Posts Tagged ‘ saving money ’

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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Saving and Investing Tips for the Self-Employed

By Jessica Wagner

Saving, whether it’s for retirement purposes or otherwise, is tough enough without having that added difficulty of being self-employed. Many people have found the benefits of being their own boss and making their own hours but putting money away isn’t as easy when you don’t have a company with good retirement plans.

It’s important to know that you can do this even if you are self-employed. Small business owners and online entrepreneurs alike have found ways to build up their retirement and savings funds. There are many ways to do this and there isn’t just one savings plan that you can invest in and IRAs have long been one of the most popular avenues for retirement savings.

Tax deferred retirement plans

An IRA is an account held by a custodial institution such as a bank or brokerage firm. Generally, IRA’s are designed for middle-income investors. There are no income restrictions for most middle class taxpayers and an IRA is available to everyone.
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Charting Your Own Course with a Side Business

By Kevin M

Even in the face of an apparent economic recovery, many millions of people are stagnating in their jobs, unable to get a promotion or to move to a more promising position with a competing company. Many more are still unemployed or even under-employed. That may be the reality of our time, but should we sit still and wait for better times? Is that even a strategy?

Cutting living expenses is one way to deal with a comatose employment situation, but I’ve argued in the past that frugality has its limits. When all is said and done, you can only cut your expenses so much before finding new income sources becomes an absolute necessity.

If you aren’t content to continue to just muddle through, and want to make things happen in your life, increasing the number of income streams will be the most constructive way forward. And starting a side business is the single best way to do this.

How can starting a side business build a better future?
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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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How Are You faring in the “Jobless Recovery”?

By Kevin M

Jobless recovery–that’s an obvious oxymoron if ever there was one. I first heard the term coming out of the last recession in the early 2000s. Then as now, the economy was somehow miraculously growing without worker participation. Now the term is starting to be heard in connection with the latest “recovery”, and it seems just as meaningless now as it did back then.

Do you ever get the feeling that most of what economists mean when they talk about “the economy” is a semi-worthless pile of possibly bogus statistics?

Mark Twain was credited with saying, “there three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies–and statistics”.

To that I say a big, fat AMEN!

If you have a sense that economy isn’t quite recovering, you’ve got a lot of company—I mean apart from just me. A recent article from CNNMoney (posted on Yahoo!Finance), titled How the middle class became the underclass confirms our worst suspicions.

“Incomes for 90% of Americans have been stuck in neutral, and it’s not just because of the Great Recession. Middle-class incomes have been stagnant for at least a generation, while the wealthiest tier has surged ahead at lighting speed… While globalization has lifted millions out of poverty in developing nations, it hasn’t exactly been a win for middle class workers in the U.S.”

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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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Save Money Buying Musical Instruments

By Kevin M

If you have teenagers who play musical instruments or if you’re into instruments yourself, your wallet will love a company called Musician’s Friend.

My son got into playing drums when he was ten years old, not just through the school music program, but as a personal hobby and passion. If your kids are musical types, you know only too well the heavy costs involved in sustaining their hobby: musical instruments aren’t cheap!

Not only are the instruments themselves pricey, but the cost of accessories and replacement parts can rate a line item in your budget by themselves.

In the beginning, we followed the herds into the local music shops and paid top dollar for instruments for our kids. As one example, our daughters’ violin cost $1100; that was four years ago, and now she’s ready to give it up! We originally rented the violin just in case she did decide to quit, but after a couple of years when it looked like she’d keep at it, we converted the lease to a purchase.

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Over 50 – No Pension, No 401K – What Now?

By Kevin M

Let’s be honest, most retirement posts in the personal finance blogging world are aimed squarely at people in their 20s and 30s. Those over 50 are presumed to not exist. It’s almost ironic, isn’t it, talking about retirement to people who are so far away from retirement that it’s very nearly irrelevant while ignoring those for whom it’s right around the corner?

Maybe it’s that the vast majority of people on the web are under 35, or maybe it’s just easier making multi-decade projections to a group of people so far from retirement that they’ll never remember any bad advice they’d gotten early in life. And in a different direction, all things are possible when your time horizon is 30, 40 or 50 years. Those magical retirement projections that’ll turn us all into millionaires just wouldn’t work without all those decades!

But what if you don’t have decades to accumulate a retirement fortune? What if you’re over 50 and retirement is just a few years away? If you don’t have at least a healthy six figure portfolio, how do you prepare for retirement now that the luxury of time is no longer available to work in your favor?

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Build Savings or Payoff Debt – Which Comes First?

Newsflash: You can’t get out of debt until you stop being broke!

By Kevin M

Some argue that if you’re in debt the priority needs to be to payoff your debts before attempting to build a savings account. Many call for the establishment of a small emergency fund—typically $1000—to handle contingencies, and then to pour all extra funds into the pay down and eventual payoff of debt. Only when your debts are paid will you have the cash flow to truly build substantial savings.

While there is some merit to that advice, I believe it fails to address the basic reason a person might get into debt in the first place: a lack of savings, forcing the use of credit as a savings substitute.

Until that cycle is broken, it’s doubtful you’ll ever payoff your debts or accumulate substantial savings. Life has a way of throwing contingency after contingency at us and unless we’re fully prepared to deal with that reality, getting out of debt is little more than a fantasy.

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