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20 Lazy Ways to Save Money
- Image by Paul Vivier via Flickr
Investopedia ran a post on 20 lazy ways to save money. I thought it was worth sharing my take on the post.
1. Schedule automatic payments. I do this obsessively. I run all of my regular payments through my bank’s online bill-pay. I think there are 2 bills that get paid manually; 1 is a quarterly payment, the other is due annually.
2. Eat your groceries. According to the post, Americans–on average–throw away 15% of the groceries they buy. I totally believe that. We don’t throw away that much, but it’s still too much. It tends to be the fresh vegetables, which we eat as side dishes instead of the main course. We need to switch that mindset, both to use the vegetable efficiently and to eat healthier.
3. Bundle services. I refuse. I hate the idea of having a single point of failure for multiple systems. If the power goes out, I lose my cable, but I keep the phone. If, for some reason, I can’t pay my phone bill, I don’t lose my internet connection. I like keeping these things separated.
4. Pay off credit card. Hardly a lazy process, but otherwise…duh!
5. Mark your calendar. I use my Google Calendar as obsessively as I use automatic payments. I put in reminders, grocery lists, or anything else I need to know at a specific time.
6. File your taxes on time. I just helped a friend dig out of this mess. I pay as soon as all of my paperwork is delivered. The IRS doesn’t give up and they have leverage, including garnishment and even jail.
7. Roll it over. When you change jobs, take your 401k with you. Don’t leave it behind like a series of red-headed stepchildren. It’s too easy to lose track of the accounts. Don’t cash it out! I made that mistake once and lost far too much to taxes. A rollover doesn’t count against your 401k contribution limits.
8. Switch credit cards. If you can a good balance transfer offer that’s followed by a better interest rate than you currently have, use it. But don’t forget to pay attention to the transfer fees. Do the math. If it costs you $500 to transfer the money, how much interest do you have to save to make it worthwhile?
9. Use your privileges. If you have a AAA membership, use it. It gives you a discount on hotels, oil changes, car rentals, and more. Read the paperwork. Former military gets a ton of random discounts, too. Ask.
10. Rent instead of buy. Renting can save you money over buying, if it’s something you’ll only use once, but borrowing is free.
11. Buy instead of rent. Rent-a-center is a ripoff, but they can’t even legally operate here. If you’re going to use something regularly, buy it.
12. Ask. I love to call up every company I give money to and ask if there’s a way I can give them less. Outside of chain stores and restaurants I almost always ask for a lower price.
13. Just say no. Extended warranties are generally a waste of money. However, if I can’t afford to replace the item, I do get the warranty. On my car, I brought it in for a full inspection and repair a few weeks before the warranty ran out and made all of that money back. We are slowly building a warranty fund to replace the need for any future extended warranties.
14. Have the awkward conversation. We tried giving gift-giving the axe, but nobody enjoyed that. Now, we cap the gifts at $20 and do a round-robin type of gift. $40 for gifts keeps 10 adults happy.
15. Eat at home. Generally, I can cook almost anything better at home, but I really do enjoy eating out and trying new restaurants. We just keep it from being a regular expense.
16. Balance your checkbook. What a waste of time! With automatic payments and cash for all of the discretionary budget items, I balance the checkbook once a month.
17. Stick with your bank. Either use your own bank’s ATM network, or use a bank that refunds ATM fees. I only take out cash on the first of the month, for the entire month and I do that with a teller, so this is never an issue for us.
18. Use your TV. Cable movie packages instead of a video membership? Really? That’s a horrible idea.
19. Quit those bad habits. I quite smoking, saving $200 a month. I don’t drink much and I’m working on fixing my eating habits. Vices are fun, and this is certainly not a fun way to save money.
20. Forget the pet. There is no way this would fly at my house. we have 5 cats, 2 gerbils, and a dog. Our renter has 2 pythons. We’re a flippin’ zoo and honestly, mess and cost aside, we all like it that way.
How do you stand on these ideas?
Money Problems: Day 12 – Paying for College by Doing Without
Today, I am continuing the series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances. The series will consist of 30 things you can do in one setting to perfect your finances. It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear. Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.
I’m not running the series in 30 consecutive days. That’s not my schedule. Also, I think that talking about the same thing for 30 days straight will bore both of us. Instead, it will run roughly once a week. To make sure you don’t miss a post, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or rss.
On this, Day 11, we’re going to talk about one method of paying for college.
I have a secret to share. Are you listening? Lean in close: College is expensive.
You’re shocked, I can tell.
The fact is, college prices are rising entirely out of proportion to operation costs, salaries, or inflation. The only thing college prices seem to be pegged to is demand. Demand has gotten thoroughly out of whack. The government forces down the interest rates on student loans, then adds some ridiculous forgiveness as long as you make payments for some arbitrary number of years, creating an artificial demand that wouldn’t be there if the iron fist of government weren’t forcing it into place.
Somebody in Washington has decided that the American dream consists of home ownership and a college education. Everything is a failure. He’s an idiot.
College isn’t for everybody.
Read that again. Not everyone should go to college. Not everyone can thrive in college.
Fewer than half of students who start college graduate. The greater-than-half who drop out still have to repay their loans. Do you think college was a good choice for them?
Then you get the people who major in art history and minor in philosophy. Do you know what that degree qualifies you for? Burger flipping.
Yes, I know. Just having a degree qualifies you for a number of jobs. It’s not because the degree matters, it’s because HR departments set a series of fairly arbitrary requirements just to filter a 6 foot stack of resumes. The only thing they care about is that having a degree proves that you were able to stick college out for 4 years. That HR requirement matters less as time goes on and you develop relevant work experience.
A liberal arts education also—properly done—trains your mind in the skill of learning. First, not everyone is capable of learning new things. Second, not everyone is willing to learn new things. Third, a passion for learning can be fed without college. If you don’t have that passion, college won’t create it. Most of the most learned people throughout history managed without college, or even formal education. Even if you want to feed that passion in a formal classroom, you’re assuming the professors are interested in training your mind instead of indoctrinating it with their views.
Now there are some pursuits that outright require a college education. The sciences like engineering, physics, astronomy, and psychiatry all require college. You know what doesn’t require college? Managing a cube farm. Data entry. Sales. I’m not saying those are bad professions, but they can certainly be done without dropping $50,000 on college.
Some careers require an education, but don’t require a 4 year degree, like nursing(in most states), computer programming(it’s not required, but it makes it a lot easier to break into) and others. Do you need to hit a 4 year school and get a Bachelor’s degree, or can you hold yourself to a 2 year program at a technical college and save yourself 40,000 or more?
That should be an easy choice. Don’t go to college just because you think you should or because somebody said you should, or to get really drunk. College isn’t for everybody and it’s possible it’s not for you.
A Problem With Life Insurance
It’s pretty common for someone to buy a life insurance policy and make a minor child or grandchild the beneficiary.
Bad idea.
The reasoning is usually something along the lines of making sure the money goes with the kid, no matter where he ends up, but that money is mostly worthless until the kids grows up. With the UGMA/UTMA (Universal Gift/Transfer to Minors Act) laws, depending on your state, it can be nearly impossible to access that money or use it for the support of the child.
- For example, in Minnesota, I would have to go through the following steps:
- Complete a Petition for Appointment of Guardian and Conservator with a $322 filing fee and request it be reviewed without a hearing.
- Notify any interested parties.
- Consent to and pay for a background study.
- Establish a custodial account at the bank and maintain separate accounting for the money.
That’s just to access the money. As a conservator, I’d be able to use the money for “support, maintenance, and education”, but that does not include investing in a 529 college fund. I could theoretically invest in ultra-conservative growth funds, but if the investments shrink, I could be on the hook for the difference. I’d be a “conservator”, charged with conserving the asset.
After all of that, when the kid turns 18 (or 21 depending on the setup), the money is his to do with as he pleases.
Have you ever met an 18 year old who made really good decisions about money? I had a friend who had a settlement trust pay her a lump sum at 18, 21, and 25. Each time, she bought a new car and partied with her friends for a month before the money was gone. That was nearly $100,000 down the drain.
It’s a much better idea to visit an attorney and set up a trust. Make the trust the beneficiary of your life insurance policies. Then, define who will be the trustee under what circumstances. That way, you can make sure your kids and grandkids can actually be supported by your money.
I’d Tap That: Making Life Difficult for Government Spying
Skip to the bottom if you’re familiar with PRISM and don’t want to hear any political talk and rampant violations of our Constitutional rights, but still want to protect your privacy.
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the PRISM program is an NSA program to monitor electronic activity.
Lots of electronic activity.
The companies identified to be working with the NSA in this grand overreach include AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PalTalk, Skype, Yahoo! and YouTube. For most people, that is the definition of “the internet”. If you’re doing it online, the NSA is–or could be, at their leisure–watching.
This isn’t a crazy conspiracy theory. This is happening, and the government has admitted it. In fact, when this broke, the executive branch’s response was along the lines of, “Don’t worry, we’ll find the guy who leaked this information.”
On top of that, the government has been demanding phone records from at least Verizon on a daily basis.
In addition, the Justice Department was just busted wiretapping Associated Press phones.
Seriously, if you put this in fiction, nobody would buy it, because it’s ridiculous in the land of the free.
As far as the people who say I’ve got nothing to worry about if I’m not doing anything wrong: shut up. You can speak again when you give me your email passwords, bank records, and let me install a toilet cam in your house. What are you trying to hide?
Seriously, there is such a mess of non-legislative administrative regulations that are considered felonies that the best estimate is that most people commit three felonies a day, without realizing it.
- Catch your kid with a joint and neglect to call the cops? Welcome to the federal penitentiary.
- Use one of those pill planner things to sort prescription meds for your half-senile grandmother? In some states, that’s a felony.
When we live in a system with so many rules that have never been voted on and our legal system refuses to consider legitimate ignorance of the law to be a defense and we have a collection of secret laws that are a felony to disclose or violate, government spying gets far more dangerous.
- Many TSA guidelines are secret.
- The Banking Secrecy Act of 1970 has a number of secret provisions.
- FISA.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978(FISA) is the law the NSA is using to justify all of these data requests. The law, that we all must obey, is being overseen by a small subcommittee in Congress, and the FISA courts are just a small subset of the judges. The judges are signing warrants allowing the wiretaps and massive surveillance, but that is clearly unconstitutional and, hence, illegal.
The text of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the supreme law of the United States is: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Any warrant that cannot name a place to be searched is illegal.
Any warrant that cannot describe the person to be monitored is illegal.
Any warrant that is not backed by probable cause is illegal.
Tell me how “I want to watch what everyone is saying on Facebook and seize all of the data” meets any of those criteria.
Bueller?
Wiretapping the AP is a serious violation of the First Amendment, too. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Monitoring the press in case somebody breaks a story the government doesn’t want broken is crap.
How can we petition the government for redress of grievances that they call a felony if the company discloses the violation to us? It’s self-serving circular crap.
When you throw the IRS harassing charities working for the “wrong” politics, you start to pine for the good old days of Nixon-level fair play and integrity.
To be fair, FISA got nasty with the Patriot Act, which was an abomination enacted by a different political party. Hey, Washington, next time try to remember that your laws will someday be administered by your political enemies, k? (NSA: I trust you’ll pass the message for me?)
Political talk is over. How do we stop the government snooping?
There are four main pieces to discuss, based on the scandalous Constitutional violations reported recently.
1. Social media monitoring. There’s nothing to this. If you post things on Facebook, the government sees it and knows it’s you. Don’t post anything you don’t want broadcast to the police, your grandmother, and your priest.
2. Internet browsing. There is very little that is secure on the internet. The government can subpoena your ISP and get any records they keep. Unless you go anonymous and encrypted. Welcome to TOR. The Onion Router is a system that encrypts your internet traffic and bounces it all over the world. Once you enter TOR, nothing you do can be tracked, until your internet request leave the TOR system. The system is not centrally owned or controlled, so nobody in the system can track what you are doing.
For example, if I use the TOR browser to search Wikipedia, a snoopy NSA goon could tell I’m using it, and they could tell there was a request from the TOR system to Wikipedia, but they can’t tie one request to the other. If I’m dumb and log into Facebook, I lose that anonymous shield.
That’s solid protection from anyone watching your internet traffic.
How do you use it?
Easy. Just install the Tor Bundle. When you want the NSA to stop snooping over your shoulder because you want to do a search on erectile dysfunction, you launch TOR and the TOR browser and search without having to share your embarrassing secrets.
3. Email. Email is easily the least secure means you can communicate. When you send an email, that message is in plain text, and it bounces from server to server until it reaches the recipient. Any of the involved servers can keep a log of the traffic and read your email.
Never, ever, ever, ever put anything incriminating or important in an email. Don’t send credit card numbers, your social security number, or the address of your meth lab.
But what if you want to have a dirty conversation with your spouse without letting the sick voyeurs at the NSA listen to you ask your wife what she’s wearing and how would she like it torn off?
Use PGP. OpenPGP is a free software encryption program that is basically impossible to decrypt. It’s known as public-key encryption, which means that anybody can encrypt a message to you that only you can read.
It’s like magic.
To use PGP, the easy way(for Windows users) is to get Gpg4win. Install that, then open Kleopatra. This will let you generate your encryption key. You do that by:
- Clicking File, then New Certificate
- Click Create Personal OpenPGP key pair
- Enter your name and email, then click next, then “Create Key”. Enter your passphrase when asked.
You now have a set of PGP keys. To get your public key that others can use to send you messages, right-click your certificate and select “Export certificates”. Pick a path to save the certificate, then do so. You can open this file with notepad to get your public key, or you can email the file out. There is no need to worry about security with this file.
You will end up with something that looks like my public key here:
—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v2.0.20 (MingW32)mQENBFGyPPkBCAC8zc5B7srG/ZyRMpokP3KyIMd9GA4n94wT89sP/yWFylbTKXDM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=fHba
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
To get your private key, that you can use with any number of plugins for your email client, right-click on your certificate and select “Export secret keys.”
You can either use PGP as a plugin for your email client, or you can use Kleopatra’s feature “Sign/encrypt files”. To do that, write your message in a file, then select the feature inside Kleopatra. You’ll end up with an encrypted file you can attach to your email that snoopy government man can’t read.
4. Phone calls. This would appear to be harder, since your phone is largely out of your control. There’s nothing practical you do about a landline, except to avoid saying anything sensitive. On your cell phone, you have options, assuming you use a smartphone.
For Android users, it’s free an easy. Install Redphone. If you place a call with Redphone, it checks to see if the caller also uses Redphone. If he does, it places an encrypted call over your data plan to the other phone. Nobody can listen in to an encrypted call. The same company also makes a program for texting.
For iPhone users, you’re stuck with Silent Circle for $10/month, which may be a better option, since there is support for more devices, including Android. It was designed by the guy who designed PGP and handles texting and email, too.
That’s it.
There you are, the whats, whys, and hows of modern, hassle-light, private communications. Doing what we can to foil bad government programs is our patriotic duty.
5 Ways to Force Your Spouse to Get Frugal*
Communication is important in a marriage. If you can’t communicate, how are you going to get your way?** I’ve helpfully compiled the best possible ways to get your spouse on board with your budget plans.
- Don’t include her. When I absolutely, positively cannot afford to be working towards a different goal than my wife, I do my best to ignore her. I don’t tell her how much we’ve paid off, how much we have left, or what we can afford to spend on groceries. I think she enjoys not having to worry about the petty details like “Are we overdrawn?” or “Will we be eating Alpo next week?” I’ll do anything to make her life easier.
- Nag. Nothing convinces my wife to do things my way like unending scolding. If I just remind her, day and night, surely she’ll cooperate with my budgeting plans and ideas to save money, right? Every body loves the attention, and, since we got a text messaging plan, I can shoot her a message every five minutes while she’s at the store. In all seriousness, this is actually a problem and a source of friction at my house. Reminding her every time she goes to the store is not an effective strategy.
- Whine. If nagging fails, I always try to take the advice of my toddlers and whine until I get my way. “But Ho-uh-neee-eee! Why’d you buy tha-at?” It’s always been a big hit at my house. My wife appreciates the effort I put into getting the third, screechy syllable into simple words, just to try to convince her to give up or see things my way.
- Obsess. This goes hand-in-hand with both #2 and #3. If I never giver her the chance to forget about our goals, she can never stray from them. A memo in the morning, hourly text reminders, and a daily summary of our account balances and month-to-date budget compliance just keeps us working together. Everything we do can be tied back to our frugal choices and debt repayment, whether it’s a game of Sorry or a trip to a wrestling tournament.
- Yell. If all else fails, just turn up the volume. If there’s a problem, I nag at level 10. Whining loudly enough to wake the neighbors will convince her to comply with my wishes next time. This has the added benefit of allowing my kids to receive the wisdom of my experience, even if they are in the basement playing games with their friends.
*This obviously isn’t a gender-specific article, but, as a man, I write from a man’s perspective and my pronouns match my perspective.
**Sarcasm. Really. Following these rules should result in divorce, NOT happy agreement. If you are operating under this action plans, get therapy.
Update: This post has been included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.
