This is a conversation between me and my future self, if my financial path wouldn’t have positively forked 2 years ago. The transcript is available here.
What would your future self have to say to you?
Brown Bagging Your Way to Savings
Today’s post is written by Mike Collins of http://savingmoneytoday.net as part of the Yakezie Blog Swap in which bloggers were asked to share their best day to day money saving tip.
Do you buy lunch at work every day? Have you ever actually sat down and added up how much money you’re spending?
I did once…and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw how much I was spending!
Back in the day I used to buy lunch at the office almost every single day. It certainly didn’t seem like I was spending much. A chef salad here, a cheese steak and fries there. But every day I was spending about 7 dollars and change. That’s $35 a week, which adds up to a whopping $1820 over the course of a year!
I started thinking about all the things I could do with that extra $1820, like paying off some of our debt, increasing my 401k contributions(ed: but staying with your 401k contribution limits, of course!), picking out a new big-screen tv, or enjoying an extended family vacation at Walley World.
I immediately starting bringing my lunch to work 4 days a week (I do treat myself once a week) and I’ve been saving money ever since.
Now I know what you’re thinking. It costs money to bring lunch from home too right?
Yes, of course it does…but nowhere near as much as eating out every day. Let’s do some basic math to prove the point. Say you swing by the grocery store to buy some ham and cheese so you can make sandwiches for the week. You pick up a half pound of ham for $3 and a half pound of cheese for $2. A loaf of bread on sale runs you another $2. That means you just spent $7 for a week’s worth of lunches. Even if you only bring lunch 4 days a week you’ve still saved yourself $21. That’s over $1000 a year!
And here’s a tip to save even more: If you have extra food from dinner, just bring the leftovers for lunch the next day. We always try to make just a little bit extra so I can have free lunch the next day.
So the next time you’re sitting around complaining that you don’t have enough money for so and so, think about how much money you are spending every day on lunch, or coffee, or cigarettes, etc. You might just find that you have plenty of money after all if you just shift your priorities a bit.
Huh?
Am I the only one who just noticed that it’s Wednesday? The holiday week with the free day is completely screwing me up.
Just to make this a relevant post:
Spend less!
Save more!
Invest!
Wee!
Net Worth, April 2016
Last year wasn’t a good year for my net worth. It came with a $7000 drop.
Q1 2016, however, was a great quarter.
In December, we had $13,271 in credit card debt. At the time I took this screenshot, it was down to $3836.43. As of this moment, it’s down to $2640.91. If things go as expected this week, I should wake up on Friday to a paid-off credit card. I had to raid some of our savings accounts to make it happen, but it’s happening. Some of it was a tax refund, some of it was the fact that my mortgage payment went away in December.
That’s seven years of hard work, almost to the day. Seven years ago, I was researching bankruptcy, and stumbled across Dave Ramsey. Seven years ago, we were drowning in debt.
Next week, we’re free. No more debt, hanging over our heads. We’re free to take vacations. We’re free to finally save for college, when my son is 16, and stand a chance of being able to pay for it for him. We’re free to do…whatever we want to do. Our monthly nut after the debt is paid–only in fall/winter/spring when my wife is working–is roughly 1/3 of our take-home pay.
That’s how hard we’ve cut to make sure we can pay our bills and make debt die. We do have some things that would be considered extravagant. We’re not savages. But my car is 10 years old. My wife’s is 7. My motorcycles are 35 and 30; one of them was purchased before we cared about our debt.
Back to the net worth….
The biggest change came from our property values, which sucks. That was $36,000 of the difference, which comes with the painful tax bump to go with it. A large chunk of the savings increase was the money we set aside every month to cover the property tax bill, and that will go away next month.
Still, $641,000 dollars is a long way from nothing. I’m pretty happy.
The Secret to Fearless Change
Put one foot in front of the other
And soon you’ll be walking cross the floor
Put one foot in front of the other
And soon you’ll be walking out the door
You never will get where you’re going
If you never get up on your feet
Come on, there’s a good tail wind blowing
A fast walking man is hard to beat
Put one foot in front of the other
And soon you’ll be walking cross the floor
Put one foot in front of the other
And soon you’ll be walking out the door
If you want to change your direction
If your time of life is at hand
Well don’t be the rule be the exception
A good way to start is to stand
Put one foot in front of the other
And soon you’ll be walking cross the floor
Put one foot in front of the other
And soon you’ll be walking out the door
If I want to change the reflection
I see in the mirror each morn
You mean that it’s just my election
To vote for a chance to be reborn
Failed Side Hustle: Scrapping
Last week, the washing machine in our rental house died. It was older than I am, so this wasn’t really a surprise. It was one of just two appliances we didn’t replace before we moved the renters in.
My wife–bargain shopper that she is–found a replacement on Craigslist. We got it in, then left the dead washing machine next to the replacement, as a warning to any other appliance that thinks it can shirk its assigned work.
This morning, we went over to pull the corpse of our washing machine out of the basement.
Now, I am an out-of-shape desk jockey, my wife is considerably weaker than I am, and a 40 year old washing machine weighs more than 200 pounds.
In the basement.
I’m Superman. Although at one point, I did trade 10 years of the useful life of my right knee in exchange for not letting that thing tumble down the stairs on top of me.
What do you do with a dead washing machine?We could have the garbage company pick it up for $25. Or we could leave it on the curb and wait for some stinking scrapper to take it.
Or…we could join the dark side and scrap it ourselves.
For the uninitiated, scrappers are the people who drive around looking for fence-posts to steal out of other people’s yards, or cut the catalytic converters out of cars parked at park-and-ride bus stops, or steal all of the copper pipes out of your house while your on vacation. Sometimes, they get scrap metal from legitimate sources, I’ve heard.
We decided to go the legitimate route and take the washing machine to the scrap metal dealer in the next town over.
It was pretty easy. We pulled in with the washer in the trailer. A guy on a forklift pulled up and took it, then handed us a receipt to bring to the cashier. She paid us in cash, and we were on our way.
$7.50 richer.
200 pounds of steel, and we made less than $10.
There are people who pay their bills by recycling scrap metal, but I have no idea how. Driving around looking for things to scrap would seem to burn more gas than you’d make turning it in.
Some people scour Craigslist looking for metal things in the free section.
Some people have an arrangement with mechanics to remove their garbage car parts.
Some people are only looking to supplement their government handout checks enough to pay for cigarettes.
Us? We’re going to leave scrapping to the scavengers.
