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Saturday, March 17, 2007
Financial Management for the Home
Managing your personal and family finances is an ongoing learning experience. I never tire of surfing to find ways to save money for my family. As many money management gurus love to say, a penny saved is a penny earned.
Here's what we've done so far:
1. Cancelled our cable TV
If no one is using it, then why waste $22 a month on it? That adds up to $264 a year and $2640 a decade. Or an extra pizza meal a month.
2. Cancelled our home phone account
Everyone uses their mobile phone nowadays so that $8 a month to just keep that phone number alive isn't quite worth it. The humble $8 a month adds up to $96 a year and $960 a decade.
3. Cancel memberships that give no return
I had a supermarket membership card but found that the $9 monthly fee exceeded the 5% rebates I received from shopping there. Plus it compelled me to shop there more which wasn't always so convenient.
4. Redeem your points for cash off your bill
Check with your service providers often if you can use the reward points to reduce your bill or subscriptions – the value is usually more than that of any gift or vouchers.
careOne has a wealth of money saving ideas on their website. This one is a gem: Ways To Stretch A Dollar.
I have been pondering about whether to move my blogs to my own domain. This naturally involves the tempting and very splendid task of having to test out some blogging software.
Primary among the rest are Wordpress(.org) and Moveable Type. General feedback from some kind Posties was that Wordpress is easier to use in general. AnnaBella even sent me the URL for 1500 templates. Kat, however, mentioned that MT may be easier to use but separates the templates which are more helpful.
Now with Blogdrive, the templates are in 3 parts: the main template where all the coding goes, the profile (left nav) and the sidebar (right nav). If MT works like that, I reckon it's a better bet.
Still, we won't know till we test it. Won't we? ;)
When it comes to money, I make sure I make a budget for every calendar year for our home to make sure we never spend more than we earn and maintain a monthly savings of at least 10% for our retirement and Jack's education.
When I was a little girl, my Mom always pointed out the prices of different things, probably toys, and told me which ones were expensive and which weren't, and to differentiate needs from wants. That gave me a pretty firm grounding on money management.
Money is definitely a necessity so talk of money is the root of all evil is inaccurate. It is only evil when there is an excess (an excess of anything can corrupt) or severe deficiency of (starving conditions or if you are obsessed with comparing with the Joneses), or causes a rift in your family.
Unless you are the Joneses, it is impossible to avoid borrowing money. You need to take loans to purchase a home or a car, you need to pay home insurance to protect your home, you can leverage on credit cards to maximise the interest you earn in your current accounts, you need to reduce your debt by taking on a Bad Credit Remortgage.
Read up on debt advice. For good financial management, the goal is to reduce the amount you owe and maximise the amount you save. Ideally the interest you earn on your investments and savings should exceed the amount you are paying.
Although they appear to consider each other as competitors, I find that one can use both Multiply and Friendster with similar ease.
Multiply feels more like a home I'm decorating to invite friends over while Friendster feels more like a fashion show where everyone is preening. With Multiply, I tend to add people I consider really good friends or close friends, or people I have something in common with, not mere social friends. On the other hand, with Friendster, I tend to add friends who I may simply know as acquaintances as well as good friends.
The functions are different too. Multiply has a comprehensive photo sharing network, video sharing, blog, recipes, book and movie reviews, all of which suggest a kind of intimacy with the people you are connected with. With Friendster it is all about social networking: testimonials, a brief profile, featured friends, and an optional blog (they have since removed their RSS feed for external blogs).
Whether they both evolve into each other is yet to be seen, but for now, I'll be using Multiply to share things with close friends, and Friendster to simply network.
The title is indicative of the blog's central topic of interest, the design is clean, layout pleasant to the eye, navigation logical and easy to use with categories lined up on the top bar, and the text is large for the perpetually eyestrained (me!) yet not screaming to the rest who have good eyesight.
Ilker's posts are thought-provoking and ponderous, and I have enjoyed every single word he has typed, in particular, A Shy Blogger's Avatar and MySpamLog when I realised he was actually not the beautiful woman in the picture, yet was even more compelled to read about this shy blogger, and Safeguard the Web for Children, which drove me quickly to write up one up for my own blog too.
The Thinking Blog is probably one of the most usable and useful sites I have ever visited and will definitely continue visiting. An excellently designed site with brilliant content - a real winning combination.
Credit cards have been getting easier and easier to obtain in recent years. From pre-approvals to lowered minimum annual income, everyone is armed and ready to consume with their very own (or ten) credit cards.
Most certainly it is a lucrative business for credit card companies. Defaulters pay an average of 24% per annum in interest and this starts compounding immediately after you sign the dotted line on a purchase. When you do pay your bill in full, you don't pay the interest. But if you pay just the minimum or worse, don't pay at all, the interest starts compounding.
The opportunistic, like myself, claim the free sign-up gifts, pay on time and in full, maximising the 21 days interest free credit (yay 21 days more interest on my money in my savings account), and don't hesitate to call and cancel the card after. Most companies will offer to waive the annual fee as it is easier and cheaper for them to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one.
If you have unfortunately sunk into debt, no worries. Have a plan and you'll eventually dig yourself out of it. Your goal is to pay your debt off as quickly as possible (remember the compounding interest growing exponentially daily?) and minimising the interest you're paying off at the moment.
In the meantime, use 0% credit cards to pay your bills (check the terms and conditions on full repayment and cancellation of card) and utilise 0% balance transfers to stop your debt from growing.
So are credit cards really a bane or boon? Well, it really depends on you.
This post was kindly sponsored by Credit Cards 2 Go 4.
Protecting your eyes is one of the most critical things a mother should do. I can't imagine ever being unable to see, especially with a young son to care for. Hence the great admiration and respect I have for blind mothers who manage to bring up their children themselves.
While I have been religiously slathering sunblock everyday (Sunplay SPF130), I realise I have been neglecting my eyes. In the last few months, my eyesight has been failing. I am not sure why. It could be the excessive use of the computer but then again it's been no less than the days when I was working all day and then playing World of Warcraft all night (where did I find the stamina?).
Anyhow, tomorrow the first thing I'm going to do is to find a good pair of Polarized Sunglasses. ADS Sports Eyewear has some really cool designs, like the one on the model on the front page. It looks like the giant ones Katie and Posh have been wearing.
Come May, I'll be freelancing full-time as well as being a full-time Mom to Jack. As a freelance writer, two things are important to me:
1. A company pays. 2. A company pays on time.
It is hard to gauge 1. and 2. from simply accepting jobs from referrals. In fact I had 2 clients who thought freelance meant free! Thankfully I stopped work after the first draft.
How to avoid this? Get everything in writing and signed. Have them to pay you in installments. One downpayment before starting work. One after the first draft is approved (maximum 2 rounds of amendments). And finally after the job is finished. Include penalties for late payment. Get them to sign it.
There will still be the people who won't pay or delay payment. In which case, make sure you have a lawyer friend who will happily send warning letters. One warning usually suffices.
Anyway I'll be looking for more writing work and perhaps some programming work as well.
Elance has a good source of freelance work in the fields of programming, design, writing, and business consulting. Programming and writing are definitely up my alley.
It is an interesting bidding concept and something I'll definitely try when I'm in the market for freelance work. I've bookmarked it for May.
Okay, I wish. Actually we'd sat through 40 minutes of bad traffic and Jack howling to get there. Hubby was grumpy by then and dropped me 10 minutes away so I had to wend through traffic to get to the convention hall (he was cheery after when the security guard opened up the car park for him).
OMG... the crowd. I had a headache just fighting my way through slow-moving people. Jack had fallen asleep in the Ergo and I had my hands out protecting him from being scratched by swinging cardboard boxes.
When I finally reached the fourth floor, I was going to faint at the sight of the crowd. I decided no trawling each aisle, as I would have usually done (even at 7 months I trawled and later got on my hands and knees and gleefully installed my and hubby's brand new DVD Writers).
This time I checked the map and evaded the crowd by walking outside before heading straight for the Lenovo exhibition. After all, I just wanted to "touch test" the Lenovo 3000 V100 which I had already decided to bite the bullet and buy if it passed the test.
This nice guy called Gary helped me out and noted how brave I was to bring my son along. I mumbled something about no babysitter before I began gleefully molesting the keyboard of the V100.
It was wonderfully light and the keyboard was heaven to touch. I did a cursory lookaround, drooled at the $2999 Thinkpad X (something) which was 1.65kg and oh, such a beauty. But it was way over my budget and... *okay stop thinking about it*.
Anyway, hubby caught up with us with my Mushroom Swiss burger and I told Gary okay after a little haggling. We went up to the special Lenovo area where they put together our package and freebies and paid $2148.
When we finally got home, I realised how much I've "lost it" when I remembered I forgot to ask Gary to throw in a mini Lenovo mouse. Ah well... my Mommy bear paw would probably be too big for it anyway *console self*.
Still, opening the freebies was sheer nirvana and the V100 runs like a dream. It's so beautiful I can't stop looking at it. Sigh...
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." -- Bertrand Russell
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
-- Thomas Edison (Harper's Magazine, 1890)
A woman's romance with motherhood, green living, finance, and this heady thing called life.
