Money Tips Network

This post is by staff writer Honey Smith.

In my last progress report, I mentioned that I took my student loans off Kwik-pay (autodebit) until after closing on my house. The thinking was that I’d have the money just in case things didn’t go smoothly with the house and move. Originally, I thought I’d re-enable the automatic payments after closing.

Then I realized that if I kept my student loans on manual payments, I wouldn’t be at the mercy of my lender in terms of how payments were allocated. I assumed that I was no longer receiving an interest rate reduction for being on Kwik-pay. Nothing about an interest rate reduction was listed anywhere that I could see in their account interface.

In a sense, personal finance is a battle of conservation. People manage their resources in the hopes they won’t run out of the essentials — only what people find essential can differ. This centers around the fear of losing money or some other aspect of your financial life, and overcoming that fear should involve some element of minimizing the reality of it happening.

Offensive vs. defensive finance

Fundamentally, some people approach finance on the offensive, while others are on the defensive. People on the offensive are driven by acquiring more, or advancing their careers and social standing. People on the defensive care more about keeping what they already have than acquiring more. Both an offensive and a defensive mentality towards finance can come from a fear of loss — but what you fear losing determines whether your approach is offensive or defensive.

What do you fear losing?

As I’ve mentioned before, our grocery routine is pretty straightforward. I’ll just pull it straight in from our Meal Planning for Busy Families post from last fall:

Step 1: Get a Flyer
Step 2: Find Sales on Fresh Ingredients
Step 3: Do Some Recipe Research
Step 4: Create a Week-Long Meal Plan
Step 5: Make a Shopping List from the Meal Plan
Step 6: Go Grocery Shopping – And Stick to Your List

Today, I want to focus pretty hard on Step 5: Make a Shopping List from the Meal Plan.

I’m sitting there with a bunch of recipes that make up our meal plan and a fledgling grocery list that has the on-sale items on it. Obviously, I need to add more ingredients for those meals to my list, along with staples that we need for the week.

Comparison shopping has gotten much easier to do with search engines and other price alert services.  Retailers have to be more competitive now that pricing information is everywhere.

A friend I’ve had some online interactions with posted a picture of what he thought was a mistake on the unit pricing tag on a supermarket shelf.

He claimed something to the effect of:  “It’s a 13-ounce box of Wheat Thins, but they calculated the unit price based on 15 ounces, so the unit price is lower than it should be.”

Then he made some snarky comments (in good fun) and continued on with life.  The picture he uploaded is below.

As I was focusing on the price first, my first thought was that there was a grocery shrink ray that hit the box recently, and the store hadn’t caught the change yet.  No such luck.

Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

1. Seneca on life’s burdens

“I ask not for a lighter burden, but broader shoulders.” – Seneca

Everyone has pain. Everyone has challenges. Life is about your ability to deal with the pain and the challenges.

2. The PearBudget spreadsheet

If you’re familiar with using a spreadsheet program, you’ll probably find – as I have – that this spreadsheet is an amazing way to manage a budget for free. It’s just well thought out.

I first used this a few years back, but lately I’ve picked it up again and tinkered with it. While it’s not a full replacement for something like You Need a Budget, it’s free and it’s really flexible.

This summer, my family is going on a very long road trip to multiple national parks, a stop at Disneyworld, visits with relatives, and many little side trips and journeys along the way. We are going to see large parts of the United States and do it all in an automobile.

No matter how we slice it, it’s going to be fairly expensive. Fortunately, Sarah and I have already planned out a bunch of tactics to bring down the cost of such a road trip.

Air up the tires before we leave. A quick stop at the gas station enables us to fill up our car tires to the maximum recommended air pressure before we depart. Every one PSI on any one tire improves our fuel efficiency 1/8 of one percent.

Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup! Today we found some great articles on affordable presents for dad, getting a frugal start on summer, and how not to drown in student loan debt.

Top 5 Articles

44 Affordable Presents for Dad — Need a gift for dad this Father's Day? Consider getting him golf ball soap or DIY shaving cream. [PopSugar Smart Living]

Getting a Frugal Start on Summer — To get a frugal start on summer, purge your apartment from useless gadgets and personal documents. [Get Rich Slowly]

Every once in a while, I’ll get a big windfall.

For example, not too long ago, one of my books was reprinted in Korean and I received a surprisingly nice advance from that, almost completely out of the blue.

When I get a nice windfall like that, I usually do smart things with it. I took a small portion of that advance and took the family out to dinner, then I actually invested the rest of it for the future.

For me, the challenge comes with smaller windfalls.

I won $40 in a NCAA tournament pool in early April. I could have taken that $40 and dropped it straight into savings.

I didn’t. I used it to buy a new board game. It was a complete splurge on something I didn’t need and it was basically $40 that never entered my budget.

The natural response that most of you will have – and the response I had at the time – is “so what?” If I can’t splurge a little bit, what’s the point of living?

Few of us are naturally forgiving. We tend to hold on tightly to any slight, offense, or grievance directed our way.

And what are the results of this behavior?

It certainly isn't happiness. Positive emotions rarely accompany harbored pain. When you hold on to these negative inputs, the emotions you experience are closer to anger, frustration, fear, confusion, anxiety, bitterness, or betrayal.

None of those sound very fun. So why do we hold on?

For some of us, we believe these negative emotions are the fuel that keeps us going. It's us against the world, and the pain of our past propels us forward.