- Up at 5 two days in a row. Sleepy. #
- May your…year be filled w/ magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you…kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful. @neilhimself #
- Woo! First all-cash grocery trip ever. Felt neat. #
- I accidentally took a 3 hour nap yesterday, so I had a hard time sleeping. 5am is difficult. #
- Wee! Got included in the Carnival of Personal Finance, again. http://su.pr/2AKnDB #
- Son’s wrestling season starts in two days. My next 3 months just got hectic. #
- RT @Moneymonk: A real emergency is something that threatens your survival, not just your desire to be comfortable -David Bach # [Read more…] about Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-09
Cutting Healthcare Costs
It’s not a secret that health care can be expensive. Many people pay two and three digit bills for their prescriptions. A visit to the doctor’s office can hurt the budget. Glasses cost hundreds of dollars? How can you cut this cost?
Drugs
If possible, go generic*. There is no difference between Trazorel and trazadone, aside from the cost. Wal-mart, Target, and many other stores offer common generic prescriptions for $4-5. When you are talking to your doctor, ask if there is an drug option that has an available generic. When you are talking to your pharmacist, ask if there is a generic alternative available.
Get the price match. The Cub Foods pharmacy near me matches the Target generic drug price, giving us $4 generics for the asking. This is often an unpublicized deal, so make sure you ask. If your pharmacy will not match nearby prices, consider going elsewhere.
See if there is a 90 day plan. Many insurance companies sponsor a 90 day prescription plan that gives you a 90 supply of drugs for the 60 costs as long as you are willing to accept the drugs by mail. For expensive prescriptions, this 33% discount can be a substantial savings.
Physician
Does your clinic offer online consultations with your doctor or nurses? Some clinics offer a chat or email option to talk to your doctor without requiring a visit that will add fees and copays to your expense sheet. Most clinics and hospitals have a free nurse line for basic questions, like “When is my baby‘s fever dangerous?” It’s a great chance to save some money. I know, from personal experience, that they won’t be shy if they feel you need to come in, but they generally won’t try to convince you to come in if aspirin will fix the problem.
Stay in-network. Check with your insurance company to make sure the doctor you want to see if in your network and therefore, available at the cheapest out-of-pocket price. If not, and you really want that doctor, ask your insurance company if they accept nominations for the network and ask your doctor if he’d be interested in being nominated.
Stay home for your cold. Don’t go to the doctor for every minor problem. The best remedy a doctor can give your for your cold will reduce it to a seven day malady. On the other hand, if you do nothing, it will go away in about a week. Why waste the money? This counts double for the emergency room and urgent care. Strep throat is not an emergency. Wait until morning and go to the clinic, paying the lower fees instead of the large ER costs. Make an appointment for a doctor visit, if possible. Urgent care is billed the same as a regular visit, but most insurance plans double or triple the copay for urgent care visits.
Cash Flow
A Health Savings Account(HSA) is a pre-tax account to save for qualifying medical expenses similar to a Flexible Savings Account(FSA). The main differences are that HSAs are only available for people with high-deductible insurance plans and do not have to be spent on medical expenses. Non-qualifying expenses move from pre-tax to post-tax, meaning you will be charged federal income tax for non-qualifying withdrawals. FSAs are “use it or lose it” plans. If you don’t use it, it will go away, usually at the end of the year. That makes December a great time to stock up on over-the-counter medicines and possibly replace your eyeglasses, as both of those are qualifying expenses. Find out if you have either option available. If you use either one, set aside a place to store every imaginable medical receipt, so you can be reimbursed. Make sure you understand the FSA-eligible expenses.
An Ounce of Prevention
Get routine checkups. The earlier you find a problem, the more options you have. This goes for everything from cancer screenings to blood tests. Get a physical every year and know what is happening with your body. We may be living in the future, but replacement parts are still hard to come by.
Maintain Your Health
It’s cheaper to be healthy. Eat right, exercise, quit smoking.
I enjoy a good meal. It’s one of my favorite things. I won’t cut rich foods out of my diet, so we reduced portions. Beyond the first few bites, the flavor isn’t nearly as enjoyable or even noticeable. There’s no more enjoyment for huge servings than small ones.
Get more exercise, even if it’s just a 2o minute walks twice a week parking on the far side of the parking lot, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Vision
Go online. This one is worth a write-up all by itself. I have 6 pairs of prescription glasses–all varieties of frames and coatings–that have cost a grand total of about $150. There is no noticeable difference between my cheapies and the designer alternatives. While I work on the write-up, the best site to introduce you to the concept of online glasses is GlassyEyes. Reviews, coupons, and discount likes. They have step-by-step instructions on turning an intimidating idea into a simple and cheap solution to an expensive problem.
How do you save money on health care?
* There are no generics available on new drugs until the initial patent expires. This gives the pharmaceutical companies a change to recoup their research and development costs. Without this patent period, new private drug research would evaporate. Don’t hate the brand names, but don’t show undue loyalty.
Free Tivo
- Image by Marcin Wichary via Flickr
TV is causing problems in my life.
We watch too much TV. Often, we’re only watching because there’s a crappy show in between two shows we do want to watch. In the winter–during the new seasons–my son has wrestling practice 4 or 5 nights per week, which means I miss the new shows I like. We recently downgraded our service provider, so there’s no functional guide button in the house.
That all makes me sad.
Then I found out that Tivo’s lifetime service is attached to the unit. If you sell a unit with lifetime service, you can transfer the service to the buyer. You can’t, however, transfer the service to a new box. That means that everyone who upgrades and sells their old box is selling the lifetime service with it. If you don’t mind having older equipment, you can pick up a used box with full lifetime service for less than the cost of a new box.
After reading Erica’s method of finding 750 extra hours per year, we decided to give it a shot. We are taking back control of our TV. No more rushing home to catch a new episode. No more mindlessly channel-surfing to kill time between good shows. No more commercials. And a guide! I like having a guide button.
I started shopping. My goal was to get a Series 2 Tivo with full lifetime service for about $100 before shipping. I came close a few times, but always lost the auction, in the end. I wasn’t in a hurry, and I didn’t actually have the money budgeted, so it was good to lose.
Then, a friend found himself in a situation that didn’t work with a Tivo and decided to sell his heavily upgraded, heavily accessorized Tivo HD for $100 + shipping. A quick call to my wife resulted in just one objection: Where were we getting the money? We don’t have an opportunity fund, yet and I needed to take advantage of this quick if we were going to get it.
I decided to make it free.
When I automated all of our bills, I rounded up. If a bill was for $63.50, I paid $64. If a bill wasn’t exactly consistent, I paid enough to cover the higher amount. For example, I didn’t have a text messaging plan on my cell phone until December. Before that, I’d get about a dozen texts each month, so I budgeted for paying for the texts. If I didn’t get the texts, I’d get a credit on my bill. I never lowered the automated payment. All of my bills were set up like that. My insurance company dropped my rates, but I left the payment alone. I slowly started accumulating a credit on a number of bills. My intention was to skip a month when the billed amount got to $0, and apply the money to debt. It was just a mind-game to play with myself to make the debt easier to pay.
I flipped through the bills, looking at the credits. I adjusted the payments to match the bills this month and found more than enough to buy the Tivo. This is a purchase that doesn’t influence my budget in any way. Almost. This unit doesn’t have lifetime service, so I will be paying for the monthly fee, but that’s been more than balanced out by reducing our television service.
This is a recently-high-end model for free, as far as my budget is concerned. I used money that wasn’t even on the table before I went looking for it. It’s like searching the couch cushions for money to catch a movie.
Now, I’ll have control of my TV–with a strong measure of convenience to boot–for $13 per month. The time savings is yet-to-be-determined.
A free Tivo simply because I rounded my bills up when I automated last year. That’s a pain-free opportunity fund.
Update: After I wrote this, I found out that I dropped the ball in budgeting for child-care now that summer is here and my oldest won’t be in school. These costs are going up $350 per month. I spent an hour scavenging the couch cushions of my budget this week. I had to adjust some savings and repayment goals, but I’ve effectively paid for a summer worth of care for my boy the same way. Free.
Make Extra Money: A Niche Site Walkthrough
Make Extra Money Part 1: Introduction
Right now, I have 7 sites promoting specific products, or “niche” sites. When those products are bought through my sites, I get a commission, ranging from 40-75%. Of those sites, 5 make money, 1 is newly finished, and 1 is not quite complete. I’m not going to pretend I’m making retirement-level money on these sites, but I am making enough money to make it worthwhile.
Make Extra Money Part 2: Niche Selection
These three topics have been making people rich since the invention of rich. Knowing that isn’t enough. If you want to make some money in the health niche, are you going to help people lose weight, add muscle, relieve stress, or reduce the symptoms of some unpleasant medical condition? Those are called “sub-niches”.
Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection
My niches site are all product-promotion sites. I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it. Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.
Make Extra Money Part 4: Keyword Research
If you aren’t targeting search terms that people use, you are wasting your time. If you are targeting terms that everybody else is targeting, it will take forever to get to the top of the search results. Spend the extra time now to do proper keyword research. It will save you a ton of time and hassle later. This is time well-spent.
Make Extra Money, Part 5: Domains and Hosting
In this installment, I show you how to pick a domain name and a website host.
Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site
A niche site doesn’t amount to much without, well, a site. In this installment, I show you how I configure a site, from start to finish.
Make Extra Money, Part 6.5: Why I Do It The Way I Do It
Several people have asked me to explain why I use the plugins and settings I use. This explains the “Why” behind Part 6.
More to come….
How Banks Work
On the first and the fifteenth of every month, my paycheck is deposited into my bank account. Some fraction of it is saved, while another(larger) fraction is spent. They put the money in a vault and protect it from being stolen. Anything I manage to save and anything I haven’t managed to spend yet, will build interest. The bank pays me to keep my money there, even if it’s just for a short time. Why would they do that? If I asked you to hold on to $100 for me, in exchange for giving me $10 next week, you’d laugh at me. Right? If I told you that I was expecting you to keep that $100 heavily guarded in a locked room that requires a staff and utilities, you’d try to have me committed, yet that’s what banks do every day.
What’s in it for the bank?
Let’s start at the beginning. In the financial world, there are fundamentally two types of people: those who have money and those who need it.
The people who have money get it by producing something or otherwise providing value to someone for something. They then spend less than they made, leading to an accumulation of money. Woo! Rich people! Naturally, this money gets stuffed in a mattress for safe-keeping. Their money does nothing except collect dust and, occasionally, hungry insects. It is also used to soften a hard mattress.
People who need money have a few choices. They can beg for it, work for it, or steal it. The third option leads to perforation or imprisonment, so we won’t address that one. Now, you can work for your paycheck, like most adults, or you can go, hat in hand, to a charity and ask for money. But what if you want to start a business? You’ve invented the super-widget, a device guaranteed to revolutionize the world more than anything since sliced bread or the USB-powered pet rock. You got a concept and a prototype, you just don’t have the tooling or manpower to produce the millions of super-widgets the world will soon be beating a path to your door to own. You also lack a marketing budget to tell the world to stock up on path-beaters to make it to your door. What do you do?
Enter banks.
A bank will approach the first class of people and talk their money out of the mattresses and mayonnaise jars. They offer to hold the money for the people who have it. They will protect it from theft and they will pay the owner a fee for the privilege of holding on to the cash safely. Of course savers jump at the chance. They can quit worrying about the maid making the bed and becoming a millionaire and they can build wealth with no work. But wait…TANSTAAFL, right? You can’t get something for nothing. The world doesn’t work that way.
The bank takes your money–and the money of thousands of people like you–for safe-keeping. They pay you a fee, called interest. The rest, the loan out to the second group of people, the ones who need the money. They set aside some of the deposits so the owners can make withdrawals, but the rest goes into the loan-pool. People who need money come to the bank, explain their needs and demonstrate their ability to repay the loan, then they are given money for a fee, also called interest. The interest rate for the borrower is significantly higher–sometimes 20 times higher–than the interest paid to depositors. The difference between interest earned and interest paid is what pays the bank’s bills. That gap pays for the rent, taxes, and payroll.
Ultimately, a bank’s job is to connect the savers with the spenders in a way that’s reliable enough to ensure everybody benefits. If anybody in the chain ceases to benefit, the system collapses. Depositors switch back to using mattresses, borrowers go back to their loan-shark grandparents, and banks close their doors. This is the system that allows the entrepreneurial spirit to thrive, while making money for everyone involved.
Money Hacks Carnival #105: The All Government, All the Time Edition
Welcome to the 105th edition of the Money Hacks Carnival: The All Government, All the Time Edition. Deep in the bowels of tax season, it’s not surprising that tax- and government-related articles are popular.
Editor’s Picks
LeanLifeCoach presents What Is Your Learning Style? This is an important lesson for anyone trying to teach. My main side hustle involves teaching. We try to address each learning style to engage all of our students. I’m a visual learner. In school, I always read ahead and I’ve never been able to focus while someone reads to me.
Consumer Boomer presents The Best IRA for You. Holy Educational Post, Batman! Be careful, you’ll learn something if you read this post.
PT presents How to Find Free Stuff Online Without Getting Spammed. I like free things. I hate spam. I’m a part of the target audience of this post. I use an active Gmail account for getting freebies. The spam filter can’t be beat.
Fanny Seto presents 5 Tips on How to Get a Job in this Economy. I’m glad I haven’t had to deal with this recently. If you’re unemployed, take the opportunity to develop a hobby or explore other opportunities. You may be out of work, but that means you have the one thing you can’t replace: time. Use it wisely.
Taxes or Feeding the Monster
Jeff Rose presents How to File Taxes with Your 1099s. All you’ve ever wanted to know (and more!) about the 1099.
Paul Williams presents Deduct Haiti Earthquake Relief Donations on Your 2009 Tax Return. If you itemize, make sure you include any donations to Haiti relief.
freefrombroke presents TurboTax Online 2009 Overview. I love TurboTax. I use it every year and have done so since I discovered I wasn’t capable of figuring out the Earned Income Credit.
Four Pillars presents What Happens If You Lose Your W2 Form?. Keeping track of your tax documents is always important, but what do you do if that doesn’t work?
Matthew Paulson presents Troublesome Tax Myths. Taxes aren’t optional. Ask Wesley Snipes.
Working for a Living or Earning the Monster’s Feed
Darwin presents 10 Highest Paying Degrees 2010 – Best Majors in Demand Now. The part that doesn’t surprise me is that the hard sciences pay well. Art-as-science comes with a smaller paycheck. Hmm….
J. Money presents Life in Grad School Doesn’t Have to Suck…All Your Money. I’ve didn’t make it to grad school, but I did work my way through college with a small baby. It’s good to have a support network.
The Financial Blogger presents Getting Ready for Another Purchase!. I’ve never given any thought to buying a blog. It’s a fascinating read. Make sure you read the related posts to get the full value.
Banking, Credit, and Investing or He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune
GLBL presents What to Expect From Mortgage Rate Trends for 2010. I learn something every day. Define “intraday”.
pkamp3 presents Cutting Up the Card. It may be caused by a down economy, but less consumer debt isn’t a bad thing.
D4L presents 20 Dividend Stocks Riding The Tsunami Of Dividend Increases. My first dividend-paying stock paid me 16 cents once. Stocks kind of scare me. In my mind, they’re not much different than a slot machine, so I don’t buy much. I think I had 20 shares of that first stock.
Personal Finance or The Government Doesn’t Have to Be Involved
Matt_SF presents Personal Finance Equations You Should Know: the Cash Flow Equation. If equations make you smile, this is the post for you.
Craig Ford presents 101 Ways To Improve Your Marriage Money Relationship. This goes beyond finance and dips firmly into happy relationship territory.
Hedy presents My Better Business Bureau experience. I’ve found that the sincere threat of a Better Business Bureau complaint can be effective, too.
2 Cents presents Economics: Your Personal Finance Weather Forecast. As a sci-fi junkie, I love the quote at the beginning of the article.
Dodging Taxes and Anarchism
Nope. No submissions in this category.
That’s all. While you’re here, don’t forget to subscribe to my rss feed and follow me on twitter.
