that will be occurring in the future, however until you have paid off your debt that is costing you money in interest and penalties it is not wise to save money.
You need to reduce and eliminate your debt thereby cutting off the drain on your income that is required to cover the interest costs and by doing so you will be gaining a lot more benefit than trying to build up a surplus of funds in your account.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
You will always earn less money from the interest of funds invested than it will be costing you for the interest you are paying on your debts.
- Limiting Luxuries
There is a big difference between wants and needs and when you are faced with excess debt then the only thing you really need to focus on are your needs and how you are going to pay for them.
You don't need to own the latest wide screen television or an X-Box or PlayStation. If you've got overwhelming debt then one of the first things you need to do is start limiting luxuries. Now this doesn't mean you are going to downgrade your lifestyle at all because along with all these luxuries that you've been purchasing your lifestyle has been downgraded considerably with the increased stress and financial burden you are faced with every day.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
Now consider how much happier you would be if you didn't have to pay back all that debt. Consider how much happier you would be if you didn't have to think about how you are going to pay the food bill at the end of the week.
- Take Time Out
You might feel like there is no time for you to rest and relax and you feel guilty about the fact that you do occasionally take a bit of time out.
Here is the fact of the matter -- no matter how much work you feel you need to do or how much income you feel you need to make or how many people are pressing you to get your accounts paid, you still need to consider your health and wellness and that means that occasionally you need to give both your mind and your body a break and take some time out.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
A walk in the park can energize you and can be sufficient to help you achieve some of those goals that you may have been procrastinating about.
It can help you maintain a better level of health that will help you to cope better with your current situation.
- Focus and Progress
Focus is something that not a lot of people are good at.
How often do you start something and then before you are finished you're thinking about something else or changing your mind about whether you should finish or not?
It is common practice with most people to do this and the result of a lack of focus is a lack of achievement.
The only way you are going to progress towards your goal of eliminating your debt is to focus on the task at hand and make positive steps every day based on the plan that you are setting forth to achieve that goal.
Preparing a budget helps you to focus on your income and expenditure.
More Information: Bbudget Stretcher
Writing down daily tasks helps you to focus on achieving those tasks each day.
Without these processes set out for you to follow it is very difficult to focus on what you need to do to get out of the situation you are an.
- Health and Welfare
It's common knowledge that the people who suffer the most from ill health and the inability to take sufficient care of their health and welfare are those people who are in debt and don't have sufficient income to see their doctor or to get a problem sorted when it first occurs.
You need to understand that without good health everything becomes more difficult including your ability to make money and your ability to reduce and eliminate debt.
You can't help yourself to move forward if you're in such a state that it is difficult to do what is necessary to achieve your goals.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
Your health is of the utmost importance and this is something that you need to take care of for the rest of your life and letting any aspects of health deteriorate during these times of financial turmoil could mean that you require ongoing medical expenditure for the rest of your life.
- Wants and Needs
Now this is the area that gets most people in financial difficulty in the first place.
There is a huge difference between wants and needs and if you honestly look at your financial position and consider how you have built up the debt that you are currently faced with you might just find that it is due to over expenditure on wants.
Needs are those factors that are required for you to lead a healthy happy life on a daily basis to maintain good health in mind and body for you and those whom you are responsible for.
Good food, shelter, health care - These come under the banner of needs because these are the simple things in life that you need to get by.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
DVD players, alloy wheels on your car, the latest designer clothing, cigarettes etc - These are wants and there is certainly no need to have them in your life.
- Why Should I Make a Budget?
You say you know where your money goes and you don?t need it all written down to keep up with it? I issue you this challenge. Keep track of every penny you spend for one month and I do mean every penny.
You will be shocked at what the itty-bitty expenses add up to. Take the total you spent on just one unnecessary item for the month, multiply it by 12 for months in a year and multiply the result by 5 to represent 5 years.
That is how much you could have saved AND drawn interest on in just five years. That, my friend, is the very reason all of us need a budget.
- The Budget ? The Ultimate Financial Management Tool
A carpenter uses a set of house plans to build a house. If he didn?t the bathroom might get overlooked altogether.
Rocket Scientists would never begin construction on a new booster rocket without a detailed set of design specifications. Yet most of us go blindly out into the world without an inkling of an idea about finances and without any plan at all.
Not very smart of us, is it?
A money plan is called a budget and it is crucial to get us to our desired financial goals.
Without a plan we will drift without direction and end up marooned on a distant financial reef.
If you have a spouse or a significant other, you should make this budget together. Sit down and figure out what your joint financial goals are?long term and short term.
More Information: Budget Stretcher
Then plan your route to get to those goals. Every journey begins with one step and the first step to attaining your goals is to make a realistic budget that both of you can live with.
- The Future
What will the future hold for you once you get over your debt and finally become financially free of the burden that has stressed you for so long and stopped you from sleeping at night?
With your debt cleared, and excess funds available each month over and above your expenditure, you need to consider the best way of handling this additional money.
What you don't want to do is to get back into the situation you were before where you start spending on things that you don't need and building your debt back up again.
More Information: Ultimate Debt Guide
Just consider how much better your life is without the debt and compare that to the time when you were always stressed out and finances were on your mind day night. Then ask yourself was it worth it and do you want to go back there.
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