Archive for February, 2010

How Much Money Can You Save by NOT Eating Out?

By Kevin M

Redeeming Riches has been running a truly good series, 10 Money-Saving Tips to Help You Stash $10,000!, which includes tips in each post on how to accumulate such a pile of cash, one expense at a time. The initial post in the series ran back on February 22nd, and took aim at cutting back on going out to eat as the first tip in the quest.

It’s almost standard fare on the personal finance blogging circuit to take aim at eating out as a rich source of savings, either to build up a bigger bank balance, or to reign in a runaway budget. But how much money can we save by cutting back on this expense?

Running the numbers on eating out

Let’s do some quick calculations to illustrate just how much money we’re talking about.

It costs about $25 for a family of four to buy a meal at a typical fast food restaurant. Averaging just two trips per week totals $50; continuing the pattern each week over the course of a full year comes to $2600.

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OutOfYourRut’s First Ever Friday Personal Finance Round Up

By Kevin M

This week opens voting on the Plutus Awards in the personal finance blogging world, which makes it the perfect time to launch OutOfYourRut’s first ever Friday Round Up. There are some great sites out there, with many brilliant posts, but here are the ones that really caught my interest this week…

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Save Money on Car Repairs with Car-Part.com

By Kevin M

Last week in New Car or Used Car – Which is the Better Deal? we talked about the many virtues and monetary advantages of buying a used car.

One of the common objections to buying a used car is the higher cost of repairs and maintenance. Well, we may have at least a partial solution to that problem.

Car-Part.com–“Used Auto Parts Market”—provides access to salvage dealers across the United States and Canada. Car-Part.com isn’t a salvage dealer itself, but a database of hundreds of dealers in nearly every state and province across North America. Per the site “about us” description, they’ve been operating since 1998, so they’ve had time to work out any system bugs.

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Good Retirement Planning Should Include a Low Cost/Debt Free Lifestyle

Low Cost/Debt Free lifestyle as part of retirement planning

Kevin M

Most articles on the subject of retirement planning focus completely on growing tax sheltered retirement savings plans like 401k’s and IRA’s. It’s an effort to build a large capital base as a way of creating a strong retirement income to enable us to maintain the lifestyle we’ve become accustomed to during the course of our lives.

Few pundits ever deal with the flip side of that effort—establishing a low cost/debt free lifestyle early in life. For a generation addicted to McMansions, late model cars, eating out, vacations at five star resorts and the like, no amount of money salted away may ever be enough.

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Are We Investing or Speculating in Growth Stocks?

By Kevin M

How is it, that when we put money into commodities or raw land, we’re “speculating”, but when we buy growth stocks or growth stock mutual funds, we’re “investing”? Where’s the dividing line? Is there a dividing line, or is it all marketing spin?

In recent decades, investing in the stock market has become common even and especially among the middle class. We’re routinely guided to “invest” money in stocks for future gain, and inundated with newspaper, magazine, TV and internet ads promising us double digit returns for placing money in this or that mutual fund—albeit with the caveat “past performance is no guarantee of future performance”. But exactly how do we process all of that? Do we process it at all?

In Investing Basics: What Is an Investment? Paul Williams at Provident Planning introduces the concept of familiarity blindness, a state in which “most of the basic questions don’t occur to (us) any more”. This is a valid observation of the human tendancy to avoid challenging assumptions once they’re fixed in our minds. Though we give lip service to the volatility of the stock market, do we also turn a blind eye to it’s clear speculative nature?

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New Car or Used Car – Which is the Better Deal?

By Kevin M

Question: is a car an asset or a liability?

That was a theory question in a sophomore level accounting course I took in college way back when. After some debate among the class, the professor confirmed what we all knew, that the technically correct classification is “asset”, but felt compelled to add, “Of course, in the real world, we all know that automobiles aren’t assets at all, they’re liabilities that cost money and continually drop in value from the moment you drive them off the dealer lot.”

Most of us know this to be true intellectually, but does that reality guide our decisions at buying time?

Cars represent a structural expense, that is, an expense that’s mostly a consequence of an underlying cost structure created at the time of purchase. Once we’ve made the initial purchase, we’re largely stuck with the expense level over a period of years. It’s in our best interest then to make the most intelligent decision at the time of purchase.

With that thought fresh in our minds, I believe used cars are the better choice for most people in most cases.

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10 Ways to Buy a Car Without Getting Ripped Off

By Kevin M

Buying a new car has never been one of my favorite things to do. It’s not that I don’t absolutely love the idea of having a new car, I sure do! But the flaming hoops you have to jump through at the dealership to buy a car takes some of the fun out of what should be one of the most exciting events of your life

Car dealerships offer an attractive and convenient package of services that make the car buying experience much easier:

  • They have the new cars we want (aaahhh, the new car smell!)
  • They’ll buy our old cars from us, sparing us the trouble of selling them ourselves
  • They provide financing, saving us from having to shop at banks

One stop shopping at its best—but with this ease and convenience comes a high price. Because dealers have all the car buying bases covered, they also have the upper hand at the bargaining table. The minute we walk into a car dealership, we’re at a built in disadvantage. We want a certain car, and the dealer has it—along with everything else necessary to help us get it. How could THEY ever lose?

They can’t, unless we take steps to remove the power from the dealer and stack the deck solidly in our favor.

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Positive Action in Your Life – Gonzo’s Great Gold Quest

By Dave Kelly

Ok, here’s the thing…

I like reaching goals.

I am an achievement junkie.

I am really into setting an objective, quantifying it, putting together a plan, and then going after it with everything that I have.

That is cool to me. It gives me energy and excitement. Provides purpose.

When I was in elementary school, I set a goal of being 6’3” tall. I am 6’2”. Not bad. Almost got there. Betcha didn’t know height is controlled by goal setting! Are you short? Raise the bar, set a higher goal!

Sometimes, though, it makes me do goofy things. Take for example, “Gonzo’s Great Gold Quest”. This was my attempt to achieve my goal of qualifying as a Gold Medallion member of Delta Airlines Sky Miles program.

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Is Voice Mail Killing the Economy?

The Economy is Choking on Cost Containment

By Kevin M

The other day, my wife called our prospective health insurance carrier, trying to get our plan initiated. She was greeted by voice mail and immediately placed on hold. Once she did get a live voice, she was placed on hold two more times, only to find that our paperwork was “still tied up” somewhere in oblivion. The first two representatives she spoke with were clueless about our case, the third promised to follow up and get back with us. We’re still waiting.

Here’s a curious point: until this paperwork issue is resolved not only do we have no coverage, but the insurance company has no revenue stream from us.

Stop and let that sink in. You’re a business owner or manager, and your company has problems. Costs are rising and need to be contained. Staffing, perhaps your biggest single expense, needs to be pared in order to improve the bottom line. Technology is brought in to eliminate payroll. Your customer is now “greeted” by voice mail instead of another human being, then routed through a telephone labyrinth of numeric multiple choices in the hope of finding the right person, the one who can help with their problem. Often, as in our situation above, that person is never found.

Question: what is that inconvenient arrangement doing to that other crucial component of your bottom line–your customers and the revenue they bring to your business?

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Blue Collar Jobs Can’t be Moved Offshore

By Kevin M

In Jobs and Careers That Aren’t Coming Back we listed and discussed 13 career fields that are in a state of decline and unlikely to recover. Today we’ll cover the very opposite: job fields that are here to stay and likely to expand.

Global off-shoring of jobs and advances in technology are squeezing many jobs and careers into gradual extinction, as computers and cheap overseas labor eat away at once common fields of employment. But not all career fields are affected.

People who can produce or fix things often have the greatest job security. The world is full of machines, all in need of service or repair sooner or later. Being one of the people who can keep them going is a chance to start to a side business or to full scale self-employment. Equally important, though we tend to think of most innovation occurring in laboratories, many technological discoveries happen somewhere out in the field, produced by people who can work with their hands.

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