Posts Tagged ‘ expense reduction ’

Saving Money on Those Dreaded Utility Bills

Guest Post

Are you paying too much for your utilities? Perhaps the cost has been steadily climbing for some time, at first only slightly noticeable, but now making up quite a chunk of your monthly payments. There are some simple modifications you can make to reduce these costs and help the planet at the same time; it just takes a bit of careful planning.

Change your supplier: Search online to compare electricity prices and take note of companies from which may be able to get a better deal. In light of recent increases in gas and electricity prices, it’s important not to be complacent about your supplier and to check that you’re getting the best deal available – even if you’ve been with the same company for a long time.
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Frugal Entrepreneurs – Making Money as a Consultant

By Clair Schwan

Okay folks, this is the home stretch for this four-part series on starting a consulting company on a shoestring budget. We’ve looked at startup considerations and how to handle them, expenses associated with running the business, and the many and varied hassles that really are more imaginary than real. In this last portion of the series, let’s look at income – the fun part. If you’ve done your planning well, and are mindful to minimize expenses, you ought to be able to make a decent return on investment.

Let’s take a look at what one might create for themselves, but let’s also be cautious and realistic.

Waiting for Income

If there’s one thing a frugal person is good at, it’s handling income and building wealth. Before we start rolling around and giggling amidst our big pile of cash, there are some realities that need to be faced.
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Frugal Entrepreneurs – Apparent Problems with Running a Consulting Business

By Clair Schwan

Continuing with this four part series for frugal entrepreneurs, we’ve already looked at some startup considerations for those who might desire to create their own consulting company. We’ve also examined the issue of expenses. Let’s now look at the general “hassle factor” of starting your own business in the world of consulting. More often than not, this area serves as a ready-made source of excuses for those who are looking for justifications for not starting an enterprise of their own.

The List of Problems

It amazes me each time I hear that someone doesn’t want to start their own enterprise because they don’t want the hassle associated with getting themselves incorporated, processing time cards, and taking out taxes each paycheck. Many also don’t like handling invoices, dealing with insurance issues, negotiating contracts, and wrestling with local officials about business licenses and other incidentals associated with starting an enterprise. To some, it’s all very mysterious and daunting. Well, it’s not.

If you peek behind the curtain, you won’t see the Wizard manipulating levers, pushing buttons or adjusting dials. What you will see is a bunch of clerks pushing papers. I can do that. Can’t you?
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Frugal Entrepreneurs – Expenses Associated with Consulting

By Clair Schwan

Continuing with this four part series, we’ve already looked at some startup considerations for the frugal-minded who desire to create their own consulting business. Let’s now look at what might be the most intimidating part of the equation – expenses. The frugal among us are good stewards of money, so we need to understand how best to minimize expenses that will erode our revenue, and as a result, minimize the profit we see from our enterprise.

Direct and Indirect Expenses

Let’s assume you’re no longer tethered to the corporate mothership nor chained to your desk inside that little cubicle. We’re off and running. You know it’s going to be scary because it’s expensive to run your own company. After all, it takes a huge corporate financial commitment to finance the business you just left, doesn’t it? No. It doesn’t. In many respects, you were financing the corporation all along. Huh? Let me explain.

In much of the corporate world, you pay for your own travel expenses until your expense report is prepared, submitted, reviewed, approved, and then finally paid. In essence, you’re giving a loan to your company for the direct expenses associated with project work and overhead travel. The only thing that the company “floats” in terms of expenses is the cost of labor. In your new business, that would be you, and your time costs you nothing – it’s not an expense, it’s an investment.

Besides, most of your travel and living expenses, and many other expenses for a particular project will be what are known as direct expenses. In other words, they are part of the cost of a project and therefore should be chargeable to the customer. When you bid a job, these direct expenses should be itemized or estimated in your bid so the customer isn’t surprised when they show up on the invoice.
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Frugal Entrepreneurs – Start a Consulting Company

By Clair Schwan

As a follow-on to Kevin’s recent articles about how frugality comes into play as an entrepreneur, I’m offering a four-part series to suggest that the business of consulting is a good one to consider. Perhaps this line of work has a limited application for the general population, but it’s a legitimate career path if you’re in any field that one might consider to be “professional” in nature.

Being frugal means being a good steward of resources, particularly financial resources, but it also means that me make certain we’re getting good return on our investment of time and effort. The bottom line is we’re not wasteful. Although consulting can have its expenses, especially in the area of travel, it can be a business with low startup costs, low risk, and little wasted investment, something the frugal among us can appreciate.

In this first part of the series, let’s look at startup investment, and then I’ll use future articles to address expenses, potential problems, and what we might expect in terms of income.
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Self-Employment and Being Frugal– Is There a Connection?

By Kevin M

In previous posts I’ve suggested that frugality can be counter productive if it keeps you hyper-focused on saving money at the expense of increasing your income. There is a very definite “siege mentality” that is inherent in frugality, and if taken too far it can lead to a process in which you’re constantly working to lower your cost of living but never moving forward in any real way.

Today I’d like to look at the flip side of this thinking. In this post I’d like to examine an area where properly channeled frugality can create business opportunities.

Last week I had lunch with my friend Jay and we got to talking about the possibility of a connection between self-employment and being frugal. Jay himself was the inspiration for the question—and for this post. In addition to having a very successful business, one he quite literally built from the ground up, Jay has never held a job. His entire career has been a process of moving from one entrepreneurial venture to another and sometimes juggling two or more at the same time. Oh, and yes, Jay is also very frugal. I don’t mean cheapskate frugal, but more along the line that frugality is a part of who he is.

Have you ever known anyone like this? I’ve known several. Make that many! That’s what leads me to believe that there might be a connection between self-employment and frugality. I’m not sure whether frugality sets the stage for self-employment, or if being self-employed makes one frugal out of necessity. But I’m willing to guess that there are certain characteristics of the frugal that make it easier for them to be self-employed.

What are those characteristics?
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Are “Stealth” Expenses Killing Your Budget?

By Kevin M

Do you ever find yourself wondering—perhaps when you look at your paycheck or even your W2–I make a good living, why don’t I have more money saved up?

You might look at your income and your regular expenses and think that you should be saving more, but somehow it all seems to just disappear, almost as if there are termites gnawing away at both your wallet and your checking account. And perhaps there are a few termites infesting your finances. Call them “stealth expenses”—stealth because we usually underestimate them—if we even notice them–expenses because that’s just what they are.

We all have fixed expenses that we know only too well—house payments, car payments, student loan and credit card payments. There are also day-to-day survival expenses, like groceries and gas. We’re very familiar with all of these, but it’s those others, the variables, that slowly suck the life out of a budget. Those are the stealth expenses, the ones that aren’t always so easy to measure or even to prepare for.

”Where does all my money go?”

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How Frugality Becomes Counterproductive

By Kevin M

One year ago—just about to the day—I took my first stab at this topic in Why Earning More Money is More Important than Frugality. It was one of the most popular posts I’ve done in the two years that I’ve had this site up and running. It seemed for a while that I’d covered the topic as thoroughly as I could imagine, but the subject has hit the blogosphere with a vengeance in the past couple of weeks stimulating additional thinking.

That doesn’t mean I’ve changed my original thoughts on frugality—quite the opposite. I’m now even more convinced that I was heading in the right direction on the first go round. My comment on Len Penzo’s 100 Words On: Why Frugality Has Its Limits made me realize that the subject is even more important than I imagined and that it’s time to take it on with some fresh ideas.

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6 Tips to Negotiate Better and Save Money

By Alban


Chances are, you’ve recently found yourself lamenting the cost of things these days, and wondering how everything got to be so expensive. Well, rather than automatically hand over the sticker price for a purchase learn how you can negotiate a better deal and save yourself some money.

Haggling on price is not something which must be reserved for the market place on your next vacation, instead there are six tips you can use to help you pay what you believe is fair price, rather than the market up retail price. And don’t feel bad—if the seller really couldn’t afford to offer you the discount they wouldn’t, no one is going to run their business at a loss just to clear stock.

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Entertainment For Less

By Kevin M

There’s a “stealth expense” that chews through budgets and often leaves us with an empty bank account or even a little deeper in debt each month; its called entertainment expense, and at least part of the problem may lay in the fact that we’re usually reluctant to even view it as an “expense”.

Maybe this is the case because entertainment has a way of defining us—it’s often who we are, which has to be something more significant than just an ordinary expense, doesn’t it?

We can be meticulous about budgeting for housing, groceries, utilities and a host of other expenses, but entertainment is often—to borrow a political phrase—“off budget”.

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