Tag: money

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Change It Up

I thought it was a pretty good April Fools joke a few days ago when Justin told me that he had bought a new guitar, and showed it to me. I just about freaked out because money has been way too tight to even think about buying a new guitar! He let me rant and rave for a few minutes before showing me that it wasn’t a new guitar – it was his old one, with a new pick guard on it! I was embarrassed, but relieved, and that is the truth!

Have you ever looked at the price of guitars? And seen how many different types there are? Sometimes Justin and I go to the local guitar stores and look at what they have. He and I have about the same taste in color and style. But there is so much more to it than just looking good. It has to sounds good, and you have to know what sound suits your style of playing before you can pick out a new guitar.

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Storing vinyl records

Guest post by Dianne Trestle

When I split up with my first husband, I let him keep all of my vinyl records. I did that because I had agreed to let him keep the house, and I was having a very hard time getting people to help me move out of the house. I had hundreds of albums – a lot of money was spent on them! Now I have mixed emotions about having let him keep them, and I wonder if he listens to them at all, or if they have all been given away, destroyed, or just taking up space in some vinyl record storage case somewhere. And I know that if I had them now, they would probably just be taking up space in my basement, gathering dust, not being used at all.

I think the reason that I feel so melancholy about this is that those albums represented many years of my youth, and leaving them behind was a lot like leaving my youth behind. And I really don’t like that feeling very much at all!

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Shop Smart

Made in USA (free clip art)
Made in USA (free clip art)
Whenever making a purchase of an item that I plan to use for a long time, I try to perform what my engineering son likes to call “due diligence.” By that, I mean I will spend quite a bit of time finding out as much as I can about the product. I want to “shop smart” so as to not waste my money on a product that will not perform the way I want it to perform. I will try to find, and Read Full Review material on the product, do some comparison shopping online for it, and even check and see if there have been any complaints or recalls on the item.

In this day and age, I also try to buy American-made products, to support our economy. If we don’t help keep our country working, our taxes will end up going up to support the unemployed! And between you and me, I’d rather not join the ranks of the unemployed, so I always try to keep that in mind as well!

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Technology Changing So Quickly

Thinking back to when I was a young child, my parents had analog telephones scattered throughout the house. They started with one incoming telephone line, then when my sisters and I were teenagers and hogging the phone talking to all our friends, they got a second incoming line for us girls. Then we started getting online which tied up the phone line and no one could call us without getting a busy signal. So they got a third phone line – primarily for internet but also a backup line for us girls. After all, three teenage girls can do a whole lot of talking on the phone, between their girlfriends AND their boyfriends!

But now, we’ve grown and moved out, we all have cell phones and we get online using cable instead of the telephone line. So my parents decided to give up the home phone line and save $50 a month. I don’t blame them!

Another big technology change has been instant messaging and texting. What a great convenience that is! Especially when you just need to push a message to someone and not really talk to them or engage in a 2-way communication. I use texting all the time with my sisters and my parents, and I love the way they can get in touch with me any time, even if I am on the phone and on the internet, all through my cell phone.

I just love how technology is changing so quickly. Now if they will just start reducing the monthly charges. I don’t see how they can justify these high prices for phone service any longer – they are not spending money on expensive phone lines and cables – it’s all digital.

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Got a wedding invitation

Yesterday I received an invitation to attend my best friend’s daughter’s wedding in wilmington that is being held in October. I can’t decide whether to attend or not. Somehow I get the feeling that this invitation is really a “don’t come, but please send money as a gift” request. Or maybe it was mailed to me simply as a courtesy to her mother, knowing that we are such good friends. Either way, I’m not sure that my budget will allow for me to take the time to travel there. I think I need to talk to my friend and see what it is that she really wants. I don’t want to alienate my friend, you know what I mean?

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Saving and Spending

So I decided that I wanted to take the family on a nice vacation this year but, realized I needed to take a look at our finances first. I’ve always had an idea of how much we spend on everything, but never really had a budget that was written down. In order to get a realistic idea of what we’re saving and spending, I thought maybe I should track everything.

I looked up free budget software online to get started. After all, I’m trying to save and I don’t want to shill out more money in all of this. At first I thought I would be overwhelmed. I watched a few video demos on how easy the software programs are to use. Some programs wanted a ton of information and others looked just like a spread sheet. I already have spread sheet software… that’s not what I was looking for.

I looked at reviews for best budgeting sites to get opinions of what other people thought worked and didn’t for them. I’ve narrowed it down to three different sites. I think just to get a good idea of what each site can do for me I’ll use them each for the next two months. At the end of the two months I should be able to tell which software will work best for me in the long run.

I can’t wait to see where our money is actually going. I wonder if I’ll find that it hasn’t been going where I thought it had been this whole time. No matter where it’s going I want to save so that we can afford a nice vacation. Budgeting here we come!

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How I Plan to Save Money This Year

This year I really need to work on saving some money.   I started using a new website to track all of my spending.  It shows me exactly where all of our money is going.  I was a little shocked to see how much money we really spend going out to eat or on fast food.  I’m setting a budget for everything.  I know we can’t cut everything off cold turkey so I’m going to have us do a step down method for our spending habits.

Right now we spend about $500 a month of groceries.  I would like to get that down closer to $300 or less but I know we need to work towards that.  To start I’m setting  a budget of $400 a month or roughly $100 a week on groceries.  I think we can manage to cut back by $25 a week to start with easily, especially if I really work to use up what we have in our pantry.  The following month I’ll move it to $75 a week.  If we do really well with that I might even be able to move it down a little further but I’m not going to go crazy.

We’re taking a closer look at television and cable services along with movie rentals.  We purchased a few pay per view movies on demand this month.  This is really silly considering we pay almost $20 a month for Netflix, we just need to send back our current DVD  to get the next one on our list.  My husband and I are thinking about turning off our cable television because just about everything we watch is available online and we do have Netflix.  We pay about $100 a month for cable so that’s more money we could save every month.

I know groceries and entertainment aren’t the only way we can save but at least it’s a start.  I was able to easily identify these ways to save and will do some digging into other ways to save that I might not be soo obvious to me.

 

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Honesty is the Best Policy

Today I went out to run a few errands. I stopped off at the bank to deposit a few checks. I always check the amount of a check before I put it in the ATM. For some crazy reason when the check was scanned, the machine read it as being worth ten more dollars than what I thought I was depositing.

I thought it was really strange, so I pressed the button for the machine to return the check. I glanced at the amount again – I was right about the amount and the machine was wrong – and resubmitted it. This time it read the check correctly.  

I’ve always said that honesty is the best policy. I’d hate to steal ten dollars from someone do I quickly fixed the situation.