I really dislike a standard household shower. You know the kind - you probably own one too - a straight metal bar holding up the shower curtain. The curtain is so close to you during the shower its constantly touching you, or almost touching you so you have to manipulate yourself in such a way as to avoid it… Its cold, soggy and clings if you touch it with you leg or side or whatever… Anyway, if you’re like me, its bothersome.
One time I had the fortune of being in a “nice” hotel they had an arc curtain rod. Its a rounded rod that curves out so the curtain is away from you, but the bottom is still inside the tub. It was wonderful. I don’t remember what the business trip was for, but I remember that! I loved it so much, when I got home I bought a curtain rod like that for myself. Well, recently my kids and I (and Robin) switched bathrooms so I moved “my” special curtain rod over to the new bathroom. Disappointingly the curtain rod, even at its logest adjustment was maybe half an inch too short. The rod would stay up - but it just didn’t have enough pressure to maintain the arcs position, so the far part of the arc would bend down with the weight of a wet curtain and then the sides would tend to want to go towards the middle. This is no good.
Well - late the other night I had a money idea! I put some pennies and dimes under the rubber ends to extend the curtain rod just enough that it now holds wonderfully. Total cost - $0.50 (4 dimes + 10 pennies). Now there’s putting money to good use!
We all know time is a fixed resource we all have. However there is a way to increase the amount of time you have. No, not by sleeping less and not by messing with the Special Theory of Relativity and time travel.
Think about how much time it takes to do a routine task. What if you could reduce the amount of time it took to do that routine task and cut the time in half by being more efficient, or by using a tool or technology. You would have effectively doubled your time. The time resource hasn’t changed, but the act of being more efficient by organizing or using a tool/technology has effectively doubled your time (for the period of that task).
Take stock of what routine tasks take up time in your day and how can you perform those tasks more efficiently in order to “increase” your time. Think of all the things you could get done with just a little more time. Its definitely worth the effort.
There’s nothing like having a great Christmas full of happiness, family and giving and then having that fire dowsed like a sugar high crash by the realization that you have a big debt that’s been multiplied by Christmas gifts.
Often it won’t manifest itself until after New Years since we’re still in vacation/party mode. But don’t let a looming sense of debt ruin your vacation and dampen your spirits. The way to overcome that feeling is to put forth at least a minimal effort to understand where you stand financially, what your plans are for the immediate future and be on a plan to execute those plans.
This is where a budgeting system helps. It will ensure you know where your money is going and where you’ll be in the near future. Once you have that assurance, your mind will automatically stop worrying about it. And if you ARE in trouble, you can take action before you make things worse.
There are lots of budgeting systems out there from paper and pencil to fully automated systems. CalendarBudget has been designed to meet the needs of budgeters to alleviate that guilty feeling and help you get on your financial track.?? Try it today - its free while in beta period - and can get you on the right path.? If CalendarBudget is not for you, at least sit down and organize your finances so you have a plan.? It can take less than 2 hours to get a fairly accurate picture of your finances, and its time very well spent.
A second opinion may have helped
Have you ever started a project and realized half way through (or worse, once its “completed”) that a better design would have either saved you time or done a better job?? This has happened to me countless times.? Now, I try to get a second opinion, preferably from an expert, but even from a non-expert person, to validate my plans *before* starting the implementation.? Often, my plans will change with someones opinion - and on occasion I’ll change the entire concept, or even not do the project, due to someone’s opinion.
A single opinion is never superior to that of several.? Now… often I’ll discard others opinions if I’ve already thought through their objections, but often they think in angles I haven’t, which can make the design of my [computer software, woodworking project, gift idea, paper airplane, etc...] idea better because I can adjust for the angles I didn’t consider. If you try to amend a design after implementation, it can be impossible or very difficult to change - often resulting in expensive and time-consuming workarounds, rather than a better design.? Sometimes additional ideas can be easily integrated even after implementation has started - but don’t count on it!? Also - its still a good idea to get more opinions even after starting - because maybe you CAN easily change things for the better, but its always best to get opinions from the start.
Is this pushing regifting to the extreme?
While cleaning out our food storage area tonight, I noticed a (rather large) stash of Hallowe’en candy that we separated from the rest. We always do this at Hallowe’en to ration the amount of candy our kids have at once. This year (like years past) we forgot about the stash since we rarely go to the food storage area. Now that Christmas is upon us, here’s my devious plan….
Use most or all of that candy as part of the kids gifts/stocking stuffers. It will save us between$30-$50 easily. Our kidsnever knew that we kept some of the candy apart from the rest anyway, so its perfect. They are young enough to not know better.
Its perfect I tell you, PERFECT!!! MUAA HA HA ha ha haaaaaaaa.!!!
[dashing off into the night with a black cape and bag full of candy]
I have a wall clock hanging in the main room of my house. The clock was custom made as given as a gift for my graduation from college. Its an elegantly framed computer keyboard (on the bottom, and on the top is a centered clock fixture, on the right side is a small brass abacus, and on the right is a small printed circuit board. Behind the clock fixture is inscribed on a brass plate, “Time is Money”. It fetches lots of great reactions, but its message is singluar.
We’re all familiar with this saying, and I think we intrinsically understand it without a detailed explanation. However, I think we often fail to apply logic in correlation with this understanding (me included). Here are a few things that we commonly waste time with, that if changed, will win back precious time, reduce frustration, increase focus and ultimately increase the amount of money we can earn. More…
CalendarBudget recently started a forum. One of the things we discuss there is what features/benefits you want CalendarBudget to take care of for you. You can make any suggestion regarding something you need.
We also have a list of planned features that you can vote on here –> VOTE. Items with the highest number of votes will get done first. Take a moment and vote now!
In the spirit of Time = Money, I’ll post some time saving tips on Mondays to hopefully give you back some time to spend either managing your money, or perhaps something even more important, like spending time with your family.
Watching my wife work on a computer drives me absolutely crazy. I know lots of shortcuts and time savers and my mind is usually way ahead of the computer interface. When I watch her use the computer, and see her not using the shortcuts I’ve become accustomed to, or worse, see her dwell on a screen when the next step is (to me anyway) obvious, frustrates me to no end. I’m still learning patience on this one… try to teach rather than always do… but for the rest of the world, here are just a few of the time saving tips that will give you minutes and possible hours of your day/week back. Some of the following tips apply to windows machines only (sorry Mac friends - please post your tips as a reply):
- When word processing and moving from one word to another, don’t scroll with just the arrow keys, 1 character at a time. Hold down the CTRL button while hitting the arrow buttons on the keyboard. Now the cursor moves a whole word at a time, not just 1 character at a time.
- Similarly, don’t delete 1 character at a time. Hold down the CTRL button and delete to delete a whole word at once.
More…
First of all - the rule of thumb is NEVER buy a new car unless you have money to burn. Vehicles devalue so quickly, the financing usually leaves you paying for something that is not even worth the remaining balance you owe. In fact, as soon as you drive the car off the dealers lot you can take a few $1000 off the price you just paid. 0% financing may make is look more tempting, but its still a bad deal.
Now, having said that, I just bought a new car 
But I did so with my eyes wide open. You may recall from a previous blog that my van died. We decided at the time to try living without owning a vehicle. We tried the experiment for 3 weeks. The money savings were great, but here’s what we found. We were spending up to 1 hour/day trying to arrange for borrowing a vehicle to get our family (7 of us) to the places we needed to be at. That time (and to a less degree, the stress of feeling like a burden to those we were constantly asking) was something we didn’t fully consider. The time I would have been working was spent thinking of who to ask, making calls, leaving messages, returning calls, worrying about not getting to meetings I had, etc…
So in the end we decided that although we could live without a vehicle, it was causing more pain (time loss, stress) that it was saving us (financially). In fact this was triggered by a friend who discovered my situation and suggest a vehicle and described some financing I hadn’t heard of before. It seems car companies are desperate to sell vehicles these days. So, in the end we bought a new car - a Kia Rondo 7-seater.
Here’s why I did it: More…
The technique involves the following rules:
- Buy only items on sale. Buy nothing that is regularly priced. Make short route around local grocery stores and spend a few minutes in the weekly flyers to see whats on sale.
- Stockpile items that are super sales. These items may take me over my regular grocery budget in the immediate week, however, they will save me lots in the long run.
This means while I am starting this I may not have much variety since maybe there will be only a few worthwhile sales and I stockpile peas and hamburger. But then the next week corn may go on sale and increase the variety, and so on.
After building a stockpile from super sales, our regular grocery expenses should go down considerably. We also have the peace of mind that we have at least a 3-month emergency food supply.
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