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The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.

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How to Save Money On Anything

Finance

Haggling
Haggling (Photo credit: pritzkerphoto.com)

There is a little-known secret to saving money on almost anything.  If you want to know what it is, please send a case of beer and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to my house.

No takers?

In that case, I will share the secret that has been passed down from father to son since the Mesopotamians landed the Santa Maria at Plymouth Rock.

Ready?

The secret is to…ask.

That’s right, just suck it up and say “Pretty Please”.

How does it work?

In the easiest version, you call up one of the companies you pay regularly and you say “How can I save some money?”

Allow me to give you some examples.

How to save money on insurance

Call up your insurance company and ask, “How can I save some money with you?”  You may be offered a multi-line discount if you let them insure your home and your car or you might be told to raise your deductible.  If you have a $1000 emergency fund, you can afford a $500 deductible.   They may recommend that you drop some coverages that you don’t need or they may ask you some questions that will allow them to lower your rate.  For many years, I lived 2 miles from work and got a discount for the low mileage.

How to save money on utilities

When you call your electric company to ask the magic question, they may offer to conduct a home energy audit to determine where you home is leaking energy.  If they try to charge you for the audit, remind them how long you’ve been a customer in good standing.

Another option they may offer is to install a remotely-triggered switch on your air-conditioner.  Around here, that switch is good for a 15% discount off of my bill in the summer.

How to save money on your cell phone

If you are out of a contract or near the end of your contract you have leverage.  Look up the best comparable deal from another company.  Then, call your cell phone provider, ask to be transferred to the retention department, then ask them to convince you to stay.  They will.

If you aren’t near the end of your contract, you can still call and ask.  If that doesn’t work, watch the mail and any emails from the company.  If they change the terms of your contract, you can get out of it without paying a penalty.  If you get that opportunity, call and ask for the retention department.

How to save money on credit cards

I am assuming you have a credit card with a balance that gets carried from month to month.

Credit card companies are competitive.  Find a competing deal and call your company.  Ask them to beat the deal.  If the competitor is offering 9%, ask for 8%.  If they refuse, call up the competitor.  Tell them you will transfer your balance over if they will waive the transfer fee.    A surprising number of companies will be happy to do so.

Most bills can be reduced in some way.  All you have to do is ask.

Have you had any luck pointing the shrink ray at your bills?

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Negotiating Superstar

Finance, Parenting, Recipe

Recently my son asked me for some money.

This isn’t rare.

He asks me for money on a regular basis.  He’s kind of greedy some days.

This time, however, he asked what he can do to earn some money.  Now, since I live in Minnesota and have the dog and we had the sixth snowiest winter ever this year, all my dogs little shoe-bombs have been buried for the last six months. It started snowing in early November and  as of this writing, on March 25, I still see two inches of  snow covering every thing. Last week, we had a thaw and got to see the grass.  We also got to see the dog’s business all over the yard.

I told him that I would give him $10 to clean up the yard.  He asked if a friend could help.  I said yes.  Then he asked if they would have to split the money or if I would be paying them $10 each.  I said that I’d be getting the same amount of work done, so they should split the $10.

He didn’t like the plan, so he negotiated his way up to getting seven dollars each.  Originally,  I was planning to pay $20, but got talked down by a friend.  I’d still be willing to pay $20.  What I’m trying to do is encourage him to start negotiating.  I am a lousy negotiator.  I want my kids to have better financial skills than I do.  I want them to grow up knowing how to negotiate and being comfortable negotiating.  That will make him a better financial adult.

So I encourage him. Sometimes I offer a lowball number and if he gets so upset walks away I ask him why he didn’t give a counter-offer.  If he just accepts a number that’s way too low,  or if his grandma offers him a shiny nickel to mow her yard, I tell him no. I tell him to reject it and offer something that he feels is more in line with what he would actually be doing.

Now, if I’m going to keep up these lessons I need to work on my negotiating skills too, so this is also a self-improvement game.

How do you teach a kid to negotiate? What resources are out there to teach yourself?

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Family Bed: How to Make It Stop

Parenting

A young girl kisses a <a href=baby on the cheek.” width=”300″ height=”199″ />
Image via Wikipedia

For years, my kids shared my bed.

When my oldest was a baby, I was working a graveyard shift, so my wife was alone with the baby at night.    It was easy to keep a couple of bottles in a cooler by the bed and not have to get out of bed to take care of him when he woke up once an hour to drink a full bottle.

Then he got older.  And bigger.  And bigger.

We tried to move him to his own bed a few times, but it never worked well.    He’d scream if we put him in a crib, so we got him a bed at 9 months old.  That just meant he was free to join us whenever he woke up.  Brat.

We finally got him to voluntarily move to his own bed after his sister was born.    Shortly after she was born, I woke up to see him using her as a pillow.   To paint the proper picture, this kid is 5’9″ and wears size 12 shoes.  At 11.  When I woke him up to tell him what he was doing, he decided to sleep in his own bed.

Method #1 to get your kids in their own bed:  Have kid 1 try to crush kid 2 and feel bad about it.

Method #1 isn’t a great solution.

Soon, baby #3 showed up and we had 2 monsters in bed with us again.    Once they started getting bigger, it became difficult for the 4 of us to sleep.   We tried to get them into their own beds.   Unfortunately, even as toddlers, my kids had a stubborn streak almost as big as my own.   Nothing worked.

Eventually, they got big enough that I was crowded right out of the bed.  At least we had a comfortable couch.

Sleeping on a couch gets old.

When the girls got old enough to reason with, we had a choice:  We either had to find a way to convince them they wanted to sleep in their own room, or we had to have a fourth brat for them to attempt to crush at night.

We went with bribery.  Outright, blatant bribery.

We put a chart on the wall with each of their names and 7 boxes.  Every night they slept in their own beds, they got to check a box.   When all of the boxes were checked, they got $5 and a trip to the toy store.

It took 10 days to empty our bed and it’s been peaceful sleeping since.  That’s $5 well-spent.

Have you done a family bed?  How did it work?  How long did it last?

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Identity Theft: What To Do When You’ve Been Victimized

Finance

<a href=Credit Card Theft” width=”240″ height=”189″ />
Image by Don Hankins via Flickr

Have you ever been surprised by having a credit application denied?  Or been told that you’re paying too much for your car insurance because you have bad credit?

There are 15 million victims of identity each year with an estimated loss of $50 billion.   That’s a lot of cake.    If you’re credit card gets stolen, you’re only liable for up to $50 of the theft, but what if your checking account is cracked or someone is opening accounts in your name?   What is the indirect cost coming form higher interest rates?

Identity theft happens.  It could happen to you.

What should you do if you become a victim of identity theft?

  1. File a police report.   You’ve been victimized, make sure you have some documentation of that.
  2. Contact any credit card company that has possibly been affected.   If you lost your wallet, call them all.    If somebody has opening cards in your name, call all of those.
  3. Call the credit bureaus* and have a fraud alert put on your credit report.   This will force any new creditor to take extra steps to verify your identity before opening a new account.  Ideally, your identity thief won’t be able to make the grade.   If that isn’t enough, look into an identity freeze.   That will stop a lender from even seeing your credit report without your explicit permission.
  4. Close your bank accounts  Depending on how severe the theft, you may need all new accounts at every level.   If the thief has a box of your checks, or even your account and routing numbers, you need to close the accounts to protect your money.
  5. Report the theft to the FTC at 877.438.4338.   You’ll get additional documentation of the theft, including an ID Theft Affidavit that can make it easier to clean up the mess.
  6. Hire a witchdoctor to curse the soul of your attacker.   No, he probably won’t actually turn into a warty toad, but what if?   Maybe the universe will wield the Magic Karma Hammer and beat him into a little greasy stain in the street.
The important thing to remember is to hurry.  The longer you wait, the more damage will be done and the harder it will be to straighten out.  As soon as you find out about the theft, start fixing it.
Have you had your identity stolen?  How did you deal with it?
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The Happy Butt

Life

Do you find the cloud in every silver lining?   Is the glass not only half empty, but evaporating?  Do you start every day thinking

Smiley head happy
Smiley head happy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

about how the effects of entropy on the universe make everything you do ultimately pointless?

You may be a pessimist.

Pessimism gets a bad rap.    Without pessimists, we wouldn’t have insurance plans, missile defense systems, or Eeyore, and what would the world be without those things?

The thing you have to ask yourself is “Does the negativity make you happy?”

The next thing you have to ask yourself is whether or not you were lying with your previous answer.

If you have a negative outlook on everything, I have good news for you:  it’s possible to defeat it.   No matter how long you’ve been looking at the world through coffin-colored glasses, no matter how ingrained your negative slant is, it’s possible to change it.

You have to want to change it, because, as the saying goes, old habits die hard.   Yippee kai yay.

You need a happy butt.

Little known fact: language shapes the way you think.   If your language has no words for a concept, you will have a difficult time thinking about that concept, or even understanding it.    Statistically, Asians are better at math than their western-world counterparts.  Why?   It’s not genetic.    When a family moves to the US, the edge is lost within 2 generations.    It’s not the amount of school they get.    Even in backwaters with limited school access demonstrate the same abilities.

It’s the language.   Euro-based languages are horrible.   They are a clumsy mish-mash of crap from around the world, and the numbering system makes no sense.   11, 12, 13, huh?   Spoken, that’s not a progression, it’s something we have to learn by rote.   Why is 13 pronounce “thirteen”, with the ones place first, but 23 is pronounced with the tens place first, the way it is written?   Where did the word “twenty” even come from?  It’s obviously a horrible bastardization of “two” and “ten”, but is it self-evident?   Does the progression through the decades follow some kind of rule?   Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty.  Nope.

The Asian languages (most of them) differ.   The numeric progression is spoken in a rules-based progression that makes sense.   23 is literally “two tens three”, making learning math less about rote memorization and more about masters some simple rules.

In the western world, we are handicapped by our language, at least when it comes to math.

The rest of our thoughts are formed by language, too.   Learn a language with different roots than the one your were born with and see how your perceptions change.

One of the signs of negative thinking is qualifying everything you say negatively.   For example, one person might say “It’s a beautiful day, today” while Mr. Negativebritches would say “It’s a beautiful day, but it’s probably going to rain.”   That’s a sad butt, err, but.   Every time you qualify a sentence with a sad butt, you are reinforcing your negative view of the world.

The solution?  Drop your drawers and paint on a smiley face.   You need a happy but(t).    You can rephrase the sentence into a happy thought without changing the sentiment or meaning  in any way.   Try this:  “It’s probably going to rain, but it’s a beautiful day, now.”   That’s a happy butt, and it reinforces the positive in your mind.

It sounds stupid, but it works.   Your language shapes your life.   Put a positive spin on what you say, and you will eventually start to think about life in a positive way.

Give it a shot.  For the next week, every time you say something negative, qualify it with a happy butt.   At the end of the week, come back here and tell me how it’s working and if you can sense a change in your mindset.

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