Saving and making money

[Yahweh]

I'm a very thrifty person, probably even miserly. Here are some things I do to minimize the money I spend:

- I own a single pair of jeans, a shirt, and some socks. This is my entire wardrobe. I wear the same clothes everyday. The clothes I own were gifts. (I make an exception for work clothes: I own five different colored collared shirts, one pair of slacks, and one pair of shoes.)

- I do not turn on the A/C in the summer or heat in the winter. Its easier just to strut around the house nude in the summer, and its easy to bundle up in the winter.

- I don't own any furniture, not even a bed. I prop my computers up on cardboard boxes and sleep on a comforter on the floor. I do this deliberately because I tend to move from place to place once a year, and I like being able to pack everything I own in my car to avoid renting a U-Haul.

- I shop to maximum the nutritional value of my food for minimal cost. For that reason, I don't buy anything nutritionally wasteful like junkfood, alcohol, cigarettes, soda, etc.

- Coupons are your friend.

- Carry around cash rather than a credit card. Unless you spend money like me (i.e. your spend the minimum amount of money it takes to survive out of habit already), its much easier to stick to a budget when your cash is tangible and in hand.

- Don't eat out at restaurants. Its almost always cheaper (and healthier) to cook meals at home.

- Children cost a lot of money to have and raise. Don't have children if you are financially unprepared for it.


Once you've mastered the art of saving, start making money:

- Unless you're extremely gifted writer or athlete, you need education to be competitive. However college is one of the biggest expenses, you can minimize the cost as follows:

-- There is nothing the least bit shameful about going to a community college for part of your career.

-- If you can, I highly recommend taking CLEP and Dantes exams to test out of as many college credits as you can. At my college, each CLEP is worth 6 credit hours, each Dantes is worth 3 credit hours, and both tests cost $100. I've taken two CLEPs, two DANTEs for a total of 18 credit hours and $400; I have two more CLEPs lined up in the next two weeks. Altogether, this means I've earned 30 credit hours for $600, at a total savings of $9300 and saved me nearly a year of classes. I attend a regionally accredited university, but its so easy to test out of classes that its practically feels like buying a degree; I've done the math, and I believe its possible, if you play your cards right, to legitimately earn 4-year degree in 6 months.

- Retail sucks: its low-prestige, low-paying, and stifles creative thought. As soon as possible, become a professional in the real world -- don't wait. If you're into accounting, apply to be a payroll clerk or work in a cash office. If you're into medicine, take your boards ASAP. If you like construction, apply for building maintenance positions. If you want to be a lawyer, apply to be a paralegal. Experience matters more than degrees, and you'll do yourself a favor jumping into your career as soon as possible.

Case in point: I used to stock grocery a few years ago, but I applied to become a programmer when I was 19. I earned a rousing $13/hr, double what I made in the grocery store, but still much less than what I felt I should have been earning. However, I stayed with the job for a solid 18 months, because I believed that it was a stepping stone to better opportunities. I was right: I found a job at 21 making $29/hr. So, in the space of about 2 years, I quadrupled my income, even without having any degrees whatsoever because I had prior programming experience. I'll make $10/hr more when I get my degree.

I think my career choice has a much lower barrier to entry for people my age than other career choices. However, even in college, its still very easy to find respectable $15-20/hr. For most people with no degree of specialized skills, I usually recommend Q/A or software testing: the field is always in demand, has 9-5 Mon-Fri hours, regularly pays $15-20/hr, you get to spend your entire day pointing out flaws in other peoples work, and you actually can accomplish reasonably rewarding work.

- All of the people in wealthiest quintile of the population invest their money. Start small: move your money out of your checking account and into a money market account. When CD interests rates climb back to around 3.5-5%, by a few CDs (read about strategies for laddering your CDs, so that you always have a constant stream of income coming in around every 3 months). These are relatively safe investments.

Remember, time is the enemy. Inflation eats away about 2-5% of the value of your money every year. Savings and checking accounts earn too little interests to recover the lost money; money market and CDs are your friend, they will help you beat inflation.

-- For each child you have, try to put $1000 into a money market account each year. By the time you send them off to college, you'll be able to pay out of pocket.



Feel free to add your own money-making tips

[incognito]

I dont have anything to add, but i would like to make a point to agree with the idea about carrying cash. Credit cards are nice in emergencies, but if you are a person prone to spending money, carry cash. When paying with credit card, you dont really seem to notice how much money is being spent. as with cash, you can actually see the cash being taken away from you. Sort of like how casinos give you chips to play with instead of cash. losing chips is much easier than losing money.

[malicious_bloke]

I have never had a credit card, and I don't intend to start any time soon.

After I realised several years ago that my state pension will eventually be worth the sum total of fuck all (yah I'm only in my 20s, but a bit of prior planning doesnt go amiss), I started putting aside as much money as I can every month (after house, car and family of 5 it aint all that much, but it adds up).

I was lucky enough to get a 2-year ISA early in 2008 at about 6.3%. It will mature next year, after which I need to find something else to do with it...the ISA rates now are pretty much worthless. My savings account has a fixed rate at pre-"WHERE THE FUCK DID MY ECONOMY GO" rates for another year or two, thankfully. Short of a massive run on the pound, my savings are safe (even though I have stuck a nice pile into euros and put them in a german bank, just in case)

[skyfire]

Apr 27, 2009 23:09:42 GMT -5 Yahweh said:

- Coupons are your friend.

Even better is using coupons in conjunction with sales and promotions.

-- There is nothing the least bit shameful about going to a community college for part of your career.

I've also found them to be better places for networking, especially since the professors usually have fewer students to deal with and so can spend more face-to-face time with each one.

-- If you can, I highly recommend taking CLEP and Dantes exams to test out of as many college credits as you can. At my college, each CLEP is worth 6 credit hours, each Dantes is worth 3 credit hours, and both tests cost $100. I've taken two CLEPs, two DANTEs for a total of 18 credit hours and $400; I have two more CLEPs lined up in the next two weeks. Altogether, this means I've earned 30 credit hours for $600, at a total savings of $9300 and saved me nearly a year of classes. I attend a regionally accredited university, but its so easy to test out of classes that its practically feels like buying a degree; I've done the math, and I believe its possible, if you play your cards right, to legitimately earn 4-year degree in 6 months.

May want to check the fine print, there.

I was informed that some colleges attach strings to their CLEP tests, such as giving you credit for the class but making you take an equal number of hours in its place.

- All of the people in wealthiest quintile of the population invest their money. Start small: move your money out of your checking account and into a money market account. When CD interests rates climb back to around 3.5-5%, by a few CDs (read about strategies for laddering your CDs, so that you always have a constant stream of income coming in around every 3 months). These are relatively safe investments.

Actually, given the present circumstances CDs are the safest investment out there; individual banks are presently more solvent than the federal government, and even if a bank did go bust there are still legal remedies.

Feel free to add your own money-making tips

If possible, purchase luxury items (such as books, CDs, and DVDs) used. While you run the risk of the item being damaged in some way, often times buying used can save you quite the sum of money. Pay attention to the newspaper when it advertises garage sales and fundraiser sales. Down where I am, the going rate for used books is $0.50 each for all but textbooks and technical manuals; DVDs can be found for as little as $1.

If you intend to purchase a luxury or big-ticket item, research your purchase in advance. This will help you keep from being stuck with something that's crap, and in the process you may find a better deal than what you were looking for.

[David D.G.]

"It ain't the money I love. It's the not havin' it I hate." ~Molly Brown


~David D.G.

[skyfire]

A few more I thought of -

Be flexible with your food.

In short, make do with what food you have, even leftovers. This will help you stretch your budget by keeping your food bill down.

For example, your average commercial spaghetti sauce isn't that far removed from your average commercial pizza sauce in terms of quality and ingredients. Slap some leftover spaghetti sauce on some leftover tortillas and you've got the makings of a cheap pizza.

Make do with off-brands if possible

Very often, stores will have their own brands of products that are meant to compete with national brands. Some stores will also make room for off-brand and discount products.

In some instances, such as soap or dairy products, the store-brand or off-brand products will be comparable to the national brands in terms of quality and ingredients. You can shave $$$ off your grocery bill by going for these instead of the national brands.

Be careful, however, as not all discount or store brands are created equal. For some products, like pet food and vitamins, you'd do well to go for the national brands; the money you'd save going for the cheaper product won't compensate for the poor quality.

Do your shopping early in the morning, preferrably right after breakfast.

A lot of your grocery goods, such as meats and baked items, have a rather short shelf-life; even items only a day or two old may need to get yanked.

Rather than lose money by pulling product straight off the shelf, however, a lot of your stores will simply slap on a lower price tag (such as, say, charging you $1 per pound for a meat item instead of $1.50 a pound). It gets the product off of the shelves, all right, but the store still makes a little bit of money on the transaction.

The morning is when the stores that do this normally slap on the discounts. As such, the earlier you get to the store each day the the more reduced-price items you can find. Some stores will even go so far as to take select reduced-price items and put them in their own separate section.

Just ensure that you've had at least some sort of breakfast before going, however; if you go when you're hungry, you'll buy more product than you normally would have otherwise.

[Yahweh]

More ideas:

- I used to have a bad habit of shopping for food every 2 or 3 days, generally because I like to buy fresh food, and often fresh food doesn't last long in the fridge. I decided to buy large quantities of canned and boxed food, trying to avoid shopping more than once every two weeks. The result saves me around $30 in gas a month.

- Walmart is not the cheapest place in town. There is a no frills grocery store just down the road, it sells food at virtually wholesale prices; the catch is that you have to put a quarter in a slot to get a cart and you have to bag your own groceries. Barring that, there's a Baker's nearby which almost always beats Walmart in price, quality, and selection.

- Regarding food, nothing beats spaghetti. You can get a 16oz bag for a $1, a can of sauce for $1, which is more than enough to feed one person comfortably for two dinners, or enough to feed two people for one night. (Spaghetti tip: leftover spaghetti is disgusting. I recommend cooking a half package at a time.)

Additionally, I don't think I need to say this, but buy in bulk. I buy bulk containers of salsa because I'm a salsa fiend.

At least here in Nebraska, I find it cheaper to buy veggies straight from a farmer than at the store. However, I'm usually limited to buying whatever is "in season".

- More food tips: crock pots use less electricity than ovens.

- Don't buy a pre-manufactured computer, build one yourself. A $500 PC from Best Buy is going to be a piece of shit; a $500 PC you build from scratch will be top of the line for years to come. I recommend NewEgg.com for all of your computer parts.

- If you don't mind jumping in the middle of a nerd culture war, I recommend loading up your computer with free software. Many flavors of Linux are free, and OpenOffice is an excellent alternative to MS Office. I personally use Windows Vista as my primary operating system because I'm a .NET programmer, my whole world is Windows. However, I use OpenOffice because its free and gets the job done well.

- While we're on the subject of computers, fuck the Geek Squad. They will charge you $100 to install a stick of RAM or run a virus scanner, its ridiculous.

- There are a lot of luxuries which I would consider completely expendable:

-- Cable TV. Everything worth watching can be legally downloaded online.
-- Movie tickets.
-- Satellite Radio.
-- Video game consoles and video games.
-- Alcohol and cigarettes. Believe me, when you quit smoking, you're going to be reaching in to your pocket and wondering who keeps putting all of that money in there.
-- Coffee, soda, candy. No nutritional value means no return on the cost.
-- Bottled water. A four-pack of Brita filters costs $15; each filter is good for around 50 gallons of water. Altogether, they provide 250 gallons of filtered water for $15. How much would you spend on 250 gallons of Dasani?
-- Magazine subscriptions.
-- Eating out.
-- Holidays that encourage you to buy disposable items like fireworks or confetti.

- If you can't live without luxury items, enjoy them as cheap as you can.

-- You don't need to send pictures and text messages to your friends. Get the cheapest cellphone plan money can buy. I'm never home to take phonecalls, so I carry around an entry-level model cellphone, and my cellphone plan is $30/mo for unlimited calls and long distance.

-- Disposable razors which come in a 10-pack for $2 work just as well as the $9 razor. With that in mind, don't buy shaving gels -- they are expensive and don't last long, and certainly can't compete to the big can of Barbasol you can get for $1.

-- Replace all of your incandescent lightbulbs with low-wattage bulbs. Additionally, some lightbulbs appear in decorative groups of 2 or more; use just one bulb. This single tip saved me $20/mo on my electric bill.

- It takes a little practice, but you can squeeze a few more MPG out of your car by coasting toward red lights. Additionally, lightly tapping the gas on the way down a hill can give you enough inertia to coast up. I don't know how much this helps, I've not seen an increase in my car's efficiency, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

- Drive the speed limit, it saves gas and will help you avoid expensive speeding tickets.

[skyfire]

Apr 28, 2009 21:31:04 GMT -5 Yahweh said:

More ideas:

No disrespect intended, but I'm going to have to disagree with you on a few points.

-- Cable TV. Everything worth watching can be legally downloaded online.

For all intents and purposes, I'm bi-polar.

Music is one of the things that helps keep my moods in line, and so things like VH1 Classic (before they began screwing around with the lineup) and Music Choice have been Godsends.

-- Magazine subscriptions.

A better idea would be to compare prices and see how cheaply you can get them.

Magazine subscriptions are actually a good way to stay current on what's happening in your chosen vocation, and I've actually used articles from some of the magazines I've gotten on my college assignments. So for me, the ones I have are fairly indispensable.

Since you're looking to go back to college, I'd suggest swinging by www.fastweb.com , a website that helps you locate scholarships. Fastweb is partnered with a paid survey company known as E-Rewards; they give you online currency you can cash in for a series of free magazine or newspaper subscriptions. You can actually get things like Forbes, Wall Street Journal, or even Variety for free if you rack up enough in your account. I actually got one of my subscriptions - Fast Company - for free through them.

-- Disposable razors which come in a 10-pack for $2 work just as well as the $9 razor. With that in mind, don't buy shaving gels -- they are expensive and don't last long, and certainly can't compete to the big can of Barbasol you can get for $1.

In my case, my facial hair is so thick that, disposable or not, unless I'm looking at a high-quality set of blades I can burn through 2 - 3 razors a week. Given how cheaply I can get disposables compared to refillable razors, disposables are simply a better option.

And I don't use shaving cream or anything else like that, either. Instead, I either shave immediately after taking a bath (when my skin is still soft from soaking) or prep my face with a single Oxy pad. Again, my growth is so thick that I don't need shaving cream to tell me where I've missed.

Additionally, lightly tapping the gas on the way down a hill can give you enough inertia to coast up. I don't know how much this helps, I've not seen an increase in my car's efficiency, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Speaking from personal experience, I'd only recommend doing this on stretches of road that you're personally familiar with. Going too fast down a slope, especially one where you've got a sharp turn, can lead to pretty bad things. My daily commute to college actually has a pair of wooden memorial crosses erected, each one at a different sharp turn, as testimony to what can happen when a person fails to negotiate a turn (for the second one, I was driving to class when the paramedics were recovering the body; I saw quite a bit that day).

[dantesvirgil]

My god, if you have an Aldi grocery store in your area, USE IT. It's incredibly cheap and the quality is great.

Save your money online instead of in a traditional bricks & mortar bank -- the difference is at least 2% more. If you think you'll need to get at your cash right away, online savings accounts are better than CDs, because you don't lose money for taking out anything, whereas you would if you broke a CD before its maturity date.

The library. Use it, people. It's hard for me to do, but if you're remotely attached to a university in any way, they can get you ANY FUCKING THING YOU WANT. For free. They got me Vogue from 1897. On microfilm, people. They can get you graphic novels, they can get you the latest best seller, they can get you anything. Your public library can, too, but it's a bigger fight.

[Angel Kaida]

My friend uses a straight razor for shaving, and he says it saves him a lot of money. I'm the kind of person who makes a HUGE adventure out of grocery shopping trips anyway, so trying to get coupons and hunt down deals and sales is, like, heavenly for me. Alas, though, no one has the time for one of my Grocery Shopping Adventures when they are working.

[dantesvirgil]

Aw. If you can start a little pantry (which in college is really hard, I know), that actually saves money in the long run. It's how my husband and I cut costs when money is tight in the summer.

Watching a man shave with a straight razor is one of the sexier things I've seen men do, but the, I'm weird.

[Angel Kaida]

Apr 28, 2009 22:20:56 GMT -5 dantesvirgil said:

Aw. If you can start a little pantry (which in college is really hard, I know), that actually saves money in the long run. It's how my husband and I cut costs when money is tight in the summer.

Actually, I'm really lucky because my scholarship house takes care of that for me during the year and I live with my parents during the summer. But I will keep it in mind though, because that tip alone will comprise most of my homemaking skills when I get around to living alone. That, and I'm REALLY good at doing my laundry. SO good at it. It's very exciting.

Watching a man shave with a straight razor is one of the sexier things I've seen men do, but the, I'm weird.

The concept of it gets to me too. I'm kind of avoiding witnessing the occasion, for that reason.

[HarleyThomas1002]

A barber shop I went to once the guy used a straight edge to cut some of my hair off. That fucking hurt.

Although regarding the video games thing from a few posts back I've never spent over 30 bucks for a game. discount bins might have shitty games but on rare occassions you can get something pretty good. If you can't find it cheap one place you can find it cheap somewhere else. I paid 20 bucks for Rogue Galaxy at Superstore when everywhere else had it for 50. Wal-Mart in Regina had Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror for 20 bucks while everywhere else I went had it for 50. Both brand new copies.[/boring slighlty relevant block of text]

Wanna know how to save a boatload of money? Go amish.

Wanna know how to make money? Steal your neighbors tv and pawn it.

[dantesvirgil]

I've sold a lot of games and books over ebay/half.com. It amounted to a few hundred dollars at one point, and it cleaned up a pile of stuff I had. But your stuff has to be in good condition. You can even add the shipping fee to the list price, if you want. But I think half.com does that for you.

Edited to add: Especially if you have textbooks, or books that could be used in a college class, you might make more money selling them on half.com than you would returning them to the bookstore. Worth a try.

[Angel Kaida]

One of my friends said that basically, not using detergent except on special occasions (either when your clothes are REALLY DIRTY or just every once in a while) and hanging your clothes to dry outside instead of using the dryer would get a similar effect to standard washing-and-drying. I haven't verified. Anyone know?