I haven’t posted in a while -been too busy staring at my 401k statement and figuring out ways to save money on holiday presents while still keeping some joy in this difficult economic season. Back in October I started planting the seed with the kids: it’s a bad economy, don’t expect a lot of gifts, it won’t be like last year and make sure when you make your holiday list you put a lot of thought into it - just list a couple of things that you really want more than anything else.
Oh sure! Well, they started off in earnest, scratching their heads, thinking about their wants and needs (do they really “need” anything???) and came up with about 4 things on their list. Ok, not a bad start. We can manage that down a bit. Read the rest of this entry »
Are you making any changes to your personal spending habits due to the economic crisis? Have your re-evalutated your family budget to determine where to cut back spending? How much have you told your kids about your money situation? As a full time career mom I pay for convenience. I don’t have the time to scour the sales, I pay extra for pre or partially made dinners and we order take out probably more than most but….
Today is still a good time to sit back and assess wants and needs and understand that even little changes go a long way. Here are 6 things I have done in the past couple of weeks.
Credit card balances. Thankfully, I don’t have much on the cards but there is still no reason to pay interest rates just so I can keep some extra money in my pocket…which I will inevitably spend any way. So, I scraped together what I could and just paid off my balance. Do I have less in my pocket? Yes…but that’s a good thing…now to not bring out the plastic again!
Water- wow, does my family go through water bottles. It started to get out of control when we would go through 5 bottles at dinner…that’s just wasteful and bad for the environment. Our tap water tastes very good so this is just pure laziness on our part. Now, each night the kids fills up a pitcher of water and leave it in the refrigerator. Bottles are strictly for school lunches…big savings there at $6.99 for a 24 pack of Poland Spring and by drinking tap water we’re actually getting some flouride.
Gasoline - It’s hard to cut down on gas when most of my driving is for my daily commute, but little things help. For instance, I no longer idle when picking up my kids from their destination, I also no longer heat up the car before I get into it - yes I freeze for a few minutes but come on, we can all suck it up a bit, right?
Food - Prices seem to have no limits and even though gas prices have decreased recently, food prices have not followed that trend. My food bills are frightening but now I’m even more focused on the sales. When something goes on sale, like pasta I buy a dozen boxes which will generally carry me a few weeks until it goes on sale again. At the supermarket sale items generally cycle every 3 weeks, so buy something you know you will use in a 3 week supply and by the time you run out it should be back on sale again.
Educating the Kids - Last night my 10 year old asked me the difference of credit and debit. I defined it simply. Credit is when the bank loans you the money and you need to pay it back with interest. So, basically your $50 Wii game comes with 10% interest so you actually pay $55 for it - $50 goes to pay for the game and $5 goes to the bank for the privilege of letting you borrow the money. And, if you take too many months to pay off the game, the bank keeps adding fees and you could actually end up paying more than $50 in fees alone…where all those fees could have gone to save up for another game! My explanation for debit was it’s the same as a checking account. You can only spend money if you have it in the bank so if there’s no money in the account you can’t buy it…plain and simple..I prefer debit.
Holidays- See number 5 above. If you drill it into your kids’ heads enough believe it or not they do get it. My kids just started their holiday lists. When I warned them to go easy they moaned, “we know - the economy”. Perhaps they’re tired of hearing it but they each gave me a very short list and said they don’t expect much this year. I would have preferred they said they don’t expect anything…but I’ll take what I can get.
I’m looking for more money saving tips during this economic crisis. What are you doing to cut spending from your family budget? And, how are you communicating your spending cuts to your kids?
I’m finding myself increasingly obsessed with watching CNN and reading post after post on financial and credit matters. In fact as I write this post, I realize CNN has replaced my Ipod as back ground “music”. While I’m trying not to allow the Wall Street woes affect me too much, it’s nearly impossible. We have a few credit cards (thankfully we don’t have high balances), a mortgage and 3 kids pre-college age. So in my quest to ingest as much credible information as possible on the credit crisis today and the steps I should be taking, I discovered a really neat new website, CreditFYI.
My favorite thing about CreditFYI is they speak to you in laymen’s terms. The other thing that I love is it’s interactive. Just submit a question on any financial topic and one of their credit and ID theft experts will answer it. It’s a “one stop shop” for all of your credit questions, up to the minute financial news, mortgage calculators, car loan providers, how to guides and credit reports. They also provide you with some pretty cool tools such as estimating your credit score, because in this time of limited lending you really need to know your score and work on ways to improve it. You can also do some credit card comparison shopping (it’s a really good time to consolidate and lower your interest rates) but I think I’ll just stay away from that one for now!
There are many informative videosand podcasts and I particularly liked this article on reasons NOT to close out your unused credit cards. I didn’t know closing your credit cards could actually hurt your credit rating. With my spending temptation I’m on a mission to cut up my cards as soon as I have zero balances! Guess I’ll be hiding them in a drawer moving forward.
And there’s one other benefit of CreditFYI that no one else offers - a free identity theft monitoring service that doesn’t require you to give out your personal data. ID theft is growing every day and with today’s economy it’s an even greater concern.
Check out this video announcing the new site - what do you think?
