Knowing your weaknesses — what makes you pull out your wallet — is one key to spending less. By necessity, I’ve deactivated many of my “fun” spending triggers: The library has replaced book stores. A $10 monthly subscription to E-music has replaced CDs. Good old Walgreens has replaced the spendy gift store for greeting cards [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Spending'
Tips for Deactivating Your Spending Triggers
November 18th, 2008 1 Comment
Tags: anxiety · stock-pile syndrome · time savings
Thomas Stanley on Creating Your Own Wealth
October 22nd, 2008 2 Comments
So, Mr. Stanely, for the money: How can I get richer? Subscribe to the cheap date, hurry up and wait philosophy, Stanley says. That is, spend less, save more, and repeat. To hear him tell it, millionaires next door are no rocket scientists. They didn’t get rich quickly, and neither will most of us. (Unless [...]
Tags: cheap date · hurry up and wait · investing · spending: duh factor
Getting to 60% Part 2: More Details
October 10th, 2008 1 Comment
Husband here, chiming in with a more detailed picture of our progress toward 60%. We used “creative accounting” to get down to 79% from something crazy like 89%. Nothing fancy, just moving newspaper subscriptions and Netflix into the fun category, and moving the car payment and home equity loan into the debt/savings category. Grandma (my [...]
Tags: Cash Husband post
Getting to 60 Percent: Progress So Far
October 10th, 2008 No Comments
Here’s our progress to date on getting our fixed household expenses to equal no more than 60 percent of our budget. Right now our committed monthly expenses — utilities, mortgage, taxes, gas etc. — stand at 73 percent. (I think this might be an accounting adjustment from the previously reported 79 percent. Cash Husband can [...]
Tags: cuts · new habits · pet peeve · progress to 60 percent
Cleaning Service Verdict: Compromise
October 9th, 2008 No Comments
The votes are in: We had 4 votes to cut the cleaning service, 3 votes to keep it, and 4 to compromise — to reduce the cleaning to once a month if possible. We decided to go with the compromise, since our cleaner said she’d be willing to do that. Savings: $55/month. Now we’ll see [...]
Tags: compromise · polls · votes
You Are What You Eat, Not Where You Buy It
October 3rd, 2008 1 Comment
For one hot minute many years ago, I dated someone completely wrong for me. To this day, thinking of him makes me irrationally angry. Not because we had that wake-up, break-up moment over Steely Dan versus Nirvana. (Who the hell are you? I mean, I thought I really knew you after two weeks. Steely Dan?!) [...]
Tags: beans · groceries · identity · lifestyle · Nirvana · rice · Steely Dan
It’s Not the Cash, It’s the Flow
September 8th, 2008 1 Comment
Author’s husband here, guest-posting. After broadcasting this blog’s existence to some friends and relatives, Sara received some concerned e-mails about our solvency. So listen up: I am the keeper of the books, and I say we are OK. To clarify: We are not broke. We are not avoiding calls from creditors. We are not staring [...]
Tags: Cash Flow · husband post
Why So Dumb: Second in a Series
September 5th, 2008 1 Comment
In addition to expenses going up and income going down, here’s another reason why sometimes we’re spending more than we earn. My husband and I took a money attitude quiz the other night that asked us to rate money’s importance to us on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being “the root of all [...]
Tags: money management · parasailing · scale of 1 to 10
Why So Dumb: First in a Series
September 4th, 2008 No Comments
A reader asked, not unkindly, why we’re spending more than we earn. The quickest answer is kids. Kids dramatically upped our obligatory expenses, while at the same time slashed my income. Many families, including us, can’t afford full-time day care, which for our oldest, a year and a half ago, was $800/month for three days [...]
Tags:
Time Value Vs. My Valuable Time
August 26th, 2008 1 Comment
For this spender, there is one real turn-on about saving, called the time value of money. This is the amount of time it takes for invested funds to double (triple, quadruple, etc.), based on the interest rate. The earlier you start, the bigger the payoff. But there’s another time value that is currently winning around [...]
Tags: behavioral economics · convenience · Ticketmaster · time value
