Setting up my savings goal.
Welcome back! Have you joined my mailing list yet?
Well, I finally got around to setting up an actual savings account (the first one I've ever had). Not bad, actually. And for the first time I've paid myself first...by putting 1% of my paycheck directly into the savings account.
Granted, that's not a lot, but I don't have a lot of wiggle room to work with. My paycheck was about 15-20 hours shorter than it should have been thanks to a slowdown at work. But, it should pick up again soon, and with my second stream of income (the karaoke gig), I should be able to survive the week...if I'm careful and don't blow money that I don't need to.
So far, I've set an initial goal of $500 in my savings account. I'd like to do that by the end of the year. Four months to go! I'm hoping that I can make that happen somehow.
The income breakdown in my head (because it's not on paper yet) is like this:
- 1% from Paycheck goes to savings.
- 25% of any web income goes to savings.
Now, that's not a lot of money, especially since I've stopped pursuing the make money online strategy. Of course, that doesn't mean that it won't emerge in the future as a significant source of income. Ok, I haven't completely given up on it, but I've shifted my focus to dealing with my personal life rather than trying to make a passive income source. It'll happen soon enough. But for now, I'm just setting small goals and making sure that my fundamentals are in place.
Do you have any savings goals? What would you recommend that I do about mine? What changes would you make?
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Eat Less, Save Money
I decided that I should give something a try, just to see if I could make it work. With my plan to try to save money by cutting excess spending in effect, it is forcing me to take a step back and look to see where all of the excess money is leaking from the bucket.
Part of saving money is finding (and plugging) the leaks. Once you do that, you will begin to notice a difference in your bank account.
After a bit of thought, I found that a lot of my extra spending is due to the fact that I like to eat out a lot. Most of the time, it isn't even necessary, but I'm just too lazy to cook my own stuff. It's just so much nicer to pull up to a window, hand the cashier some cash, and then they hand you whatever you order (most of the time). It's good food, it's fast, and it's just convenient. The problem is that it is also expensive.
Using myself as an example, we can see how it adds up quickly. If I eat out once per day, and I spend about $5 on it, and if I do this every day that I have to work (which is 5 days per week), that's $25 per week. The truth is that most of us don't limit eating out to just once per day. If we go grab dinner at a decently priced restaurant, you're looking at an additional $12 (or so). Do that just twice a week in addition to the lunches, and that's $49. If you take a date with you on any of those dinner nights, expect that to be at least twice the amount.
I've found a solution that, while not as pleasant, may just do the trick.
Normally, I buy groceries but eat out most of the time. My average grocery bill is about $25/week which does not include fast food. What I did this week was decide to go ahead and spend $37 (which is about what it came to at Kroger) and get enough stuff for light meals for two weeks at once. This has two benefits - first, I have stuff at home, and this includes things that I can take to work with me for lunch, so I will be saving A TON of cash. Second, I will be eating less (this is where the sacrifice and self-control come in), so hopefully I can lose a few pounds as well.
So with all of the money I saved, I picked up some gear for tennis. I figured that if I was going to eat less, I should probably exercise more. I'm tired of being the fat guy that doesn't ever have enough money. With this plan, eventually I'll be the not-so-fat guy with a comfortable life. :D
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Forcing Myself to Save Money
Since starting my new job, I've been slowly looking for my pathway to awesome. By that, I mean I'm finally tired of being broke all of the time. There have been many times lately that I have to decide between necessities like auto insurance and rent. Fortunately, I've been able to almost make things work except for this past week, where my check was two days short (due to circumstances beyond my control). Because of that, I managed to pay about half of my bi-weekly rent payment and had to forgo the car insurance and getting the brakes worked on (which is a pretty nasty combination...heh).
One of the fundamental problems with my income is that I pay 25% of my bring-home pay in child support. I earn $12 per hour at my job, so that pretty much puts me on a $9 per hour level from the start. Here's a little rundown of my expenses:
-Child Support: Aprox. $400/month
-Rent: $400/month
-Auto Insurance: $45/month
-Fuel: $120/month (if I cruise around a bit)
My grocery bill fluctuates depending on how I want to do things. I give myself a little bit of flexibility there.
So, here's how this works:
Total estimated bring-home: $1600
Total estimated expenses: $965
That tells me that I *should* have around $635 left at the end of the month. Somehow, it doesn't work out that way very often, and I'm panicking about being short on money. Like this week, when my paycheck was about 17 hours short.
I really haven't done a lot to track my expenses, honestly. I have very few bills and want to put myself in a position where I can feel a bit more comfortable about spending a little bit once in a while. With the recent divorce, I've been stressed out a lot. And when I get stressed out, I blow money like a madman. Don't even ask how fast I blew threw my income tax return...
So how do I make myself save money? Well for starters, I need to cut back a bit on the social life. One would think that for someone who suffers from severe depression and hasn't gone out with friends in about ten years would need to get out there, and I do. I enjoy going places with my friends, but the problem is that whenever I go out, I spend money. Granted I might not blow a metric buttload of cash in one night, but it does tend to add up. Ten bucks here, twenty there...do that three or four times per week and the well will run dry awful soon. By cutting back to maybe once per week, I will be able to keep a lot of cash in my pocket.
Another thing I've started doing lately may seem a bit silly, but many people have done this successfully: putting loose change in a jar. I have an older plastic glass that I use to toss my change in whenever I think about it. Well, I usually keep the quarters in my pocket, but anything else goes in the cup. What does this do for me? Other than giving me a small break from all of the crap I haul around in my pockets on a daily basis, it's one of those little self-disciplines that I never did learn. But now, I'm getting there. Not to mention, once the glass fills up I'll have a nice little pile of change. I haven't decided what I'm going to spend it on, but we will see about that when the time comes.
The third thing I'm trying to do is to stop eating out so often. I like fast food. I'm a fan of the McDouble. But for a while, the only thing I was eating was take out. I've noticed that it really puts the hurt on my pocketbook. Not to mention, I'm huge. If I ever want to lose some weight, I had really better start eating better. The solution? Go shopping! I've learned that cooking at home lets me eat better food for less money. I mean, why spend $3 for ONE chorizo and egg burrito at Jack In The Box, when I can go to Kroger (with my Kroger card...which I love), spend a little more, but make about 6-8 of them? There is a savings there, and lets face it: my breakfast burritos are freaking awesome.
One day I would like to be able to take a real vacation. I have never done that. I'm 31 now, and the one time that I did take a week off from work, I stayed home and did nothing. I would also like to be able to afford to buy the things I like. Most of what I have was given to me (or I paid for during the course of the divorce), so my bills are relatively low. There's really no reason that I shouldn't be able to get a foothold on beating my financial woes.
That is my new goal.
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
How I Will Save $400 Per Month Starting This Week
For a while now, my main goal has not been to get us out of debt exactly. It's true, we have a little bit (from a long time ago, eating away our credit rating). However, what bothers me the most isn't that we only owe a couple thousand bucks total, but the fact that no matter how much money I bring home every week, it just isn't enough to have any left over.
Yeah, right. Something doesn't sit well with me at all about that. For starters, I'm not the one who really takes care of what gets purchased. Oddly enough, neither is my wife. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that I can do to fix it right now (mostly because nobody will get on board with me for the sake of their sanity).
So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to eliminate the car note.
No, I'm not paying it off. I'm letting the car company take it back.
Wait, before you tell me that a repo is a horrible thing to have on your credit report, let me emphasize that I totally agree with you. It is a bad thing.
Unless it's not on your credit.
See, this car that I'm paying for was purchased by my father-in-law. The car is only in his name, not even his wife's name. Go figure. Well, he passed away about a year and a half ago. The car was passed to me and my family along with an almost $400 per month note (probably more, when you factor in all of the late fees and charges for paying at an authorized agent - $10 per month!!!).
So basically, I'm paying for something that I didn't want in the first place (because I said I couldn't afford it), took anyway (to help out the mother-in-law, as well as my family), and just as predicted, I couldn't afford.
So they can have it back. That's more money in my pocket. Fortunately, it's income tax season. I should be getting a decent chunk back, and I'll just buy the best used car or truck that I can find. Heck, it's not like I go anywhere except for work anyway.
I probably should put some of that $400 in a savings account. Oh wait, I don't have control of my cashflow (except the tiny bits I earn online, which help get me through the week on the road).
2009 will be the year that I begin to take back control of my financial life. I will be keeping track of this on this site. Isn't it great when blogs evolve? Plus, you will get to know me a bit better, and maybe get some of my tips. I also hope you share your advice with me as well. I need all the help I can get.
This will be like trying to stop an advancing tank with a water pistol. What fun.
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Always Check Your Receipts!
The other day, I stopped in a convenience store (Fas-Start, on Hwy 21 in Bryan, TX...just for your information) to pick up some stuff. I payed for it with my debit card, using the 'credit' option. I feel that it is more secure that way, because anyone can memorize a 4-digit code, but it's a whole different thing to successfully forge a signature.
To make a long story short, the total of my purchase was somewhere around $6.50 cents (give or take a few cents). The cashier told me the amount, I gave him my card, signed the ticket, and left.
The next day I signed in to my online checking account, to see what my current balance was. I was a bit surprised to find that the idiot had rounded my purchase up to an even $7.00 and ran it.
Now, that may not seem like a huge amount to have stolen, but for those who are snowflakers, you would understand why it sucks so much: it adds up.
So let's look at it this way: suppose the thieving scumbags did that to everyone who made a credit purchase (and I assume that they do it quite frequently). Even .50 each time, for only 10 customers...that's $5.00. They are helping themselves to extra bits of change. MY change. And, since they are dishonest, I have no problem sharing the location of the store in this post, to help my fellow readers and friends keep from having their hard-earned money stolen by lowlife jerks.
The moral of this story? If you feel a bit sickened by stuff like this, you can always try fresh air as a remedy, but I doubt it will help. A better idea is to always check your receipts in the store. I didn't do this. If there had been a discrepancy, I could have asked them immediately to rectify the situation. Since I did not do this, I'm out of luck. I can guarantee that I won't be using them again, and I will most certainly tell people not to use them.
Note: I'm not the only one that has had trouble with this store, for the record.
If you like these posts and want to stay in the loop, please subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. And if you really like this stuff, you can buy me a coffee! Oh, and if you like being an insider, be sure to join the mailing list...I never spam, but you will get some insider specials!
Recent Posts
- Multiple Income Streams – Getting Pumped!
- Setting up my savings goal.
- Harry Potter and the Child Support Payment from Hell
- Reinventing myself – setting goals.
- It’s time to do some house cleaning.
Best of [ ! ]
- A Page Without Page Rank Ranking on Google's First Page
- The Importance of Good Employee Relations
- Twitter Followers Versus Blog Subscriptions