Tag: savings

Why Are You Not Rich?

dollarsAre you financially free or even rich? If not, what’s stopping you?

Well, perhaps the main reason is that you may be living like you are rich already, and so hopefully, reading this blog will improve your financial savvy. The following is a list of major traps that can confine you to many years as a financial slave in the rat race, so avoid or escape these as soon as you can: Continue Reading

Free Stuff – Free Fruit

Fruit1I stumbled across this site in my search for free stuff (before you acquire stuff you should always ask if you need it, however free food is pretty easy to convince yourself about!) Continue Reading

Don’t Set Your Cash On Fire

burnmoneykingControlling or at least limiting your vices can not only help you live a much longer and healthier life, it will likely make you much, much richer. (I don’t mean to preach, and I strongly believe in personal liberty). Perhaps the one to really try to avoid is smoking, or if you do smoke, I wish you best of luck if you decide to quit. Yes, tobacco is one of the most addictive substances you will come across in everyday life, and so quitting can be incredibly hard to do. In smoking your are literally burning money away Continue Reading

Buy Used

paper-bagPerhaps it is best to try and restrain your shopping urges, focusing more on needs than wants. However, if you need something try your best to get it used. This could be from a car to electronics or furniture. For example, many friends are probably trying to upgrade their electronics, which tend to have very short life cycles and so you can get a relatively new printer, computer or phone extremely cheap. My most recent item was a relatively new printer, which was given for free 🙂

One of my favorite places to shop for good deals is Continue Reading

Savings = greater happiness

big-smileDid you read the recent interesting Ally study results saying that it isn’t necessarily the salary that you can earn but rather your savings that can really affect your levels of happiness?

If you would like to read in a little more depth I found a nice discussion on the topic here.

OK, so overall such a survey didn’t appeal to my rigorous scientific standards. However,  the gist of it is that Continue Reading

Minted

minted-1I have been using mint.com for just over a year and have found it a very useful way to track my finances.It allows you to easily keep track of any accounts such as credit cards, bank balances and loans. This is in addition to including investments and property.  Tracking your spending habits from short to long term can be completed with just a click of a mouse Continue Reading

Brown Bag It

Lunch1

One way is to bring lunch to work, for starters it can certainly be much tastier than the offerings you can get from many a canteen or food court. Moreover, you can keep to any organic, vegetarian and/or minus food allergen type of diet of your choosing much easier.

At $10 a lunch, for 5 days a week for 1 year is $2400, assuming 4 weeks vacation. Clearly $24,000 over ten years is nothing to be sniffed at Continue Reading

Ramp Up Those Savings!

brownpiggybankWhat would you do if you won the lottery right now and became financially free? Would you work less, travel more, move to another part of the country or an entirely different country? Maybe engage in charity work or educational activities? Become become an excellent suffer (yes, I live in SoCal) or just lounge at the beach?

Assertively pursuing your financial independence allows you to achieve these types of life goals, rather than give them up, and hopefully get to them much more rapidly! So how can you achieve this? Well clearly it is earning more and/or spending less, and maybe somewhat surprisingly, it’s the spending less that really acts as the turbo charge in this equation. Continue Reading

Why Frugality?

dollarOK, so the question of why frugality could easily turn into a very long winded and potentially quite boring essay, which I will try my best not to do!

To keep it relatively short, I see three major reasons for embracing frugality, where each of these are clearly intertwined. The first is financial independence. At a time when many people are worried about how they will get by in retirement, a very sad state of affairs, would you instead like to still be working, but knowing that you are already financially free? Continue Reading

Skip the Car, Ride the Bike

Mountain-bikeIt is quite likely that one of your major expenses is for driving to and from work, thus you can make huge inroads, excuse the pun, to reduce expenses and maximizing your savings here. Take a look at your car loan, your insurance costs, and the (ever increasing) price of gas. These can add up to many hundreds of dollars a month, and that is even excluding any maintenance and potentially costly repairs when your car it’s out of warranty.

What can you do instead? Continue Reading