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What’s the advantage of boarding coach section on a plane early?
I don’t travel much at all. I’m very much an infrequent flier. (It’s the main reason I use a rewards credit card that isn’t tied to an airline. I sacrifice effective cash-back rate, but I know that I’ll use the rewards.)
I got my airline ticket with Travelocity (check rebates) and had absolutely no intention of paying for any upgrades. I don’t fly often enough to even care about such things. One time a number of years ago, I got upgraded to first class, and it was nice — but not so nice that I’d willingly pay for it.
Paying for exclusivity
Airlines regularly invite their first-class fliers to board the plane first. I get the reasons why they do this:
Well, making Rice Krispies treats is easy! And frugal, too!
My daughter’s “love languages” are gifts and quality time. I think I do all right with the gifts, but I can do better on the quality time part.
I had planned to stop at Sheetz to pick up a large-ish Rice Krispies® treat for my daughter. Somewhere along the way, though, I decided instead to stop at Walmart and pick up the ingredients to make them. Surprising as it sounds, I had never done this before.
I remembered that I needed marshmallows. Oh, and Kellogg’s Rice Krispies, obviously. I forgot that I needed butter, but we had some at home.
So easy a beginner can do it
The recipe is really simple. I got it right on the first try with my highly limited food-preparing skills.
My daughter and I got our hands gooey with buttery marshmallow cereal, and had a great time. We even did a small little bit of math mixing it up. (I snuck it in before she noticed hehe.)
It pays to be a reasonable customer
I’m an oddball in a lot of ways. And I’m on my way tomorrow to rub elbows with a whole bunch of other personal finance oddballs at FinCon14 down in New Orleans.
I’m also an oddball because of my feet. I have a clubfoot. Thankfully I’ve been able to go for nearly 25 years without any operations, and in the grand scheme it’s a very, very minor problem. I’ve known people with this problem that would never be able to walk.
The small price I pay for my odd feet
Around a year ago, I was tagged on Facebook to share seven things about myself. Since I’m a Level 47 troll aspiring to become Level 48, I answered, but only really ended up sharing one fact about myself: that I had two different-sized feet. The other facts were deducible from that one fact. Some cried foul, but I don’t care (hehe).
The last of the seven, which I’m sharing here, gets to the small price I pay — and also to the motivation for this post:
The one person responsible for your financial decisions
There is no shortage of personal finance advice available. I’ve been known to produce a bit myself here and there.
There are recurring themes like “buy vs. rent,” “spend less than you earn,” “the magic of compounding,” and so forth which are the cornerstones of personal finance, saving, and retirement planning. They’re cornerstones because there’s a lot of wisdom behind them.
Checklists and more checklists
I ran across Richmond Savers today, which is run by a couple of CPAs in my part of the country. The community is local to Virginia’s capital, but they have a list of financial guidelines that they try to live by every day.
If you’ve read lists like these before, the themes are very familiar. They’re the important financial issues that most of us deal with at one point or another: credit and debt, big expenses like automobiles and houses, health and wellness, and investing.
Buy wholesale with a personal supplier network
Economies of scale are a wonderful thing. The more you’re willing to buy from a particular vendor, the better the unit price they’re inclined to give you. Selling a thousand items a hundred times is a lot more work than selling fifty thousand items twice. It’s less bookkeeping, less tracking, less shipping, and less labor to sell bigger chunks of your inventory at once.
Likewise, businesses buy the materials for their operations in bulk all the time. It’s part of being competitive, and profitable. Lower expenses mean that businesses can price more competitively, which translates to higher volume, and more profits.
Team up with your business-owning friends to get bargains
Frugal, or cheap, or tacky?
Saving money, and spending less money, are two crucial activities for people looking to take, and maintain, control of their personal finances. And, as with most things, there are classy ways to go about it, and … less classy ways.
On the spectrum of ways to spend less money openly, one can be (in order of decreasing classiness) frugal, cheap, or tacky. Merriam-Webster defines each in context:
Frugal, or cheap, or tacky?
Saving money, and spending less money, are two crucial activities for people looking to take, and maintain, control of their personal finances. And, as with most things, there are classy ways to go about it, and … less classy ways.
On the spectrum of ways to spend less money openly, one can be (in order of decreasing classiness) frugal, cheap, or tacky. Merriam-Webster defines each in context:
Use money analogies to gain context
Personal finance boils down to recognizing, and acting on, good deals in their proper context. What’s a wise finance decision for one person could easily be a foolish decision for another.
In deciding whether something is a good deal, it’s often useful to quantify its cost in terms of something familiar. While raw amounts like “$500″ do indeed quantify the cost, $500 could mean wildly different things to different people:
Ten redundant money expressions (and one curveball)
I’ll admit it. I’m a card-carrying member of the grammar police, the spelling police, and the style police.
“Weird Al” Yankovic released his newest album Mandatory Fun less than two months ago. He parodied a Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” with “Word Crimes.” If Weird Al’s song speaks to the innermost parts of your being, then you understand.
And, it you’re scratching your head: No worries; we can still be friends!
Below is a list of commonly used, but redundant, money expressions. The phrases either deal with money directly, or deal with issues that can cause people to spend a lot of money.
Five ways to save $5 in five minutes
The pillar of responsible personal finance is to spend less than you earn. If you’ve heard that once, you’ve heard it thousands of times.
There are three ways to work towards spending less than you earn:
- Earn more.
- Spend less.
- Both 1. and 2.
One area that discourages people with finding ways to spend less is that “spending less” often translates to “doing it yourself,” and that takes time. Indeed it can.
There are ways to spend less that don’t involve spending a ton of time. I’ll describe five ways that you’ll be able to easily save $5 (or more!) in five minutes (or less!) Five bucks in five minutes is $60/hour. This is mid-level executive wage!
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