Writer Marc Sotkin produces the website Boomer Alley, which is self-described as a “consistently entertaining, professional grade, irreverent look at the world of the Baby Boomers”.
If you can’t see the video in the post, you can find it on YouTube or Boomer Alley. Now I have to go clean out my collection of books about beer.
Several days ago, my mother related to me a horror story about a particular dinner she’d prepared for herself and my father. She had purchased some extremely cheap frozen chicken breasts from a local discount grocery store at a price she just couldn’t pass up, but when she brought them home and actually prepared them, in her words, they were “inedible.” She not only threw out the chicken breasts she’d prepared, she tossed out the frozen ones, too. They were “not fit for human consumption,” in her words.
Recently, my wife and I tried out a small package of a new brand of toilet paper (new to us, anyway). It was extremely inexpensive, so we figured that even if it wasn’t nearly as good as our typical toilet paper, it was still a significant savings. Not quite. I went from using five or six squares in the bathroom to using at least twenty, plus I was still left feeling unclean. Not a good deal - in fact, we’ve already switched back to our regular brand.
I’m the biggest advocate you’ll find for seeking out the best deal you possibly can on most of the things you buy. Comparison shopping is a powerful tool. Most of the time, buying generic is just as good as buying the name brand. The grocery store flyer truly is your friend, as is making a good shopping list.
That doesn’t change one simple fact: sometimes, when you buy the bottom dollar item, you suffer for it. Sometimes, you wind up with an item that’s simply unusable, like my mother’s experience with the chicken breasts. Other times, you wind up with an item that’s so poorly made that it ends up costing you way more per use than you might have ever believed, like my own experience with the toilet paper.
Obviously, you want to avoid these traps. When you wind up with such a suboptimal product, you’ve essentially undone the benefit of bargain buying - and quite often, it ends up costing you more money than simply buying the name brand. In fact, this is an argument that many people make against generics and bargain items - if it’s not of the quality you need for your use, then it’s wasted money.
What can you do if you go too cheap and wind up with a lemon on your hands?
Just sample new things. If you’re trying out a new brand, don’t buy it in bulk. Instead, buy a small package of the item and make sure that you like it before you purchase the bulk package. This saves you from a situation where you have 36 rolls of unusable toilet paper.
Call the manufacturer. Whether or not the item is a “generic” or it’s a name brand item, you can still find a customer service number and let them know that there were problems with the product. Even with generics, you’ll sometimes get coupons or vouchers that you can use to get free replacements (if it’s just a defect in that item) or, sometimes, on other items.
Find alternate uses. If you find that the item isn’t usable for the purpose you intended it for, seek out alternate uses for it. Save the toilet paper rolls for camping season, where toilet paper makes great tinder for a camp fire. Food is a bit trickier, but some food items can be used as compost, for example.
Keep track of the “bad” brands. Trying an item, discovering it’s bad, and moving on to another one isn’t enough. You should keep track of brands that you’ve discovered aren’t up to snuff and avoid them in the future. In other words, instead of knowing the brands you prefer, keep track of the brands you prefer to avoid.
Grocery bargain hunting can save you a lot of money, but sometimes you wind up with a lemon of a product. How you handle that lemon makes all the difference when it comes to long term success. Good luck!
This has been a post from The Simple Dollar. Please visit give it a visit for even more articles like this one.
With the holiday shopping season in full swing I am reminded of how often people rush out to buy something just because it is on sale. I admit, I enjoy saving money as much as anyone, but I’ve caught myself falling into the trap of buying something just because it is a great deal.
A few months ago a friend called me about a tool chest that had been incorrectly priced at a local Sears store. Sears was honoring the price because people were flocking to the store with sales ad in hand. I thanked him for the heads up, but pointed out that I did not need a tool chest. My garage was already crowded, and what few tools I have are comfortably stored away in toolboxes and other organizers. His response was predictable, “I don’t really need it either, but it is half price!”
Save 100% By Avoiding Sales Altogether
I was lucky in the sense that my friend called to give me a heads up and I wasn’t already in the store, where impulse decisions often lead to the purchase of things we don’t really need. In the past, I was the world’s worst at picking up stuff I didn’t need just because it had a yellow tag, or a big “SALE” sign above it. Marketers must have loved me!
If you have a habit of seeking out sales, or giving in to tempting in-store sales, I encourage you to consider Trent’s ten-second rule, something I have applied in my own life with great success. Simply stop and count to ten before tossing the item in your shopping cart. Usually, by the count of seven or eight, I have a pretty good idea whether or not I actually need the item. Most of the time it goes back on the shelf, regardless of the cost. The way I look at it, items put back on the shelf save me 100%, and no store can match that sale price.
The Same Rules Apply to Free Items
People often rationalize the accumulation of stuff because it was given to them for free. However, I would argue that stuff is not really “free.” After all, clutter is money. The more stuff you have the more you have to spend maintaining, protecting, and storing it. There are also opportunity costs to consider. Again using my own example, if my garage wasn’t so cluttered I could store used fitness equipment there and cancel my gym membership. At $30 a month, that clutter is costing me the opportunity to save $360 per year!
To make matters worse, a quick inventory of my garage reveals much of the stuff was handed down, or picked up for next to nothing at yard sales. Save the few items with sentimental value, I could probably toss seventy-five percent of its contents and not miss a thing. Time to do some early spring cleaning!
The next time you are faced with temptation to add to your already growing collection, ask yourself if you really need the item. Take price out of the equation, regardless of how good a deal it might be. If it turns out you really do need the item, and it is available at a great price, take advantage of the sale with cash and enjoy.
This has been a post from The Simple Dollar. Please visit give it a visit for even more articles like this one.
Like many people, I tend to overeat during the holidays, from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. It’s kinda part of the tradition to consume huge amounts of food, you know?
And like many others, I also tend to gain weight during the holidays — some people can gain 5 or more pounds (though for most it’s usually only a couple pounds).
Not this time around.
On Thanksgiving, while I enjoyed time with my family, and while everyone else pigged out, I ate moderately and wisely. And I felt great about it. I also got a great workout in the morning after — heavy deadlifts followed by two brutal 10-minute weight circuits and finished with 15 minutes of hard intervals.
This will be the healthiest holiday season ever for me. I’m also starting a meal plan and exercise routine that will have me drop some fat while gaining muscle by New Years, I promise. I’ll publish more about this plan after I see the results (3 pounds dropped already).
But the really cool thing I started on Thanksgiving comes from the Okinawan people (who don’t live too far away from my home, the beautiful island of Guam).
The Okinawan Diet Rules
The Okinawans (the indiginous people of the Ryukyu islands in Japan) are famous for having the longest life expectancy in the world. This single fact has had them studied from every angle, from diet to lifestyle to genetics to environment. And while all of these have played a factor, there’s no doubt that their traditional diet has played a big part — when they eat a more modern, Western-style diet, they don’t live as long or as healthy.
So what’s their secret? Actually, there are two secrets (and they’re not really secrets), and I used these rules to guide my eating on Thanksgiving (and beyond):
Rule 1. Eat to 80% full. The Okinawans call this rule “Hara Hachi Bu”, and if you haven’t tried it, you should. I did this on Thanksgiving — while I usually stuff myself with all the good food, I just ate until I was about 80% full. Of course, there’s no way to know exactly how full you are, but it’s a guideline. And as our brains are 10-20 minutes behind our stomachs, it usually turns out that when you think you’re 80% full, you’re actually full … while when we eat to 100% full, we are usually overstuffing ourselves.
The result of this rule for Okinawans is that they end up eating fewer calories than most people. They tend not to gain too much weight as a result, and coupled with their active lifestyles (they farm and garden and generally stay active, even into their 100s), it keeps them very healthy.
The result for the rest of us is that eating fewer calories will keep the extra pounds off. If we pair this with the next rule and an active lifestyle, we can actually lose weight during the holidays.
Rule 2: Eat healthy foods, mostly plants. Way before Michael Pollan wrote about his simple rules for eating healthy, the Okinawans had this down. They eat way more veggies than most people (mostly green and yellow ones), as well as whole grains, tofu, fish and other legumes. They eat very little sugar, and very little meat, dairy or eggs. This contradicts low-carb diets such as the Zone, Atkins, Paleo and others — I’m not saying those don’t work for whatever your goals are, but I am saying that a mostly plant-based diet has been proven to work well for the Okinawans.
I used these guidelines during Thanksgiving. I don’t eat meat or fish, so I stuck with veggies and sweet potatoes and a mango-ginger tofu dish I made. Again, I ate to about 80% full, and loved it. OK, I also had some pumpkin pie (made it myself) but as I ate mostly healthy and didn’t overeat, I felt great about it.
Can you follow these rules throughout the holidays, and the rest of your life as well? The Okinawans did it (although the younger generation has changed to a more Western lifestyle and has suffered for it) and I think I can too, most of the time. Treats are great in moderation, but moderation is the key word.
Get Active Too
I’m adding more exercise to these Okinawan diet rules (not to be confused with the commercial Okinawan diet, which I think is unnecessary if you follow these rules). The extra activity will help burn any extra calories I take in (which won’t be a huge amount) and I hope lean me out even more. My goal is to be in the best shape of my life by New Year’s — why wait until then to start?
The key is to just get active. Exercise regularly if you can, play sports, toss a ball around with your family. My nephews and I tossed a football around and worked up a sweat durng Thanksgiving lunch, and the next day during a day-after-Thanksgiving dinner with my dad I went swimming with the kids.
For those who are curious, I’ll list my current workout routine. I don’t expect anyone to follow it, especially if you’re not very active already.
I try to mix some yardwork and other activities in there when I’m not too tired. Oh, and I’m doing a marathon in Honolulu on Dec. 14!
So what are your health and fitness goals this holiday season? Do you plan to just eat whatever you like, or are you getting leaner too?
This is a guest post from Leo Babauta, the author of the great site Zen Habits. If you have not already done so, please visit his insightful blog.
Recently, I was browsing through the Creative Commons pictures on Flickr (those that have been given permission to be shared freely) and I came across a few pictures that actually reminded me of my early professional years.
by YellowDog
by rjw1
by sindesign
I see several things when I look at these pictures.
I see people who enjoy and are proud of their possessions. For some, there is a great deal of personal pride associated with their possessions, and to post the pictures of their shelves and living spaces in public, they’re quite willing to show them off. Accumulation of possessions has become something of a point of personal pride.
I also see a lot of money devoted to things. At the same time, it takes only a quick glance at a shelf full of items to recognize that there’s often a lot of money tied up in those items. A large collection of anything not only had a great deal of cost invested in assembling it, but also has a great deal of cost tied up in merely sitting there. If a person has overstuffed shelves but is also facing financial trouble, there’s a direct conflict going on.
I also see a difficulty in organization brought on by having so many things. When I see an overstuffed shelf or a room full of stuff, I usually wonder how easy it can be to find the item you need when you need it. It’s often buried under mountains of items or filed away on long shelves, meaning that when you have the desire to enjoy one of the items, you have to invest some time in actually finding that item.
I also see a lot of items left unused because of the sheer number of items. Another thing that I notice is that if a person has a lot of things, he or she can only devote a progressively smaller sliver of time to each of those things. That means the cost per hour of enjoyment of each item goes way up.
Think of it this way. Compare a person who has 10 DVDs to one who has a thousand. The person with ten DVDs can watch those DVDs at their leisure, has likely enjoyed all of them multiple times, and doesn’t have to devote much effort at all to storing them. On the other hand, the person with the giant DVD collection has to devote significant time to organizing the collection, likely has not enjoyed his or her collection (many were likely watched only once, some not at all, perhaps), and has to devote significant time, cost, and space into storing them.
This is where libraries and other “borrowing” mechanisms come into play. If you’re unsure as to whether something is going to have significant repeat value for you, borrow that item. Your cost for enjoying the item is then very cheap - nothing if you use a library, or a buck or two if you use a rental service. There’s also no storage cost or effort involved, plus you retain access to a very large library of options.
But what about the “good feeling” of having a lot of stuff? For many, it feels good to have a lot of things. I know that, for a long time, I felt that exact same way. I was very proud of the media collection I had assembled, and I was quite willing to show it off to anyone and everyone.
What I eventually learned was that clutter is the enemy of good personal finance habits. It encouraged me to continually sink my money into items that would simply add to the clutter, and thus my actual cost per bit of enjoyment from those items went up significantly. The end result was a painful financial situation - and the best route of escape from it that I found was getting rid of at least some of the clutter.
If you live in a cluttered environment, take a serious look around and ask yourself whether the clutter is giving you real “bang for the buck” in your life. If it’s not, consider taking a new approach to things.
This has been a guest post from Trent Hamm who writes about personal finance at The Simple Dollar. Please visit his blog for even more articles like this one.
I have started the list for my family already. Where we live, the economical turmoil have prompted the shops to start early this year and with great discounts too.
To save big I do two things, that is easy to implement:
A few days ago, I mentioned my single best action for saving money in my own life - utilizing the library. I also encouraged readers to submit their own best actions - and did they ever! The post has already received almost 250 comments and several dozen more readers emailed me their single best action.
As promised, I’ve compiled a list of all of these actions. Here are the top twenty five - basically, these are the ones that were repeated more than twice. These aren’t in any particular order. If you want some direct personal finance actions that have actually worked for people, here’s your list.
1. Utilize the library. Many readers agreed with my statement about how valuable the library is for those who read avidly. Not only can it save you on the cost of buying books, it can also provide DVDs for viewing, CDs for listening, and many other interesting cultural experiences if you pay attention to the schedule of events.
2. Use online bill pay. Not only does online bill pay save you the expense of envelopes and stamps (roughly fifty cents per bill paid online), it also provides you the convenience of auto-calculating your bills and comparing them immediately to your checking and savings account balances. No more checkbook math necessary.
3. Get your paycheck direct deposited. Instead of receiving a paper paycheck, have your paycheck directly deposited into your checking account. This spares you the need to have to go to the bank to cash your check, plus relieves you of the temptation to have some cash taken out of the check when you deposit it.
4. Make your own lunch and take it to work with you. Instead of eating out every day, brown bag it! Prepare a lunch the night before and take that lunch with you to work the next day. It can be leftovers, it can be a fresh meal (like a sandwich), but either way, it can cut into your costs tremendously.
5. Stay home. Instead of going out on the town for entertainment, stay at home and enjoy the activities available in your domicile. Most of the activities you can do at home - reading, watching television, exercising, playing games with friends, meditating, listening to music, cooking, etc. - are far cheaper than similar activities you might do out of the home.
6. Set up an automatic savings plan. If you’re getting your paycheck automatically deposited, consider setting up an automatic savings plan to have some of that money routed into retirement or into a savings account for an emergency fund. It’s far, far easier to start saving if the actual transfer of money happens automatically without your intervention.
7. Build an emergency fund. Alongside that advice comes the idea of building an emergency fund, a cash reserve that can help you in the event of a crisis such as a job loss or an automobile breakdown. It’s easy to build one - just sweep a small amount of money on a regular basis into a savings account, watch it build, and utilize that cash when the time comes.
8. Stop smoking or drinking. Expensive consumables can be a huge drain on your financial situation. Eliminating a consumable habit, such as tobacco or alcohol, can quickly improve your financial situation while also improving your health (which can also improve your financial situation by reducing health care costs).
9. Use the “envelope” system. Many people swear by this method, in which one actually budgets their money for a month using “envelopes.” Whenever you need money for, say, groceries, you take money out of the groceries envelope - when that envelope is empty, you’re out for the month. This forces you to be careful with your spending in all respects.
10. Stop looking at ads. Advertisements of all kinds - from television commercials to flyers from the Sunday paper - simply serve to coerce you into spending money on things you don’t actually need. Minimizing your exposure to advertisement minimizes the temptation to spend that money, keeping it at home in your wallet where it belongs.
11. Ditch cable television. Cable television is often a pricy monthly bill and all it does is provide you with more channels that repeat variations on the same content. Get a digital converter box instead and watch the channels that come in over the air - ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox, and often others. And they’re free - no monthly bill!
12. Drink more tap water. Tap water makes you healthier (most people are somewhat dehydrated, even if they don’t realize it), fills you up (keeping you from overeating expensive food at meals), and is incredibly cheap compared to any other beverage out there. Take advantage of the tap - it can save you a ton of money on beverages and on food.
13. Eat out less (esp. fast food) and cook at home instead. Every time you purchase prepared food outside the home, you’re spending more than you would making a similar meal at home. So why not adopt that as a platform instead? Learn how to cook at home, make your own meals, and save a lot of money.
14. Stop shopping for fun. Shopping is a very expensive form of entertainment. Instead of shopping with your free time, find other fun things to do - almost anything is cheaper - and leave the shopping trips for the times when you actually need an item.
15. Use the “ten second rule” (or some close variation of it). Whenever you are tempted to spend your money on something frivolous, stop for a few seconds and ask yourself whether you really need this item. Ten seconds is usually enough - many people also recommend putting the item down and leaving the store, only returning if you’ve decided you actually want it after some serious consideration.
16. Accept help from others. It’s easy to let pride get in the way of accepting help from others. Don’t let that happen. Be willing to accept help if others offer it, and be thankful for it. Later on, when your situation improves, you can pay it forward and help someone who needs it.
17. Plan ahead for meals. At the start of a week, make a careful plan of what meals you’re going to eat during the week, then make a grocery shopping list based solely on those meals. When you go grocery shopping, stick to that list. This is a great way to keep your food shopping bill low while keeping the food you want and need on the table.
18. Go on a diet. Many people recommended healthy dieting as a tactic for saving money. If you make a conscious choice to eat less, not only will you save money on your food bill, you’ll also reduce your health care bill and perhaps your clothing bill as well (since it’ll be easier to find consignment clothes).
19. Eliminate expensive hobbies. Are you engaged in a hobby that requires a lot of financial upkeep, like golf or collecting? Instead of continuing that expensive hobby and watching it drain all your money, choose a different path entirely - find a new hobby to focus your energy on that doesn’t require so much upkeep cost.
20. Stop reading women’s magazines. This is perhaps the biggest surprise on this list for me, but several readers swear by it. They argue that women’s magazines are extremely effective at convincing you to shop for things you don’t necessarily need, convincing you that you need some item in order to keep up with the crowd. Spare yourself the guilt - skip those magazines.
21. Make a budget/spending plan. If you can’t seem to get a grip on your spending, try assembling a budget/spending plan so that you can clearly see where your money is going. Spend a month or two keeping careful track of what you actually do spend on certain items, then set a spending goal for that type of item. This can simultaneously serve as a wake-up call and as “training wheels” for good financial habits.
22. Set strong goals. Don’t fleetingly think about how you wish things were. Instead, sketch out exactly how you want your life to be in, say, five years, then focus all of your actions toward that goal. Not only can this cut out frivolous spending, it can also help you to make strong choices to improve every aspect of your life.
23. Stop worrying about what other people think. Don’t let the opinion of others rule the choices you make in your personal life. It’s not their life to live - it’s your life. Instead, make choices that you think are strong - and don’t worry about the neighbors or the naysayers.
24. Sell your car. A car is perhaps the worst investment you can make. It depreciates rapidly, breaks down regularly, and requires constant upkeep. Instead of dealing with this, sell the car and make do with the other transportation options available to you - a bicycle, buses, trains, and so forth.
25. Be accountable to what you spend. Finally, try having a weekly or monthly review of all of your spending. Make yourself face the mistakes you’ve made - don’t let a bad spending move lie in the dust and be forgotten. Use it as a tool to make sure it never happens again.
Hopefully, these tactics spur you on to great things.
This has been a guest post from Trent Hamm who writes about personal finance at The Simple Dollar. Please visit his blog for even more articles like this one.
