Archive results for “January 2009f 2009”
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About a year ago, I shared seven sites where you can help others by clicking a button. I have another site to share. This one involves a little more than clicking a button since you need to leave a comment or sign up to the RSS feed. I think it’s a neat idea, so I thought I would share.
In full disclosure, the new owner of this blog (Jeffrey Strain) owns the site. He emailed me to share the site and didn’t pressure at all for me to blog about it here. I’m only blogging about it because it’s a neat idea. I’m already a subscriber 
From the About page:
In the later part of 2008 I was having a discussion with a good friend about people and their desire to do good. He had asked me a simple question:
“If you had a five figure amount of money and you wanted to do good, what would you do?”
I said that not only would I support a cause that I believed in, I would try to figure out a way to encourage others to do good as well knowing a lot of people doing good things — no matter how small — can add up to great changes. He handed me a check and said for me to use it how I wished to encourage the world to be a better place. This is the beginning of that journey…
Jeffrey shares ideas for no or low cost ways to make the world a better place. For each comment the site receives, 10 cents will be put towards funding a microloan at Kiva.org. If you sign up to the RSS feed, 25 cents will be added. So far, one microloan has been funded.
If interested, the site is called Free Microloan. If you have a moment to leave a comment you can help fund the next microloan.
Well, it’s been tougher this time around, but my body has been cleansed of caffeine. Much to my delight, I have been able to transition to drinking just water and milk remarkably well. I wish I could say that I am feeling great, but I can’t. I seem to have picked up a bug of some sorts and I haven’t been feeling well. Perhaps my body was so out of whack for a while so that left me susceptible to something.
My husband is also doing fine with no caffeine as well. He was fine after one day. When scientists talk about genes playing a factor in addiction, I think they have something there.
This whole thing will save us money, no doubt. I think one of the nicest things about it was having a talk with our son today. He’s observant and watches what we do. He brought up the fact that there is no longer any soft drinks in our house and I was able to explain how important water is. He was able to stump my knowledge of things quite a few times, but that’s quite alright. After our talk, he grabbed a water from the fridge and handed it to me. Then he grabbed one for himself. He said he wanted us to be healthy. I’ll drink water to that!
It’s great that all of us are on board with no caffeine. We’re also committed to living a healthier life overall. That’s another reason why our grocery price book is going to be such a great tool. It can easily be modified to include key nutritional information and become an aid to menu planning (which is in the works). Each of us has a need with our diets now and I think that spreadsheet will help us meet them.
Something you may have heard about is creating a grocery price book. Basically, you write down the groceries you buy often and then note the price you paid for them. It’s a great tool to get the most out of your grocery money (for more background on the idea, read this great post at Get Rich Slowly).
When it comes to groceries, I have been fortunate thanks to my past experience working at a grocery store. Hours of pricing and scanning things left me with a thorough mental price book. So I never created a physical copy. While we were at the grocery store today I realized that the years have taken their toll on grocery prices and my mental book was now greatly outdated. My buying price points were way out of whack. It was time to start a new grocery price book. This time, it won’t be in my head.
I fired up a spreadsheet and listed everything in our cupboards and fridge. There are columns for item and price, as well as quantity, total, ounces and price per ounce. To help aid our grocery shopping, our price book is going to double as a shopping list. Before we go shopping, I can print out the list and look around the house to see what we need. I can also choose to add quantities on the list right on the computer and get an idea of the cost of our trip since I included a total column as well. Here’s a pic:
I thought it would take days to complete, but it didn’t take that much time at all. We really don’t have too many different things that we buy now, since we have been making more and more from scratch. Because this price book is also serving as a grocery list, I included non food items as well on it.
The end result for a few hours of my time is something that will save us money. It will also save us time since I won’t have to write a new grocery list every time (or skip the grocery list all together and end up buying things we didn’t need yet). It will keep us focused on getting the best value on our groceries.
It will probably be a month or more before we’ll need to do some major grocery shopping again. I’ll report back on how well it worked and if it indeed helped us save money.
It’s January 8th, and that means that Suze Orman will be on Oprah today.
According to an earlier press release, there will be a free download of Suze’s new book. I don’t see it on the Oprah site yet, so hopefully they will still do it. Maybe they’ll launch it during the show or something.
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to catch the episode, but I’ll be checking back later for the eBook download
UPDATE: It’s there now!
http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahshow/20081119_tows_bookdownload
When we first started reducing our debt, we really cut our expenses. As our debt decreased and our income increased, we gradually eased up on some of those cost cutting measures we took. I’ll admit that convenience is the biggest factor for not sticking with them.
First Example – hanging laundry to dry versus using our electric dryer. We had a system going and even installed a place to hang wet laundry in our bathroom. After a while, we didn’t hang our clothes as often. Gradually we stopped doing it altogether. Well, it’s back and we’ve already saved the electricity from two loads of laundry.
Second Example – using paper towels versus a kitchen towel. For a while there, we had weaned ourselves from heavy paper towel use. We were using kitchen towels for drying our hands, etc. Somewhere along the line, the kitchen towels went into hiding and we used paper towel after paper towel. “We’re out of paper towels again!” was a common comment. Well, they are now in a very non-convenient place in the cupboard to discourage use. Thanks to some after Christmas deals we have some more kitchen towels to use and our kitchen looks festive.
There are other things we stopped doing, but these are the ones we have agreed to bring back so far. At this point, since we need time for other things we are weighing the cost/benefit of each thing to see if it is worth it right now. Since we have an electric dryer, the laundry was a big one. And since we were buying paper towels often, they were another one. A side benefit of all this is that we are reducing our waste and conserving energy.
The weather around here hasn’t been that great and we haven’t been able to make the trip to do our major monthly grocery shopping. That’s when we stock up on the essentials since they are cheaper at another store. We have been running out of things, so we decided to head to a store that is closer to us.
Some things we couldn’t bring ourselves to buy. $1.30 for a can of soup versus $0.79 is a pretty big difference. We’ll do without the soup for now. Other things, like eggs and cereal, we had to buy.
This story of our trip down the cereal aisle is fairly typical. All three of us walk down it and I ask our son to see if there are any cereals on sale that he would like. We spot one of his favorite cereals (Lucky Charms) and see that it is 2/$5.00 on sale. My husband heads over to the generic Lucky Charms and I stay by the brand name so we can compare the prices and ounces. We may not use walkie talkie’s like the Economide family, but we have a pretty good system for comparing prices and we make sure our son is involved.
What wasn’t so typical is what happened before my husband reached the generic cereal section. He was stopped by someone working in the aisle and asked if he would like to buy one get one free for Kellogg’s cereals. All you have to do is say “Buy one get one free” and my right ear moves for better reception (yes, I still do the ear wiggling!).
It turns out that he is affiliated with Kellogg’s and was working in that store. Thanks to his coupons, we were able to get large boxes of cereal for $1.50/box (the coupons were combined with cereals on sale). Not too bad. He made my day right there. That wasn’t all, he spent a few minutes giving us a head’s up on some promotions coming soon.
We didn’t notice him talking to anyone else. While we were with him his attention was 100% on us even though other customers were passing us by. Maybe it was because we were obviously trying to stretch our dollars. Then I remembered something. Back when I used to work in a grocery store (which seems like ages ago now), we were encouraged to help people find the deals. Some of us workers would tell stories of how we helped people save money. Believe it or not, there were customers who were offended when we mentioned an available coupon. So we kept an eye out for the people who were looking at prices or maybe had a coupon folder – some clue that they were price shopping. It makes me smile thinking back on how we had scoped out all of the coupons around the store (even by the wines – sometimes there were coupons for produce or meat with no wine purchase required!) and how we handed those out to customers.
Maybe that is why the man decided to help us out. I made sure to thank him plenty (I probably said it three times before we walked away) and I smiled at him and saw a smile back. Yeah, I think that’s probably why he did it.
In other grocery trip related news, I found myself walking up to the coffee and sniffing it longingly even though I’ve never really been a coffee drinker. I don’t recall ever having caffeine withdrawals more than two days (I’ve quit caffeine multiple times in the past). I’m on day three and it has been the worst day yet. I was so close to getting some soda. But I held out and raided our hard candy when we got home to take the edge off of it. I sure hope today was the worst of it and man, I hope this post makes sense! My head’s still a little fuzzy 
The New York Times is doing a series called “Debt Trap – A series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.” On New Year’s Day, they did an article that rings so very true to me. If you recall, my credit card debt started with a candy bar offered on college campus.
Since I started blogging, I have come to realize that whenever you get a credit card through another avenue than the credit card company itself, someone is making money from selling that card to you. The same rings true for web sites and blogs that have links to credit cards. It can be a profitable business – the one time I looked at it, some companies were paying up to $50 for every person that signed up for a card.
Thinking back to the displays at my old college, there were always college students manning the booths. I figured that student organizations were the ones behind the applications. But according to the New York Times articles, the colleges themselves can get a very lucrative deal. In some cases, it pays for the college to have a student go into debt and have a balance on their card at all times. Another scenario is that that college receives a percentage of every charge a student makes. Makes my stomach do a little flip – they sure got me!
The contract [for Michigan State University] calls for a $1 royalty to the university for every new card account that remains open for at least 90 days, $3 for every card whose holder pays an annual fee, and a payment of a half percent of the amount of all retail purchases using the cards.
[Via NYTimes.com]
So…some colleges are not only allowing the credit card booths on campuses – they are encouraging them! They get a lot of money by doing so. The colleges mentioned in the article say that the revenue is important and sometimes used for scholarships. It doesn’t make much sense to me. And selling student information so credit card companies can market to them? Ugh. I get those alumni credit card offers. I guess my alma mater got a deal as well to sell my information.
I don’t mind colleges making money. But it seems like there could be a better way than targeting young adults with credit card offers. It’s like raiding the young adult cradle.
If interested, here is the link to the entire Debt Trap series at the New York Times.
About This Site
My Debt
- Original Debt: $38,495.86
- Added Debt: $1,781.50
- Total Debt: $40,277.36
- Paid: $36,084.36
- Remaining: $4,193.00
- Broken Down
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- Student Loan: $4,193.00
- Auto Loan 2: $0.00
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