Budgeting | Quality Life, Low Price

Between Quality and Price

When you carry out a random survey asking people to choose between quality and price, you will surely come up with an interesting result. You will discover that some people are sticklers for nothing but quality, high-end, luxurious and designer products. People in this category want the very best of products and will go to any length to acquire high-quality products.

Some advocates of high-quality products do so for recognition in the society while some others do so simply because of the durability of high-quality products. They argue that on the long run, you will spend little or even next to nothing for maintenance when you purchase the products of good quality since they last longer and are more rugged. So, the investment is worth every dime.

Meanwhile on the other spectrum, there are those that believe that price is the main thing to consider when buying any commodity. In this category, it is also amazing to know that there are two sub-classes. There are those who believe that high prices automatically command respect and attention. These class of buyers are more interested in the price tags rather than the designer label. They assume that the higher the price, the better rating for the product, irrespective of the quality. Those in these category usually have enough cash to throw around.

The other class strongly believe that the lower the price, the better for them. Therefore, you will never see them in luxury stores or expensive boutiques. They go to places like thrift stores and the like. Some do this out of frugality while some others are forced by necessity but the important thing is to strike a balance between the two –price and quality.

Filed Under: Budgeting, Shopping Tagged With: Luxury good, Price, Product (business)

How To Save Money

At the beginning of every year, millions in various communities on earth will make a new resolution. One of such resolutions is to become more disciplined and buoyant in financial terms. At the end of the year, a negligible percentage can beat their chests and boldly enter another year with enough savings.

Even though the concept of saving money is a nice one that attracts many people, not so many people are quite good when it comes to saving money. Most end up spending the money on one stuff or the other. So, to make a success of saving, there are some things you need to know before you start filling your piggy bank.

The first is that you have to set goals that are realistic and easily achievable. If you make $800 in a month and you want to save up to a million by the end of the year, then its either you are banking on a jackpot or your million is in cowries. Setting realistic and feasible goals is the first step in successfully saving money. Do not be discouraged by the size or percentage of the amount you have set aside to save. It is not the size that matters but consistency. If you set aside just $10 a day, that will be over $3600 in one year!

While setting the goal, ensure that the percentage that you set aside is one that you will be comfortable with. The fact that you are saving some bucks does not translate to you or your family starving. Fix a percentage that can cope with and stick to it. You do not have to set aside all your salary for savings unless your father is a billionaire, and a generous one at that. After setting a benchmark for, what you need is self-discipline to ensure that you do not end up swallowing the funds.

Filed Under: Budgeting Tagged With: Money, Piggy bank, Saving

Benefits of a Frugal Life

Warren Buffett is widely known all over the world, his name is a regular entry on the Forbes list of the richest in the world. As a matter of fact, he was once the richest man on the planet in 2008. However, in spite of all the billions at his disposal, the wizard of Omaha is also known and roundly admired for his frugality. He lives in the same house he bought decades ago and drives the same vehicle he bought years ago –without a driver.

In the world of today, it is quite common to see many rich people flaunt their wealth and riches to the high heavens. Some see it as a status symbol to be extravagant, thus they buy the Bugatti Veyron and order for a customized Gulfstream jet. Although there is nothing bad in enjoying the fruits of your labor, moderation is always good while frugality in finances is even better.

To be frugal comes with benefits although you must be prepared for those that will call you names like penny-pincher and so on. Frugality is a sign of caution and responsibility and it is not the same as being a miser. To be frugal is tantamount to making purchases only when necessary. In other words, you do not spend money without any tangible reason. One of the most obvious benefits of being a frugal individual is that you have the advantage of saving more. The money that would have gone to the designer shoes or luxury spa can be channeled into savings for the future.

By being frugal, you impose financial discipline on yourself. The lack of financial discipline is the main reason why millions remain trapped in poverty and squalor. They the not have the idea of being frugal, whatever comes their way is quickly spent. If you are frugal, you can always be prepared for that rainy day.

Filed Under: Budgeting, Occassions Tagged With: Bugatti Veyron, Frugality, Warren Buffett

Shop Online and Save Time

I don’t know about you, but I’m not real fond of standing in lines at stores. In fact, I’m not real fond of stores. Maybe there’s something missing in my makeup, or maybe it’s just because I’m a man, but the idea of taking time out from what I’m doing, just to run to the store and buy something can be a little annoying. Of course, living out in the country makes that quick run to the store into a somewhat longer run to the store.

Okay, okay, I know that women like to shop. Apparently, us guys aren’t born with the “shopping gene;” it must be included in the “X” chromosome that women have and men don’t. Even then, I’ve heard women talk about not enjoying shopping for necessities, like food and disposable diapers; no, what women like is shopping for clothes, shoes, and you know, fun stuff.

Personally, I’ve been thrilled by the invention of the Web, and especially by the amount of businesses who have jumped into the Internet with both feet. For a lot of necessities, I can do a quick search, and come up with a number of sources for whatever it is I’m looking for. Not only that, but I can find a better selection, cheaper prices and it’s delivered right to my door. How can you beat a system like that?

Granted, there will always be a place for the local store. I can’t really imagine an online grocery store being all that effective or competitive. Nor can I imagine buying all my clothes online. While it may look great on the model that’s showing it off, my body doesn’t look like that, so it’s probably not going to look like that on me. No, I’d much rather buy my clothes someplace where I can try it on and see how it’s really going to look.

Filed Under: Budgeting, Shopping Tagged With: Grocery store, Online shopping, Shopping

Breaking the Instant Gratification Cycle

If your credit card habits have forced you to realize that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, you might wonder about two things: how you got here, and how best to get out of here! Getting into credit card debt is unfortunately all too easy. Like appealing little lottery tickets, offers of credit arrive unsolicited in the mail quite regularly. Filling out the applications is also easy, and before you have time to rethink the idea, a wallet sized piece of plastic arrives in the mail. With that piece of plastic often comes a deep well of financing, allowing many things.

Credit card usage begins an unfortunate, endless cycle. By allowing the instant gratification of purchasing availability before funds are available, a typical scenario unfolds. The card isn’t paid off every month, and interest begins to accrue. Enjoying the sense of instant gratification, the scene repeats, month in, and month out. It becomes habit, even a lifestyle. One day you wake up and there’s more credit card bills coming in the mail than there is junk mail. This creates a logistical nightmare, as each bill is due at a different time of the month. It’s just too easy to miss payments, which results in very high interest payments being charged.

Debt consolidation is the way to escape the multiple payment morass! Apply with a first tier lender to pay off your multiple credit cards, while combining your payments into one per month. The advantage is more than twofold: there’s only one bill to handle each month, and the interest rate is often substantially lower than previously enjoyed. That can save an incredible amount of money, depending on how much credit card debt you’ve accrued. A third, unspoken benefit can be had: it’s possible to cut up most of those credit cards to help break the cycle of instant shopping gratification.

Filed Under: Budgeting, General Tagged With: Credit card, Debt consolidation, Gratification

Online Office Supplies at a Bargain

Like many people, I have an office in my home. It’s more or less complete, with three computers, a couple of printers, a copying machine, and even filing cabinets. Just like anyone else who has a home-based business, I have to pay for all this out of my pocket. Since I can’t count on “the company” to pay for it, I’ve gotten to be a bit of a tightwad on my office spending.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t like to have good stuff in my office, or that I won’t buy the fancy labels and pre-printed papers, or print things in color. It just means that I’m always looking for ways to shave a little off of the cost of those items.

I’ve found that buying locally at any of the big office supply stores isn’t always my best option. First of all, it costs time to go there, look over their selection, and stand in line to pay for it. That time is time I’m not productive, not making money; in fact it’s just lost time. Not only that, but the store price may not be the best price I can get on the item. This is especially important for items I use a lot of.

Take CD and labels for example. Now, I realize that you probably don’t use a lot of those, but I go through a couple hundred of each every month. I can buy them locally, and spend about $5.00 for a box of 50 envelopes and $40.00 for a box of 2,000 CD labels. Or, I can go online, and buy the same items (packaged a little differently). That way, I only pay $20.00 for 2,000 CD labels, and $15.00 for 2,000 CD envelopes. That’s a savings of over 1300 percent on the CD envelopes!

There are a lot of generic office supply items available online for really incredible savings; not just these examples, but many, many more. Take a moment to do a quick search on froogle.com or even on e-Bay.com and your eyes will light up with the savings.

Filed Under: Budgeting, Shopping Tagged With: Compact Disc, Filing cabinet, Office supplies

Saving Pennies

Most people who are good at saving money don’t succeed by saving a hundred dollars here and a hundred dollars there; they do it by saving a few pennies here and a few pennies there. While a few pennies, in and of themselves aren’t much, when you multiply that savings by hundreds of times per month, you’ve got some substantial savings.

On the other hand, many people don’t bother with those penny savings, because they don’t see the value in it. They’re thinking in terms of what those two or three cents mean by themselves, not what they mean when added together with all the other places they can save a few cents at a time.

Let’s take gasoline for an example. If you save just three cents per gallon and buy 100 gallons per month, that’s $3.00 per month, or $36.00 per year (and you probably buy more than 100 gallons of gas per month). Okay, now let’s add changing your light bulbs over to CFL bulbs. That change can save you about $4.00 per light bulb per year. In an average home, that equals $40.00 per year. How about putting in programmable thermostats in your house? That’s a biggie, depending on the size of your house and the climate you live in, you can save as much as $40.00 per month, or $480 per year. Now, let’s start buying generic brands in the grocery store. That’s probably worth another $20.00 per month, or $240 per year. Finally, get rid of your everything cell phone, and go for a basic phone service, that can save you as much as $60.00 per month, or $720 per year.

Let’s see now, if we just add up those savings, we’ve got $1,516.00 in our pocket. What could you do with 1500 dollars? Is there some project you’ve wanted to do around the house? A short vacation you’ve wanted to take? Hey, I can think of lots of uses for that money.

Really, we’ve only scratched the surface with this little experiment. Look around you, where can you save a few pennies?

Filed Under: Budgeting, General Tagged With: Gallon, Penny, Saving

Keep an Extra Car to Save Money

Have you noticed how gas prices keep getting higher and higher? I’m sure you have, gasoline has become one of the biggest budget challenges for many families. Trying to pay for enough gas for two cars can take a big bite out of anyone’s pocketbook.

The easy answer is to switch over to small cars; and in fact many people have done so. But, for most of us, we need at least one big vehicle for a family car. So, even if the second vehicle is small and fuel efficient, we’ve got at least one gas hog in the garage.

Here’s a cost savings idea that you’ll think is crazy. That is, instead of having two cars for you and your spouse to drive, keep three. In other words, go ahead and get two small, fuel efficient cars for you to use for all your daily errands, driving to work, and taking the kids to the ball game. But, don’t get rid of that big old car you have, but keep it around. That way, you have the big vehicle you need, when you need it, but don’t have the financial burden of buying gas for it for every little trip around town.

It’s actually cheaper to pay the extra insurance premium (especially if the car is older, and you just have liability insurance on it) and license plates on that third car, than to pay for gasoline to drive it around all the time. You can easily save $100 or more per month on gas savings, while your insurance premium for the third car will only be somewhere between $10 and $20 per month. Even in the worst possible case, you’re still ahead $80 per month. Not only that, but you’ve got a spare car around, for those unavoidable times when one of them is in the shop for some repair or other.

Like I said, it sounds crazy, but it works. Run the numbers for yourself and see how much you can save by having an extra car around the house.

Filed Under: Budgeting, General Tagged With: Automobile, Fuel efficiency, Vehicle

Do it Yourself and Save a Bundle

Many of us spend much more on the family groceries than we think we do. In fact, according to various studies I’ve seen, the average American family of four spends between somewhere $600.00 to $800.00 per month for their food bill.

The question naturally arises, “Why do we spend so much on our food?” Do we actually eat so much, or is it the way we are buying our food that is causing the problem?

Actually, although obesity is a major problem within the United States, that really isn’t why our food bills are so high. The bigger problem is in the way we are buying our food. A large part of the typical family’s food budget is spent in buying prepared foods, snack foods, and portion packaged food products. All three of these are killers on the food budget.

Let’s look at prepared foods. If you buy frozen chicken leg quarters, it costs about 39 cents a pound. However, if you buy seasoned leg quarters, you pay 99 cents a pound. So, you just paid 50 to 60 cents a pound for someone else to sprinkle three cents worth of seasoning on your chicken. How about hamburgers? If you buy 73% lean ground beef, it costs less than $2.00 per pound. However, if it is premade into hamburger patties, the price goes up to about $3.50 per pound. One more example I want to give you, potato chips. You can buy a snack size bag of potato chips for your kid’s lunch for 99 cents, or you can buy a pound bag of potato chips for $2.50, which gives you enough potato chips for at least six lunch bags.

Any time you buy prepared or individually packaged food items, you are paying somebody else to do things that you can do quite easily yourself. If you stop paying them, you can pay yourself somewhere between $100 and $300 per month; that’s quite a savings. A family of four, who doesn’t buy prepared foods and portion sized packages can eat for $400 to $450 per month, and eat well too.

Filed Under: Budgeting, Occassions Tagged With: Food, Potato chip, Snack food

Is Quality Worth the Price?

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In today’s economy, everyone is looking for a way to save a buck. It seems like every year things cost more and more, and we’ve got less and less to pay for it with. With this kind of struggle, many shopping decisions boil down to “What’s the cheapest one I can buy?”

Did you know that it’s cheaper to buy a Rolls Royce than it is to buy more common models of cars? If you buy most cars, by the time you finish paying for them, you’re ready to start thinking about replacing them. But, if you buy a Rolls, you can drive it for the rest of your life. Let’s compare the numbers. A new Rolls-Royce Ghost costs $246,000.00. A new Chevrolet Impala (just to pick a car at random) costs $29,000.00. If you drive from the age of 18, till the age of 70, that’s 52 years. Let’s say that you buy a new Impala every six years, which means you will buy 9 of them in your driving career, for a total of $259,000.00. The Rolls ends up cheaper. Please note that this isn’t taking into account the increase in the Impala’s price caused by inflation.

Okay, maybe this example is a little extreme, but I’m using it to illustrate a point. There are things that make sense to pay for quality, while there are others which it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what brand of consumer refrigerator you buy, it’ll probably last you 12 to 15 years. On the other hand, a wool men’s suit will last at least twice as long as a suit made from cheaper material; at about 50% more cost.

When you are making decisions about purchases, especially major purchases, you really need to consider the life expectancy of that purchase. In some cases, the extra that you pay for a higher quality product will be paid back to you in longer life. Obviously, this doesn’t apply if the extra cost is just for cosmetic changes to the product. A diamond studded blender is still just a blender, albeit a fancy one.

Filed Under: Budgeting, General Tagged With: Chevrolet Impala, Life expectancy, Rolls-Royce Ghost