When you write a few different blogs, it’s inevitable that topics will overlap occasionally. This is one of those times.
Frugal college students know how to save money on the things they need for school. Buying textbooks online, for example, is a great way to save a bundle. Learn how to save even MORE on your college textbooks at my other blog, here!
In the distant past, I wrote a post about shopping online without a credit card. At the time, I recommended Vanilla Visa gift cards; these cards come in denominations of $25, $50, and $100, and can be purchased in many places, such as CVS Pharmacy.
I have come to decide that these cards are NOT the way to go. A big disadvantage of the Visa gift card variety is that they are only good for the face value, and cannot be reloaded. Add to that a steep initial purchase price, and the cost-effectiveness of using the card goes way down. The environmental impact of all those disposable plastic cards is also a concern.
Since then, I have been using– and highly recommend– the Wal-Mart Money Card. Say what you will about Wal-Mart (and I’ll probably agree with every criticism you might have), but the Money Card has changed my financial life.
The Wal-Mart Money Card has many advantages over the “single use” cards:
Using the Wal-Mart Money Card for direct deposit and bill-paying has made budgeting so much easier… and no more weekly trips to the bank to cash paychecks! Most important, I am only spending what I actually have– no credit card debt or hassles.
Do yourself a favor and check out the Wal-Mart Money Card. You may very well decide it is the right choice for you.
Filed under budget, budgeting, cash basis, credit, credit cards, frugal, money, money management
How embarrassing to see that it’s been almost two years since I’ve updated this blog!
Well, at least I have something wonderful to show for my absence: a brand-new veggie garden! The landlady let us dig up the yard– my boyfriend’s parents came down about ten days ago with a roto-tiller. We made a garden plot about 12 feet by 20 feet, which is plenty big for our purposes. We’ve since planted both seeds and seedlings. We would have liked to have started everything from seeds, but we got off to a late start. Tomato and pepper seeds need to be started indoors a few months before transplanting.
Matt’s dad with the roto-tiller
The compost pile we’ve just started
Our version of “American Gothic”
The tomato plants
We planted tomatoes, green beans, carrots, red and green bell peppers, jalapenos and habaneros, and yellow squash. I expect to be making plenty of spaghetti sauce and salsa! I plan to take a workshop in canning and preserving offered through the University of Maine Cooperative Extension (a great resource for learning about gardening).
I grew veggies in containers last year, and it was exciting and rewarding to harvest my own vegetables.
I can only imagine how great it will be when my new full-size garden starts producing veggies! I’ll keep posting updates, I promise.
Rows 1 & 2: tomatoes;
Row 3: green beans;
Row 4: carrots;
Row 5: red bell peppers;
Row 6: green bell peppers;
Row 7 left: jalapeno peppers;
Row 8 left: habanero peppers;
Row 7/8 right: yellow squash.
Filed under frugal
I love leftovers!
When a restaurant portion is too big for me to finish in one sitting, you know I’m eyeballing it and figuring out how many more meals I can get out of it! Your big plate of too-much-pasta will serve as lunch at work tomorrow, and possibly dinner tomorrow night! Not only are you eating less per meal, you are stretching the value of your dining-out
Cooking in large batches and freezing it for future meals is also a great way of saving time and money.
All that said, I’m actually pretty squeamish about leftovers. Friends say I’m a germophobe, and maybe I am. But if it’s a personality flaw to not want e. coli in my system, then I’m as flawed as can be!
Paying attention to food safety couldn’t be more important today! I’m very cautious about how long I keep leftovers around in the refrigerator. For dishes I’ve cooked myself, 4-5 days has always been the maximum refrigerator time. Restaurant leftovers, generally 2-3 days tops.
I just found a super resource from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration). It shows the recommended guidelines for how long food can be safely kept in the refrigerator and freezer.
Food Safety Education: Cold Storage Chart
My personal guidelines came mostly from instinct, and are not too far off from the recommendations. I may adjust my leftover management schedule slightly. I am a germophobe, after all.
Looking at my schedule for the coming semester, I suddenly came to a harsh realization:
I’ll really need to manage my time very carefully if I’m going to make it to graduation!
Yes, I’ll be graduating in December with my Associate’s degree in Liberal Studies. After that, I’m transferring to the university for my Bachelor’s in Media Writing.
The next few months will be a crucial time for me… and time itself will be crucial!
I’ll be taking six classes, working in the library part-time, caretaking at home, writing several blogs, working on other writing projects, reading close to four hundred different blogs, hopefully having something resembling a personal life…
After spending the past few days keeping track of how I actually spend my time… I realized I waste a lot of time! Now, I’m all about living a life with broad margins (as Henry David Thoreau once wrote), but I’ve been seriously out of control! There’s really no excuse for playing twenty-seven consecutive games of Snood. That will not work when I’ve got six classes’ worth of papers and projects to do!
What I really need is to budget my time as frugally as I do my money!
Just as in learning to control your money-spending, it will take great self-discipline to rein in my rampant time-spending. I need to re-frame time as being just as valuable as money– Time is something that should be managed carefully to maximize its usefulness. Obviously, the analogy only goes so far– you can always make more money, but you’ve only got twenty-four hours in the day, and that’s it. Still, a subtle change in perception can make a huge difference.
Anyway, I’ve been working on an Excel spreadsheet, similar to my financial budget, to portion out my hours as if they were dollars. I’ll post a screenshot when it’s done.
I know I can stick to a money budget…. but can I stick to a time budget?
Stay tuned for updates….
Filed under budget, cheap fun, frugal, money management
Back-to-school shopping time for Christine!
This week, OfficeMax has their 15%-off-everything-you-can-stuff-in-a-paper-bag promotion going on.
It’s a standard sized brown paper grocery bag, and on my shopping safari yesterday I came nowhere near filling it. It can hold a deceivingly large volume of small pricey impulsive things, which is the nefarious plot that lies below the surface of the promotion.
In fact, I only bought about $10.15 worth of various things– a package of highlighters, some index cards, two three-ring binders (good price on the Avery “Durable” ones), a pencil pouch (so I can easily find my stuff, instead of digging around in my backpack for my eraser or pencil leads), and who knows what else. Restraint was used, anyway.
I pay for my loot, and check the receipt before I leave.
And do the math in my head, just to be sure.
There’s no sign of my 15% discount!
The whole ritual of putting-things-in-a-paper-bag-and-get-a-discount was the point of my visit!
Still overpriced, even at 15% off… but oh well.
I went back to the cashier and (sweetly as can be) pointed out the error.
She apologized and gave me my one dollar and fifty-two cents.
I felt a little silly, but I lived up to my end of the contract– I put things into a bag as they required!
Besides, that $1.52 could buy me several ounces of gasoline.
MORAL OF THE STORY:
Always, always, always check to make sure you get any discount you’ve been promised!
Think about the big picture: If 100 people per store, times 1000 stores in the country, don’t get their $1.52 discount, that’s $152,000 that Office Max has stolen from the people of America.
Filed under cheap fun, frugal, money management, saving, shopping
I put some gas in my tank this afternoon. Regular unleaded was $3.92 (and 9/10).
Who’d have ever guessed that someday we’d consider $3.92 cheap?!
Filed under frugal
Let’s talk a little about budgets and income.
Your budget (and you do have one, right?) consists of:
In a zero-based budget, no income goes unaccounted for.
[ Income – (Expenses + Savings) = 0 ]
Let’s say you’re cruising along with your nice zero-based budget, and suddenly your income goes up? Let’s say you get a raise or promotion at work, or maybe you take a part-time job to make a few extra bucks. Could this actually be a potential problem?
But that’s a good thing! Well, sure it is, and congratulations! For smart people, things won’t change too much. The extra money will mean extra savings, a bigger emergency fund, a thicker cushion against the slings and arrows of life.
For others, however, that extra cash will represent a potential lifestyle upgrade. It’ll go directly into the expenses (new car, nicer home, more stuff, etc) portion of the budget, and the savings will stagnate. The frugal instincts may weaken, and soon it will feel as if the raise never even happened.
We see this a lot with recent college graduates in their first real jobs. They’ve been living like poor students for the past four years, and become intoxicated by their first decent paychecks. And so they jump right into a spendy lifestyle they really have no business having…. at least not until the student loans are paid.
Now, what about the folks lurching through life without a budget or any sort of spending controls? That extra money will fix everything, right? Not necessarily. Habits don’t change that easily. If your spending is out of control at $20,000 a year, it will probably be that much more out of control at $30,000.
The smart person will maintain the budget, increase the savings, and keep moving along according to their goals… you do have specific goals, right?
Filed under budget, frugal, money management, saving
Economics?! Gross! Who wants to read about something so dry and dull as economics?
Keep reading, friend. You might learn something relevant to your life.
Let’s say you have twenty dollars in your pocket.
Let’s say that twenty dollars is all you have until next payday.
Now, what will you do with your twenty dollars?
One thing for sure– you can’t very well do all these things with with your twenty dollars. In an ideal frugal world, you will stay home, eat peanut butter sandwiches, listen to the radio, and read a book from the library, but that’s just me.
Still, there are so many possible choices vying for your twenty dollars. Your choices are endless… yet your money is finite. That twenty dollars is all you’ve got.
This is the basic dilemma of economics– scarcity. The idea of scarcity is that people have unlimited wants and needs… yet the available resources to satisfy them are limited.
Economics is concerned with scarcity and the choices we need to make: if I choose to spend all my money on a movie, popcorn and a drink, I can’t very well gas up my car, as well. However, if I go to a cheap matinee and forgo the snacks, I have money left over to put at least some gas in my tank.
When you live within your means, you become very conscious of the choices you make.
Each time you make a choice, any number of alternate choices are given up. This is called opportunity cost. A dollar spent on one thing is a dollar you can’t spend on something else. If you go thirty dollars over your entertainment budget, you have thirty dollars less to spend on, say, groceries.
Time is even more scarce than money. If you choose to spend the evening watching TV instead of studying for an exam, that time is gone forever. If you choose to limit your child to only one after-school activity per season, he/she might be missing out on all the other activities, but the decrease in stress may be worth it.
The concept of scarcity seems so obvious, but a lot of people just don’t get it. There’s a lot of denial surrounding scarcity. This is a major reason why credit card debt is such a huge problem– too many people view their available credit as an ATM whenever the “wants” outnumber the available dollars.
Scarcity is very real. You can’t have it all. Unless, of course, you’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.
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