Saving Freak

Homemade Stain Spray

Make your own stain-fighting spray for the laundry! I put 1/2 a spray bottle full of Tide laundry detergent (Tide is awesome at fighting stains). Then, I put a little bit of Dawn dishwashing liquid and fill the rest with water. Shake it up, and there you have it - your very own stain-fighting spray! I think that this fights stains MUCH better than the stain-fighters that I buy in the stores.

–Tammy from Fort McCoy, FL

Use Plastic Grocery Bags for Packing Material

Another good use for all those grocery plastic bags is to use them as packing material! When you send a gift, or when you make a move to a new home, these bags are great for wrapping glassware and other breakables!

–CKDavis from Flagstaff, AZ

Ask Your Cafe For Used Coffee Grounds

Many cafes will give out quantities of used coffee grounds for your garden for free! Our local Borders does this and it is wonderful for the garden, esp. acid loving plants like azalea, lilac, hydrangea, etc. All you have to do is ask!

–Carol from Landisville, Pa

Dilute Fabric Softener For Twice As Much

I love using fabric softener for my laundry, and one bottle of fabric softener makes two for me, and I’ll share how:

I saved one of my empty fabric softener containers and when I bought a new one the same size, I poured 1/2 the contents into the empty, saved, bottle and filled both bottles to the top with water. I use a 1/2 capful in each load and it lasts me for more than a month. Try it.

Note: Most fabric softeners these days are ultra brands or very thick and loaded with perfumes and work just the same when diluted.

–sbb1 from Umm al Quain, UAE

Multipurpose Bath Products

Did you know that you can multipurpose many bath and body products? For instance, I like to purchase scented bubble bath at the dollar store and use that for my hand soap. It’s not only cheaper than hand soap but, and here is what I like, it comes in so many more scent choices. Landers makes huge bottles that come in fruity scents, and my local Dollar Tree is now selling aromatherapy scented shower gels which can also be used. Hey, it’s not bath n body works, but way cheaper. And a great savings (and a little bit goes a looong way!)

–Carol from Lancaster, PA

Every year I end up going on a big shopping trip to get all the gifts we are going to give to our friends and family.  This happens because I always forget to get gifts throughout the year.  Both my siblings and mother are good about shopping ahead of time (though my brother is only good about it because his wife does all the shopping).  So how do I keep from overspending every year and having to turn to debt to make up the difference?  We save some money each month for gifts so that ther is plenty in our account to cover any last minute spending. 

We keep up with this money by putting it into a separate account and only touching it if we a purchasing a gift for someone (this includes birthdays, weddings, baby showers, etc.).  If you haven’t created a gifting fund then you are making life a lot more complicated. 

If you need help getting organized I would check out the mini budget form on the Next Steps site.  This site is run by the I Was Broke Now I’m Not team (the ministry of Joe Sangl).

I have written on here before about checking your credit report every four months using annualcreditreport.com.  What I have started doing is checking my credit score once a month to make sure there are no surprises coming my way in the short term.  Now I am not going to pay for a score that belongs to me, so I had to get creative in to check my score regularly without being charged by the cartel of the credit bureaus. That being said I have come across two easy ways to check your score without being charged.

1.  Your Credit Card -  I have read that there are a few companies that will provide you with your credit score for free through your online account information.  The main one seems to be Washington Mutual.  I just so happen to use a personal WAMU card so I went and checked it out and there was a little link that said FICO score.  I clicked on it and I could see how my score has been effected over the last 12 months.  This updates once a month and pulls the score from Transunion.  If you are interested in gettin ga WAMU card you can sign up for the ESPN card here

WARNING!!!! IF YOU CANNOT CONTROL YOUR SPENDING THEN NO CREDIT CARD IS SAFE IN YOUR HANDS AND THIS OPTION SHOULD NOT BE EMPLOYED, DISCUSSED, OR EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT!!!

2.  Free Websites - For those who should stay away from credit cards there are three sites that will be of great use.  They are:

CreditKarma.com - This site offers your credit score as a free service and tries to sell you other offers on the side.  It has been getting the best reviews from newspapers and other publications for helping you improve your score.  The only downside is that it only focuses on credit not overall finanaces.  This one is free forever with no purchase necessary.

Quizzle.com - I enjoyed this site the most because of all the great tools that it gives you.  If you are starting out with budgetting and want to know where you are compared to most Americans then this is a great site.  They will also be adding new features in the future.  Of the three this one seems to be the most helpful at evaluating and improving your overall financial health.  Once again this one is free and you can keep it for as long as you like

Credit.com - This site is the least of the three.  It uses and estimator to determine your score instead of actually going and getting the score for you.  You will need information from your credit report to get a good estimate.  You can get the actual score for free but it is only a 30 day trial.  For this reason I didn’t even sign up for the service.

Tomorrow I will discuss why any of this matters and why your credit score and report are a great tool if you need them.  Personally my goal is to not need them at all and I will write about that soon too.

For the new year I resolved to lose weight, 30 lbs. to be exact.  I did my first weigh in on Jan 5 and was 217 lbs.  Today marks 3 weeks since I started my diet and I am now at 204 lbs.  A tidy 13 lbs off.  I can already feel and see the difference.

In conjunction with my personal new year’s resolution, I encouraged my readers to start using a budget.  I was curious to know if anyone tried getting a budget started or if anyone had questions about budgeting?  If you haven’t started a budget this year, now is the time.  I tried to be pretty comprehensive in my explanations of how to budget so check out my budget category if you are new or want to start budgeting today.

Now that we have covered the different ways of budgeting there is one last step stabilizing our financial strategy. That step is to be prepared for upcoming expenses. There are two types of upcoming expenses expected and unexpected.

Unexpected Expenses are emergency expenses that show up from time to time.  To prevent these kind of expenses from coming in and ruining your budget you should have an emergency fund.   If you are still in debt (excluding a home mortgage) you should have a emergency fund of $2500 or if you do not own a home it should be aroun $1000.  Once you are out of debt an emergency fund of three to six months of expenses will keep the emergencies of life from ruining your financial future.

Expected expenses are things like Christmas, car repairs, house repairs, etc. We know these things are going to come eventually so why not set a little aside in our budgets each month to deal with these problems as they come and kill our budget for that month. Any expense that we know is coming due we need to save for throughout the months that precede that expense. So how do you keep track of this savings? Once again Joe Sangl has the best form I have been ablt to find for this purpose. So go over to his tools page and download the Monthly Escrow Account form. With this form we can determine how much we need to save each month in order to be prepared for expenses we know are coming. Here is an example from our escrow form:

 As you can see this chart shows how we can pay for Christams, car repairs, and other expected expenses.  This allows us to not have to dip into our emergency fund when these kinds of expenses pop up.  I hope these last few days of budget talk have encouraged you to get started on a budget and to enhance your life through good financial management.

There are many people who either own their own business or work completely on commission. This puts them in the situation of having irregular income. The advantage to these types of jobs is that you have some control of how much or how little you make. The downside is that you have high and low periods during the year (feast and famine) that make some months a lot of fun and others not so much. So how can those with irregular income work out a budget when their income goes up and down, sometimes very dramatically, every month?

The first step is to determine how much you need to spend every month to cover all living expenses. This includes saving for retirement, adding to your emergency fund, or any other type of saving you want to do throughout the year. Now that we know how much we are going to spend every month we need to save into an account three times what you need to run the monthly expenses (or budget). Now you have a reserve of money that you can dip into during the famine months and build it back up during the months of feast. If you have a couple of feast months in a row and end up with more money than is necessary to fill up the famine savings then you can use that money to pay off extra debt, put more into retirement, or whatever else you want to do with it.  Having worked in sales for years I have a lot of friends who are on irregular income of some variety.  When running this idea by them the majority (you will never convince everyone) thought this was a great idea and were going to implement this system into their own lives.  A couple of them have reported back that this has really helped their marriages because they no longer had months where they had to do “without”.  This stabilizing force has really changed their lives for the better and made it easier to accomplish their financial goals.

Yesterday I talked about budgeting with a monthly budget, but that can be hard if you are living paycheck to paycheck.  If you are in that position right now do not feel bad because almost 70% of American employees are in that situation.  In order to get out of paycheck to paycheck  living you will have to start managing your money better.

The weekly budget is  a tool that will allow you to get a grasp on your money without having to plan the whole month. Once again I will refer you over to Joe Sangl’s tools page because this is the best pre-made form I could find. Download the Weekly Budget Form and fill it out in a very similar fashion to the Monthly Budget Form.  The major difference is you go week by week.  So if you are paid weekly or every other week you just fill in the pay you received by week like this:

The form automatically fills in the totals at the top.  When you have money left over the total is yellow.  If you go over the money in your paycheck it turns red.  And when you spend all your money to zero it turns green (this being the goal).  As you can see it is very much like the monthly budget but you are spending each paycheck (or if you have more than one income, paychecks) on paper as you get it.  This allows you to pay bills as they come in.  So if you have a bunch of bills at the beginning or middle of the month you can devote the majority of that paycheck to paying bills and use the other to pay for food and fun.  This usually means the first month will be a little tight but once  you make it through the initial adjustment stage things get easier and easier.  This will allow you to start saving money and figure out where the overspending is occurring.

This budget will work for almost anyone but in the financial groups that I talk to the  question of irregular income always comes up.  I worked on full commission for a while and it did make budgeting a lot harder but there are ways to stabilize the feast and famine lifestyle that many irregular income earners experience.  I will explore what we found to be the best option tomorrow.

A budget is not a means to keep you from having fun and it isn’t even a tool to tell you where or how you have to spend your money. A budget is just a spending plan. You are just telling your money where to go ahead of time instead of waiting until you are presented with a buying decision. This puts you in control of your money instead of being jerked around by marketers and salespeople.

The best thing about budgeting is that it isn’t an exact science. If you set aside 300 dollars for groceries and find at the end of the month you haven’t used it all and would like to have an extra night of eating out, you can do that. The goal is to make sure we are not over spending not to make life miserable by shackling ourselves to the ink on a piece of paper. So lets get started.

Joe Sangl has the best budget form I have run across. In fact it isn’t even close. So lets go to his tools page and download a monthly budget form. Now that we have a framework to go from, all we do is open it in excel and start filling in the blanks. Start with income

Now type in your expenses.

The first time through just type in everything as you have been spending it. This will allow you to see the areas you are overspending and adjust accordingly. I love that this spreadsheet tells you what percentage of your income each area is consuming. The other great feature is the running total at the top. When you are done it should look something like this.

WOO HOO!! It equals zero!! That means you are done and just have to follow the plan that you have laid out. My wife and I sit down and figure out our budget out each month before the month begins. This works great for us, but a lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck (about 70% of Americans) or have irregular income, like I used to. This makes it much harder to budget on a monthly basis. Tomorrow we will look at a weekly budget form for those living paycheck to paycheck and on Thursday irregular income. If you need more help with this subject I recommend going over to Joe Sangl’s site and filling up on information. And for legal reasons I have to let you know that I am not a financial counselor and the information I share here is only how my wife and I manage or have managed our finances. I hope this inspires you to get your budget together for the new year.

I am a big believer in the New Year’s resolution. I make one (and only one) every year. This allows me to focus on something that I have been putting off and attack it. This year I am going to lose weight. I know this sounds like the resolution that everyone makes but when I make a resolution, and share it with people, I stick to it until it is done. How much weight am I going to lose? 30 lbs should put me close to my ideal weight so that is the goal.

In the spirit of new year’s resolutions I want to encourage anyone that does not have a written budget to start one for January. I am such a believer in budgeting that the next few days will be about my budgeting philosophies and how to get your budget set up so that you are comfortable with it. For those of you who think a budget is a set of rules sent to ruin your life I want to encourage you to read for the next few days with an open mind. I am not the person who enjoys budgeting by nature but I have seen the impact of this tool on my personal finances and want to share that with my readers. If you have never budgeted before THIS IS THE TIME!! By telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went you will be able to save money like never before. My blog is called Saving Freak not only for how much I save on purchases but also for the amount of money my wife and I put away each month. You can do this too and I will show you how this week.