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Make a Budget

: Image by r.lovewell via Flickr

In the past, I’ve gone through a detailed series of budget lessons demonstrating how to make a budget and showing my personal budget spreadsheet template. If you weren’t here to see them develop, you probably haven’t seen them at all. I’ve never built an actual index for those posts.

This is the master index of my budget planning resources. As I develop more, this will grow.

Budget Lesson #1 – In this lesson, I go over how we handle discretionary income and I explain our modified envelope system. The discretionary budget contains things like our grocery bill, or the clothes we buy. We have near-total discretion over what is purchased, hence the name.

Budget Lesson #2 – Lesson #2 contains the details of our monthly bills. These are the ones that are consistent, predictable, and actually due each month. Most people take these for granted as the bills they have to pay, but it’s not true. You can get almost all of your regular bills reduced just by asking. You would also be surprised what you can do without, when properly motivated.

Budget Lesson #3 – This is where I explain how we deal with the non-monthly bills. That is, the bills that have to be paid, but are not due on a monthly basis. I also share the personal budget spreadsheet template I developed. I am working on a few sample templates to match various imaginary scenarios. If you’d like to be an anonymous case study, and get free help setting up a budget, let me know, please.

Budget Lesson #4 – In this lesson, I describe our “set-aside” funds for things that will need to be paid eventually, but not on a set schedule. Sometimes, they are never actually due. We set aside money for the parties we throw, for car repairs and for a number of other things. A few of these items are outright optional, but they are part of what makes life fun. You can’t make a budget without including some of the extras.

Budget Lesson #5 – This is the companion piece to lesson 2. Learn how I’ve reduced–or attempted to reduce–each of these bills. For the better part of two years, I called Dish Network every few months to ask for a discount. For almost 2 years, it was granted. Then one, day, they told me they were putting a note on our account to keep us from getting any more discounts, so I canceled. 100% discounts help us save more.

Budget Lesson #6 – This is the reduction companion to lesson 3. These bills are harder to reduce. Have you ever successfully gotten your property taxes lowered?

Budget Lesson #7 – This is the reduction companion to lesson 4. Notice a pattern, yet?

Budget Lesson #8 – Here, completely out of order, is the reduction companion to lesson 1. Watch as I magically reduce–or rationalize–our discretionary budget.

So, dear readers, what part of budgeting should I address next?

4 Ways We Keep Wasting Money

Finance

: Image by Getty Images via @daylife

MSN Money has an article up on common ways money is wasted. Here is my spin.

We(as a species) tend to do a great job of wasting money. Between inertia and the emotional pain of cutting off something we have gotten used to–whether it be Netflix or a 3rd arm–it’s hard to kill wasted costs. As Robert Heinlein said, “Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal.”

MSN listed 4 ways to make your money go bye-bye:

1. Credit cards

According to the article, in the US, the average rate of interest is 15% for a total nation-wide debt of $850 billion-with-a-B. That’s insane. I lucked out and quit using my cards before the CARD act forced all the issuers to send their rates to the moon. I’ve opted out of every agreement change since then, while I pay off the remaining balances. 15%! If you buy something for $1000 and pay it off in a year, that’s $1150. What could you do with an extra $150? It’s time to get out the torches and pitchforks and drop by Mr. Debt’s house.

2. Overdraft fees

I set up an overdraft protection account years ago, because it was a heckuva lot cheaper than bouncing checks. It came with a 25% interest rate and a $2 fee per use. A couple of months ago, they boosted the fee to $10 per use. Jerkface, you’re already cashing in on my interest, do you have to touch me like that at the beginning of the date, too? Thankfully, we haven’t used our overdraft protection since we went on our debt-killing crusade in April of 2009. Oh, Mr. Debt! You’re going to have a really bad day when I get to your house. There will be a smoothie à la Otis when I get there. Side note: If you’ve got a dark sense of humor, rent Otis. Not only will you love it, you’ll get the smoothie joke.

3. Unused memberships, gift cards and rebates

Gym memberships are the big example here. People buy a membership because they set some awesome New Year’s resolution, use it for 2 months, then spend 6 months telling themselves they’ll start using it again soon before they finally cancel. At $30 per month, that’s $180 that could have been spent sending me presents. If you must get a gym membership, wait until spring. That’s when people tell themselves they don’t need a membership because it’s so nice out, they can just exercise outside. When people tell themselves that, the gyms cut membership costs to lure people in to start their own 6 months of denial.

Take a look at your other recurring costs, too. Do you use the cable package you have, or could you be just as happy with the next one down? Do you need the donkeys-and-kneesocks-around-the-world channel? You’ve gotten your 10 CDs for a penny, can you tell Columbia House where to go with their $20 per CD commitment?

4. Airline fees

This one is easy. Forget the 3 hour lines, fees for showing up, Pervo-Scan™, and minimum-wage molestation agents masquerading as cops. Drive whenever possible. If it’s not possible, show up in a kilt, regimental-style(assuming you are a guy!). Don’t check a bag, just ship if overnight to your hotel. Most of the time, that’s cheaper than $50 per bag, anyway. Avoid the fees as much as possible.

What other ways have you wasted money?

Budget Lesson, Part 8

Finance

This is a continuation of the budget series. See these posts for the history of this series.

This time, I’m looking at our discretionary budget. These are the things that don’t have a fixed cost. Any individual item is largely optional, and, ultimately, we don’t track these purchases closely. At the beginning of the month, I pull this money out of the bank in cash, except for 1 category. When the discretionary budget is gone, it’s gone.

Groceries/Dining – At the beginning of the week, we sit down with a meal planner and (Can you guess?) plan our meals. The planner we use has a weekly calendar with a checklist below each day to build the grocery list. At the bottom of the page is another checklist for staples that don’t apply to a specific day’s meal, like milk or snacks. We build the list, then transfer it to another sheet, broken out by grocery department. That keeps me from having to criss-cross the store. I make one lap. When I go to the store, I only bring that week’s grocery budget in cash, so I keep close track of how much is going into the cart. Recently, we’ve gotten so good at making our meals cheaply from scratch that I reduced our monthly food budget by $50. I enjoy good food, so I wouldn’t reduce this budget item if it was a sacrifice in quality. For example, the Rainbow Foods store-brand chips actually taste better than Lay’s for half of the price. We stock up when things are on sale and cook creatively. Sometimes, if time has been too tight to make a meal plan, we eat solely from the pantry for a week, buying nothing but bread and milk. By sticking to the list, and not fearing the store’s brand, we are able to feed our family of 5 1/2 for $450 per month and still eat well.
Discretionary – This is for the random things that come up, and some of the not-so-random. Toiletries, activity fees, admissions, and fund-raisers all come out of this fund. At the end of the month, whatever is left gets tucked into a box and forgotten. When the box gets full, it goes to the bank to be applied to debt. There isn’t a lot to cut here, since this line-item is only $200.
Baby stuff – This category is continually shrinking. Our middle kid is recently potty-trained and our youngest is trying. There is no baby food and no formula, just 1 pack of diapers every month. In 6 months, this category will be eliminated.
Gas/oil – This is the single category that isn’t cash-based. It makes no sense to take the kids out of the car to pay inside, especially in the winter. Also, all of the temptation is inside. It’s much better to spend the money at the pump. There isn’t much we can do to reduce this, at the moment. Our next car won’t be a full-sized pickup, but we are several years from that purchase. We’ve started clipping oil-change coupons to keep this down to the minimum amount possible.
Clothes – We only allocate $15 per month for clothes. In a good month, we don’t spend it. We can’t eliminate it completely, because things do come up. Over the summer, I’m hoping to completely leave it alone to save up for a new(used) winter jacket for our older daughter, who doesn’t get hand-me-downs.
Blow Money – This is the safety valve. It can’t get reduced and still work.

We’ve now addressed out entire budget, including what we can do and have done to keep our costs under control. Looking back, I don’t see too many cuts I’ve missed.

Saturday Roundup – No More Car

Misc

: Image via Wikipedia

…err, no more car loan. I paid off my car this week, a year early! Now I’m down to 2 debts: a credit card with an embarrassingly high balance and my mortgage. We’re rocking the debt snowball!

Free Money Tip

INGDirect is having a sweet promotion. Open a checking account, use it three times in 45 days, and get $50 free. Free money is the best kind. I love my ING account and keep all of my savings there. If you don’t have an account there, yet, now is a great time to open one.

30 Day Project Update

This month, I am trying to establish the Slow Carb Diet as a habit. At the end of the month, I’ll see what the results were and decide if it’s worth continuing. For those who don’t know, the Slow Carb Diet involves cutting out potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, and dairy in all their forms. My meals consist of 40% proteins, 30% vegetables, and 30% legumes(beans or lentils). There is no calorie counting, just some specific rules, accompanied by a timed supplement regimen and some timed exercises to manipulate my metabolism. The supplements are NOT effedrin-based diet pills, or, in fact, uppers of any kind. There is also a weekly cheat day, to cut the impulse to cheat and to avoid letting my body go into famine mode.

I’m measuring two metrics, my weight and the total inches of my waist , hips, biceps, and thighs. Between the two, I should have an accurate assessment of my progress.

Weight: I have lost 17 pounds since January 2nd. That’s 6 pounds since last week. I cheated this week and had a slice of toast and 6 croutons with my grilled chicken-but-no-cheese salad.

Total Inches: I have lost 9 inches in the same time frame, down 3.5 since last week.

Naturally, the first week is the most dramatic. That’s when my body was flushing most of the garbage I’d been eating, including holiday feasts. I’ll have a hard time complaining about 6 pounds in a week. My guess is that I drop another 10-15 pounds by the end of the month, bringing the average to about 1 pound per day. Over time, that will drop as my base caloric burn drops to match my new weight.

Best Posts

Realized Returns is giving away a Kindle. I would greatly appreciate it if you didn’t enter, because I’d love to get a Kindle.

Maximizing Money has put together a stellar list of financial blogs. If I’m not enough to keep you going, take a look at that list.

Mystery shopping sounds like it could be such a sweet deal for some people. Always try to make money doing what you love.

Here is another list of sites that can make you some money. I love side hustles.

And finally, here is Lifehacker, showing you how to make better cocoa.

LRN Timewarp

This is where I review the posts I wrote one year ago.

I wrote a post on saving money while cooking. This post has easily withstood the test of time. We keep getting better at stretching our budget. Over the last year, we’ve actually reduced our food budget by an additional $50 per month, while the quality of our meals has gone up.

This was the first week I posted a 30 Day Project update. My first goal was to start waking up at 5AM. That worked well for almost the entire year, but I’ve let that slack off over the last few months. On the weekends, I don’t set an alarm or try to get up early, but I’m still up by 7:30, usually. During the week, my alarm goes off at 5:10, but I let myself snooze it. I’ve discovered that I do better at attending to my personal projects(like blogging) late at night instead of early in the morning. So, I’m going with what works, instead of trying to force what doesn’t.

I also reviewed the bills I pay that aren’t paid monthly in my third budget lesson.

Carnivals I’ve Rocked and Guest Posts I’ve Rolled

First 3 Things to Do in the New Year was included in Crystal’s rockin’ new Total Money Carnival.

4 Ways We Keep Wasting Money was included in the Festival of Frugality.

Living the XBox Life on an Atari Income was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Swamp Finance was hosted by Squirrelers.

I ran the guest post, The Best Financial Advice I Ever Received for Saving Money Today.

Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.

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That’s all for today. Have a great weekend!

Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site

Business, Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how to set up a WordPress site. I’m going to show you exactly what settings, plugins, and themes I use. I’m not going to get into writing posts today. That will be next time.

I use WordPress because it makes it easy to develop good-looking sites quickly. You don’t have to know html or any programming. I will be walking through the exact process using Hostgator, but most hosting plans use CPanel, so the instructions will be close. If not, just follow WordPress’s 5 minute installation guide.

Installing WordPress

Assuming you can follow along with me, log in to your hosting account and find the section of your control panel labeled “Software/Service”. Click “Fantastico De Luxe”.

On the Fantastico screen, click WordPress, then “New Installation”.

On the next screen, select your domain name, then enter all of the details: admin username, password, site name, and site description. If you’ll remember, I bought the domain http://www.masterweddingplanning.net. I chose the site name of “Master Wedding Planning” and a description of “Everything You Need to Know to Plan Your Wedding”.

Click “install”, then “finish installation”. The final screen will contain a link to the admin page, in this case, masterweddingplanning.net/wp-admin. Go there and log in.

Configuring WordPress

After you log in, if there is a message at the top of the screen telling you to update, do so. Keeping your site updated is the best way to avoid getting hacked. Click “Please update now” then “Update automatically”. Don’t worry about backing up, yet. We haven’t done anything worth saving.

Next, click “Settings” on the left. Under General Settings, put the www in the WordPress and site URLs. Click save, then log back in.

Click Posts, then Categories. Under “Add New Category”, create one called “Misc” and click save.

Click Appearance. This brings you to the themes page. Click “Install Themes” and search for one you like. I normally use Headway, but before I bought that, I used SimpleX almost exclusively. Your goal is to have a simple theme that’s easy to maintain and easy to read. Bells and whistles are a distraction.

Click “Install”, “Install now”, and “Activate”. You now have a very basic WordPress site.

Plugins

A plugin is an independent piece of software to make independent bits of WordPress magic happen. To install the perfect set of plugins, click Plugins on the left. Delete “Hello Dolly”, then click “Add new”.

In the search box, enter “plugin central” and click “Search plugins”. Plugin Central should be the first plugin in the list, so click “install”, then “ok”, then “activate plugin”. Congratulations, you’ve just installed your first plugin.

Now, on the left, you’ll see “Plugin Central” under Plugins. Click it. In the Easy Plugin Installation box, copy and paste the following:

 All in One SEO Pack
 Contact Form 7
 WordPress Database Backup
 SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
 WP Super Cache
 Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
 date exclusion seo
 WP Policies
 Pretty Link Lite
 google xml sitemaps
 Jetpack by WordPress.com

Click “install”.

On the left, click “Installed Plugins”. On the next screen, click the box next to “Plugins”, then select “Activate” from the dropdown and click apply.

Still under Plugins, click “Akismet Configuration”. Enter your API key and hit “update options”. You probably don’t have one, so click “get your key”.

Tools

The only tool I worry about is the backup. It’s super-easy to set up. Click “Tools”, then “Backup”.

Scroll down to “Schedule Backups”, select weekly, make sure it’s set to a good email address and click “Schedule Backup”. I only save weekly because we won’t be adding daily content. Weekly is safe enough, without filling up your email inbox.

Settings

There are a lot of settings we’re going to set. This is going to make the site more usable and help the search engines find your site. We’re going to go right down the list. If you see a section that I don’t mention, it’s because the defaults are good enough.

Writing

Set the Default Post Category to “Misc”.

Visit this page and copy the entire list into “Update Service” box. This will make the site ping a few dozen services every time you publish a post. It’s a fast way to get each post indexed by Google.

Click “Save Changes”.

Discussion

Uncheck everything under “Email me whenever…” and hit save. This lets people submit comments, without actually posting the comments or emailing me when they do so. Every once in a while, I go manually approve the comments, but I don’t make it a priority.

Permalinks

Select “Custom structure” and enter this: /%postname%/

Click save.

All in One SEO

Set the status to “Enabled”, then fill out the site title and description. Keep the description to about 160 characters. This is what builds the blurb that shows up by the link when you site shows up in Google’s results.

Check the boxes for “Use categories for META keywords” and “Use noindex for tag archives”.

Click “Update Options”.

Date Exlusion SEO

Check the boxes to remove each of the dates and set the alt text to “purpose” or something. This will suppress the date so your posts won’t look obsolete.

SEO Search Terms 2

This plugin reinforces the searches that bring people to your site. It’s kind of neat. Skip the registration, accept the defaults and hit save.

WP Policies

Scroll to the bottom and click import. We’ll come back to this.

WP Super Cache

Select “Caching On” and hit save.

JetPack

Across the top of the screen should be a giant banner telling you to connect to WordPress.com and set up Jetpack. You’ll need an account on WordPress.com, so go there and set one up. After authorizing the site, you’ll be brought back to the Jetpack configuration screen. Click “Configure” under “WordPress.com Stats”. Take the defaults and hit save.

Contact

On the contact configuration page, copy the code in the top section. You’ll need this in a moment.

Pages

Now, we going to create a couple of static pages. On the left, click “Pages”, then “Add new”.

Name the first page “Contact” and put the contact form code in the body of the page. Hit publish.

Menus

Under Appearance, click “Menu”. Enter a menu name and hit save.

Then, under “Pages”, click the box next to “Contact”, “Disclaimer”, and any other policies you’d like to display. Hit save.

Widgets

Also under Appearance, click “Widgets”. This is where you’ll select what will display in the sidebar. All you have to do is drag the boxes you want from the middle of the page to the widget bar on the right. I recommend Text, Search, Recent Posts, Popular Search Terms and Tag Cloud. In the text box, just put some placeholder text in it, like “Product will go here”. We’ll address this next time.

Posts

We’re not going to worry about getting posts in place, yet. That will be the next installment. However, the steps in the next installment could take 2 weeks to implement, and we want Google to start paying attention now. To make that happen, we need to get a little bit of content in place. This won’t be permanent content. It’s only there so Google has something to see when it comes crawling.

To get this temporary, yet legal content, I use eZineArticles. Just go search for something in your niche that doesn’t look too spammy.

Then, click “Posts”, then delete the “Hello World” post. Click “Add new”. Copy the eZine article, being sure to include the author box at the bottom, and hit publish.

To see your changes, you may have to go to Settings, then WP Cache and delete the cache so your site will refresh.

Congratulations! You now have a niche blog with content. It’s not ready to make you any money, yet, but it is ready for Google to start paying attention. In the next installment, I’ll show you how I get real unique content and set it up so Google keeps coming back to show me the love.

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