Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
Quite often in the evenings, my family looks for activities to do together. Sometimes we’re frugal and we go to the park - other times we’re not so frugal and we go to the bookstore or to a botanical garden with an entrance fee or the like. The important (and healthy) thing is that we are spending time together, right?
Well, it turns out that almost every night in our local community, there’s some sort of free entertainment going on: a farmer’s market, a municipal band concert in the park, a play on the town stage, a free concert by a local band in the park, a planning meeting for the town festival, a basketball game at the local high school, a community dinner for the fire department, and so on. These events are all either free or else offer a deep discount (like a freewill donation at the fire department dinner, where $5 in the pot gets dinner and contact with people in the community).
If you want a ton of free entertainment, there’s a ton of it to be found in your local community. The only problem is that it can be difficult to be aware of what is going on. There’s a solution to that: call your city hall and also give a ring to your chamber of commerce and ask for a community calendar. In many cities, a weekly or monthly community calendar is printed and given away freely, which lists community activities of all kinds. Circle some that you like and attend them - you can’t get a bigger savings than having an entertaining evening for free.
Even more important: your local community can be a valuable resource, and this is a great way to get to know them. I’ve discussed the financial value of being involved in your community before, but when you pair it with activities that are free to begin with, you’re actually throwing away opportunities and wasting money by staying at home or going out to shop in the evenings.
Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
If you’re like me, your route to and from work takes you by a lot of temptations. For me, there are two drive through coffee places and a wonderfully cozy diner open for breakfast on the way to work, and on the way home my route takes me by an enormous bookstore and a nice little ice cream parlor, too. These places all tempt me to spend money that I shouldn’t spend, and for the longest time I was in the habit of spending some money at one of these places every day.
I broke this habit by using a very simple technique: for a few months, I took a slightly longer route to and from work each day that avoided these places. It cost me an average of three minutes each way, but the incidental stops at these places were completely gone, so it often took me less time to commute than before with the stops included. Instead of driving through town, I bypassed most of the town by taking the interstate to the next exit and backtracking just a bit, driving through a suburban neighborhood and near a hospital instead of through the commercial loop.
What happened? The positive impact of this change was pretty immediate on my credit card bills, as I was spending a lot less on spur of the moment things that I didn’t need. I also found that it was actually a more efficient route, as I didn’t stop nearly as often for extra things, so I could get from work to home much quicker.
If you find that “quick stops” for little things in the morning and evening are eating you alive, try a different route to and from your place of business. It can be a big money saver - and even a time saver.
Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
Many people sign up for auto insurance when they acquire a new automobile and then forget about it. They get comprehensive, collision, and liability insurance on their newest auto and leave this insurance on there until the vehicle is ready to be traded in, continuing to pay for insurance that’s no longer cost-effective.
The truth is that once your car reaches a certain point, comprehensive and collision insurance are no longer cost-effective. One rule of thumb for this is when the cost of a year’s worth of collision and comprehensive insurance is more than 10% of the current cost of your car. Why? When your car is devalued to this point, it’s often getting close to the point where you would merely trade it in for a newer model.
If you’re driving an older car that is getting near the end of its lifecycle, it’s almost always just one major incident away from being traded in for another car. When you start to feel this way about your current vehicle, save some money by calling your auto insurance agent and canceling everything but liability insurance on the car.
I don’t want to trade in a nonfunctional car! Why not? When the inevitable does happen and you do need to trade it in, the car’s value will be small regardless of whether a part needs to be rebuilt or not.
Of course, for many of you, this doesn’t apply - many Americans don’t drive a vehicle until it reaches this point. However, if you do find yourself actually getting the full value out of a car by driving it to this point, you can pocket some additional cash by just giving your agent a quick ring.
Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
If the one thing keeping you from cutting up your credit cards is fear that you might someday desperately need them in an emergency, this tip is for you. When I was younger, my aunt once filled an ice cream container half full with water, put it in the freezer, waited twenty four hours, pulled it out, put her credit cards in there, then filled it up with water to the top and stuck it back in the freezer. The end result was a giant ice cube with her credit cards stuck in the middle.
What? Why? She realized that she was spending far too much money with the plastic and if she kept the cards around, she would keep using them on stupid things. She also realized that there may be a big emergency some day when she would need them. So instead of cutting up her cards, she froze them.
By freezing her cards, she didn’t destroy them, but she rendered them very difficult to use. To have access to the card, she would have to unthaw a rather large ice cube - it filled up a gallon plastic bucket and thus would take some significant time to unthaw, even if you used heating methods to help. This served two purposes: one, it got the cards out of sight and out of mind, and two, it made her take some very serious pause if she ever thought about getting them out to use them.
Using this strategy and about two years of steady payments, my aunt got herself completely out of credit card debt, and this technique was a big help in the process. The best part is that it’s quite simple and a very effective psychological trick to get yourself out of the plastic mentality.
Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
Depending on your cell phone plan, you may be paying for far more service than you’re using - or not paying for enough service. Either way, you’re handing the cell phone company money for no good reason, and you can eliminate that by just keeping simple tabs on your cell phone usage.
If you’re using Verizon or T-Mobile, you can have your minutes in your web browser window. Just check out the Verizon Minutes Used Firefox plugin or the T-Mobile Minutes Used Firefox plugin to track your minutes. Both are quite useful for keeping track of how many minutes you’ve used without any effort. These both require that you’re using the Firefox web browser - there is no alternative for IE users.
Take a detailed peek at your cell phone bills. Make sure you’re not getting dinged with overage charges or other such charges. If you never see any and are using far fewer minutes than you’re paying for, that’s also a concern.
Call up your cell phone provider and ask for a plan change. If you’re going over your minutes every month, it’s almost always cost-effective to pay a bit more each month for a plan that includes those minutes. On the other hand, if you’re nowhere near your limit each month, then you can save some cash by dropping your total minutes down a bit.
I usually check this every six months or so; it takes about three minutes to figure out if a change is needed and about two minutes more to make that change. In just five minutes, I can often save $60 over the course of six months, which is a very healthy time investment.
While you’re at it, you might also drop any extras from your plan that you don’t use. I send maybe ten text messages a month, but at one time I was paying for unlimited text messaging. Dropping this down to a very small allotment of messages saved me some additional cash.
Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
One thing I did recently that started saving us about fifteen dollars a month was that I made the useful observation that I don’t watch that many channels at home. We had a package that included Starz and I never watched it.
When we signed up for cable, my wife selected the package with the idea that we would have movies always available, but during the time that we have the television on, we’re usually watching specific shows or else watching C-SPAN or the news.
So, all I did was call my cable provider and simply ask what channels were on their most basic plan. They listed the channels and I discovered that 90% of the programming I watch was in these channels, so I simply switched to that plan. It took about four minutes and now I’m spending $15 a month less than I was before.
All you have to do is think about what you actually watch on television for a minute and then make a list of the “top” channels on a sheet of paper. Then give your cable or satellite provider a ring and ask for the cheapest plan that includes those channels. You can almost always save some cash each month by doing this.
Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
Does the title surprise you? It shouldn’t. The financial costs associated with germs spread by hand-to-hand and hand-to-face contact numbers at least in the billions per year. For example, just in the health care industry, “transfer of germs by caregivers due to poor hand hygiene can contribute to nearly 90,000 patient deaths per year and $4.5 billion in medical expenses” (from Riley Hospital for Children). This doesn’t include the costs in lost productivity and medical costs from hand-to-hand and hand-to-mouth contact in the general population, which likely dwarfs this.
Odds are that sometime in the last several years, you’ve come down with an illness of some sort, and the odds are good that this illness was caused by something borne on your hands. A regular hand washing regimen, which takes just thirty seconds, can strongly reduce this risk.
All you have to do is wash your hands thoroughly each time you use the restroom. Moisten your hands, cover them thoroughly in soap, rinse, and dry, and you’ll eliminate the vast majority of the germs that may take up residence on your hands and thus vastly reduce the risk of illness due to these pathogens. This reduces medical costs and also lost productivity - time when you could either be making money or doing something you love instead of lying in bed feeling miserable.
Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.
One big factor for saving money that many people miss out on is motivation. For me, constant reminders of what I’m saving money for help me greatly to avoid spending money on unnecessary things. Here’s a gameplan for quickly finding motivation for saving.
Find a picture online of what you’re saving for. For me, I found two pictures: one of a house that I really liked (saving for a down payment) and a picture of my toddler son (reducing debt and saving for college).
Figure out how much it will cost (approximately). I estimated the cost of a down payment and also the cost of about a third of a college education in about eighteen years. The numbers were quite large, but not so large that they felt unapproachable.
Print out a few copies of that picture with the cost as a caption. I printed out five copies of each one. I actually put the numbers in bold on each picture near the bottom.
Place that printout several places you will see it. I keep one or the other wrapped around my credit card in my wallet so that any time I plan to whip out plastic, I see my son’s face or the home I’d like to have and I rethink the purchase. I keep them in other places, too: on the dashboard in my truck and so forth.
These reminders were very easy to make and help keep me on pace for saving money.
