Remaining Time
Poll: Saving $50 Beats Diets, Love & Time
If you had a choice between saving an extra $50 a week or gaining an extra hour daily, what would you do? I vote for the extra hour, (seven hours a week). But more money beat out diet, time and sex, according to this recent survey from allyou.com/Shortcuts.com. Here is a snippet from the full survey results:
- Over half (57%) of those surveyed would rather save $50 an extra week
- vs. 31 % who would rather lose one clothing size
- or 6% who would opt for more sex
- or 6 % who would rather have an extra 60 minutes each day.
The Real Bonus
My choice: Please give me another hour every day! With an extra seven hours a week, I would use 33 % of the extra time to earn more money, 33% of the bonus time would be spent relaxing, and I would spend the remaining time with my children.
Here’s another nugget from the poll:
“More women (45%) feel better when they’re cutting grocery costs vs. sticking to an exercise regimen (24%).”
Once again, I disagree with that allocation of time. A commitment to an exercise program can yield both long-term savings and better health. Preventive medicine and exercise represent savvy investments of time and money. Consider the cost of obesity.
The Power of Coupon Clipping
“Consumers are changing their spending habits, but not drastically. The survey, conducted by DMS Research with 5,877 respondents (5,250 females and 627 males), uncovered that small changes such as clipping more coupons, are taking precedence over large lifestyle adjustments like driving less or cancelling gym memberships.
Across all categories of spending, more women tend to be tightening their belts than men, cutting back on vacation, spending, and dining out.
The survey revealed:
Almost three-quarters of respondents (71%) are now clipping coupons;
Four in ten respondents (41%) consider treating themselves to something under $49 to be a splurge;
Even in a tough economy, just over one-quarter (28%) of respondents won’t give up purchasing quality items and 17% won’t give up buying their favorite beauty product
‘We know how important saving money and saving time are these days, so we aren’t surprised with the findings that something as simple as using coupons – and increasingly, electronic coupons – is on the rise,’ said Tara Trocki, director, AOL’s Shortcuts.com. ‘This is a testament that using a free, simple service can lead to significant financial savings without having to make a major lifestyle adjustment.’ “
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Weekly Roundup: Car Payment Almost Gone Edition
My wife and I are closing in on a status we have never achieved during our married life together - without car payment. Just a couple months after we married I leased an SUV. The lease represented one of the dumbest finance moves I’ve ever made, and has haunted us, financially, for a decade.
When the lease was up I refinanced the balance into a traditional loan, and before that loan was up I traded in the SUV and financed our current vehicle. We are now within one month of saying goodbye to car payments - forever. We plan to continue to pay our car payment to ourselves by depositing the same $310.00 we’ve been paying for our curerent vehicle into an online savings account. In a few years we’ll use what’s in savings to buy a new (used) family car and I’ll drive the old one back and forth to work. We will continue this pattern for the rest of our driving lifetimes.
The Fab Five
Early Retirement or Meaningful Work? Thought-provoking post which asks, would you rather “retire” early or continue meaningful work? To me, the question is asking, would you rather hang up your current job to spend your remaining time in an endeavor that is meaningful to you. Which begs the follow up question, why aren’t we already doing meaningful work? Like I said, very thought-provoking. (@ Brip Blap)
Your Real Wage. Do you know your real wage? No, not your hourly wage…your real wage? I’m referring to the amount you are paid after taxes, commuting costs, employment costs, child care, etc. Read on to figure out your real wage. (@ Hundred Goals)
Five Ways to Make Laundry Day Easier. My wife recently had to tend to an ill family member, leaving me alone for a couple days with the kids. I typically help with laundry duties, but rarely do I take the lead. I was reminded why I dislike it so much over those couple days. The tips in this article remove much of the stress (and expense) from laundry days. (@ On Simplicity)
Recoup Your Lost Savings. The last time I looked at my retirement account statements I was closing in on being down 40% from the highs of last summer. Thanks to a slight rebound, I’m hoping the most recent quarterly statements will look a little better. Kiplinger has put together a helpful calculator to figure out how long it will take to get back to those high balances again. I’m still depressed. (@ Kiplinger.com)
How to Live Well on Less in Retirement. This post goes along with the theme of my favorite personal finance book, Your Money or Your Life, which emphasizes the point that you don’t need to be a multi-millionaire to enjoy a comfortable retirement. By making sacrifices early on, and living frugally both before and during “retirement,” you can live on less than you might think. (@ Get Rich Slowly)
The Best of the Rest
- 6 Job Search Tips for New College Grads
- An Amex Credit Card Bill You Won’t Believe
- 5 Practical Steps for Generating New Ideas and Insights
- New Debit Card for Teens and Parents - The Discover Current Card
- When How You Spend Determines How Much You Spend
- Cheap Summer Activities
- Four questions to help redirect your life plan toward your dream
- Save Money By Turning Off Your Television
- I Am An Investor
- Investment Strategies I - Passive Investing
Site of the Week
Early Extreme Retirement. I was planning to include this site in the roundup itself, but I found so many interesting posts I decided to just link to the entire blog here. Any time I feel like I am sacrificing too much I go read a post at Jacob’s blog about how he became financially independent and I quit feeling sorry for myself. This guy has made some incredible sacrifices, and I like that his ideas are outside of the normal personal finance advice box.
Post from: Frugal Dad
Living Off The Grid Daydreams
Ever wish you could just unplug from your current hectic life? Maybe quit your stressful job, move to a farm with several acres, and spend your remaining time living at a much slower pace. Yeah, me too.
The problem is that this type of lifestyle seems so simple, but is terribly difficult to pull off these days. Why? Because we have become slaves to our stuff - myself included. We have our houses, our cars, our expensive hobbies, our electronic gadgets, our new furniture, our designer clothes, etc.
We spend the majority of our lives working to pay for the stuff that keeps us from living a life with more freedom. Along the way we usually manage to accumulate debt buying more stuff than we can afford. So then we spend even more time working to repay the money we borrowed to buy the stuff that we work to pay for in the first place. Whew! It’s a vicious cycle.
Photo courtesy of iLoveButter
How To Break The Chains of Stuff?
So how do we break the cycle? How do we join others who have chosen to live off the grid? It isn’t easy. I believe the very first step is to stop accumulating stuff. Draw a line in the sand (or on your front porch), and vow not to allow anything else to enter your home unless it is a necessity or improves your quality of life in some way. If something qualifies under those two conditions, you must save for it and pay cash. No more borrowing!
The second step is to take a look around your house, and your budget. Are you paying for things that you could really live without? The $40 gym membership, or the $15 Netflix membership, may not seem like much by themselves, but how much of a nest egg would be required just to cover those expenses? I mentioned the multiply by 25 concept in a previous post. The idea is that you can estimate how much of your nest egg would be required to maintain your current expenses. I used Netflix as an example:
At roughly $9 a month, our Netflix membership sets us back $108 per year. To continue paying for Netflix out of passive income earning 4% per year, I would need a $2,700 ($108×25) savings balance.
So I would need to save $2,700 just to cover my monthly $9 Netflix membership. Imagine how much a $500 per month car payment would require? Frightening isn’t it? When you think about things from this perspective it makes it a little easier to separate needs from wants.
Photo courtesy of flattop341
Discover Your Passion
The next step in living off the grid is to discover your passion. Ask yourself: If you didn’t have to wake up tomorrow morning and work for money, how would you spend your time? Gardening? Fishing? Volunteering? Teaching? Some people enjoy what they do (believe it or not), and wouldn’t want to give up their jobs. The rest of us go to work to pay the bills, and look outside of paid employment for self actualization.
The point is to figure out what it is you want to do with your life, and figure out how to do that more often. By eliminating bills, downsizing your home, avoiding the accumulation of stuff, etc, you might be able to afford to spend more time working on your passion, instead of your job.
Think In Terms of Sustainability
The freedom to unplug from the hustle and bustle of our current lives and “live off the grid” doesn’t come without sacrifice. Many choose to give up creature comforts like cable television, an automobile (or two), or even electricity (paid-for energy, that is). Some are able to harness the power of solar energy, or wind, to generate power for their homes. Imagine how nice it would be to lose that utility payment! Wells can supply water, and gardens or small farms may provide a percentage of a family’s food source.
I feel the need to pause here and add a disclaimer to this post. My tone may have seemed preachy in the lines above. I live in a neighborhood, have a mortgage and a car payment (almost gone), and education debt, and a job, and I’m an energy hog when it comes to air conditioning, and I failed to produce enough crops last year to build more than a couple salads. I am about as “on the grid” as one can be.
But I’m also a daydreamer, and at times when I’m lost in my thoughts I think about how nice it would be to get rid of all this “stuff” and start over. I think about raising my kids to be less materialistic. I think about how much I would enjoy devoting more time to gardening, and raising my children, and coaching youth sports, and building projects around my house. And then I ask myself, why can’t I do these things? I know the answer, and I know what needs to happen, mechanically, to get there. It’s getting there that is the hard part.
Post from: Frugal Dad
