The first 30 years of my life I was convinced it was the other way around. I believed that in order to be successful you had to make a lot of money, at any price, even if it meant that you hated what you did for a living. After all, what was more important than making a lot of money?
I always talk on here about watching your spending, staying out of debt, to stop spending on useless “stuff” that doesn’t bring real benefit to your life, etc.. But that doesn’t mean you should be a cheap bastard with your money, either.
OK, times are tough – We all know it. Right now, you might be worrying about how to pay for groceries or the gasoline in your car, and we can use all the help you can get to stretch each and every dollar. Luckily, I have a few friends that have plenty of tips for saving money and I asked them to send them all to me so I could assemble a list for you – the person looking to save money.
At my house, basic digital cable TV cost over $69 per month (plus taxes) and I watch maybe 10 or 15 of the 150+ channels that they provide me, meaning that I pay for many channels that I have no interest in. With the price of just about everything headed skyward, and paychecks plummeting, paid cable and satellite TV is often one of the first things to go from anyone’s budget.
The other day I came across a saying that made me really give thought to the amount of time I have left in my life and what I want to do with it. Comparing the time I have left to accomplish my goals to the balance in a dwindling bank account made me really reflect on the similarities between the two. Here is part of this saying:
Think those dollar stores are only full of useless junk you don’t really need in the first place? Guess again. I too used to think that, until I stopped into a local Dollar Tree the other day on the advice of my grandmother, who wanted me to pick up some holiday wrapping paper for her. I had never thought of checking out one of those stores for much of anything, but she insisted that I stop there to buy the paper she needed. Once inside, I thought I had hit the jackpot, as they had tons of products priced at just $1 that I normally buy at my local drug or big-box stores for much more money.
I stopped paying fees to use an ATM about a year and a half ago when I moved my checking and savings from Bank of America to Charles Schwab. No matter where I am, how often I do it, or how much money I withdraw, Schwab reimburses me for any fees I incur from using other bank’s ATM machines. That’s a lot different than how much I used to get charged by BofA anytime I wanted money from any other ATM machine but one of theirs! But now with internet and local banking becoming even more popular, there is absolutely no reason that you need to stay with a bank that wants to charge you a small fortune to access your own money. Here are eight of the more popular banks offering checking accounts with no ATM fees, no matter where you use your ATM card.
Just last week I read the article “Ten Biggest Money Wasters” over on CNNMoney.com and was fascinated at the types of things that people tend to waste their hard-earned money on. While a lot of us go way out of our way to clip mounds of coupons, drive an extra mile out of the way to save $0.03 per gallon of gasoline, or buy the cheapest items we can find (which only need to be replaced every few years rather than lasting forever), many of us waste money each and every day on little things that really add up — and are mostly avoidable. While I encourage you to go read the entire article I referenced above, I wanted to mention a few items on the list for your perusal:
A few weeks ago I was reading an older article about a family killed in their sleep by carbon monoxide poisoning. Just like that, a family was wiped out overnight because of a silent killer in their home, one that could be present in any of our homes at any given moment. Without a carbon monoxide detector to alert them, they had no idea that the pilot light had gone out on their ancient heater and gas was filling their home; they just never woke up.
