Food and Finance
By masterofnone | March 14, 2009
One of my biggest weaknesses when it comes to personal finance is that I am terrible about eating cheap. I am kind of addicted to Chipotle burritos, and spend way more money each month on them than I really should. A part of me thinks it is OK since I really do derive a lot of joy out of them (I do have a problem I know), but the other part of me thinks that I do need to cut back.
Not that eating out always has to be expensive. There are many ways to find cheap meals eating out, but as a general rule, you wind up paying too much. I’m trying to learn to cook more healthy, cheap recipes that will motivate me to eat at home more, but I still am not where I should be. I know that the cumulative of all that extra spent money will come to haunt me in the future. I guess it is just a matter of getting some self control and holding myself to cooking at home. It’s just not easy for me, though.
Topics: Personal Finance | No Comments »
I Love Online Insurance Sites
By masterofnone | March 12, 2009
So, I just had a bit of a debacle with my car this week. I found out that I needed to get a new car since my old one would take more in repairs than the car is worth to me. After aggressively hunting around on Craigslist, I finally get another car, a 1991 Civic in excellent condition. Anyways, I need to get insurance on this thing as fast as possible (they don’t take too kindly to uninsured vehicles driving around).
To do this, I simply logged on to the USAA website (they do really good work), click on insurance, entered in a few stats, and I was literally fully insured in 10 minutes! I could even print out my proof of insurance card so that I could register the vehicle. So quick and easy, I wish everything in the financial world could be like that. So, whether you are looking for car or cheap truck insurance, check out some of the cool online quote systems out there at the moment. It’s very convenient stuff.
Topics: Insurance | No Comments »
Why I Don’t Budget
By masterofnone | March 9, 2009
If you listen to most personal finance bloggers, they will constantly harp on the need for having a solid budget. Having a budget, according to these people, is critical to make sure you don’t spend too much. While I cannot disagree that having a solid budget will help you control your spending, a budget often fails because people simply cannot stick with it.
That’s right, making, tracking, and keeping a budget is very hard, and takes a lot of mental energy and discipline. Alse, charting all your random everyday expenses into fixed categories can be quite tricky in my opinion. You can only focus on so much at once, and keeping a budget takes up a lot of that focus.
So, I like to take the approach where I simply set aside an appropriate amount of cash for savings each month, and just spend from there. I can easily check my bank account balance online, so I know how I’m doing. I have some fixed expenses (savings, rent, bills, etc.), but other than that I just work with the pool of money I have. I find this takes much less work than trying to keep up with a budget while still proving effective. What do you think?
Topics: Personal Finance | No Comments »
Welcome to Smart Money Tips
By masterofnone | March 8, 2009
Welcome all! Here at the smart money tips blog, we hope to bring you all sorts of information ranging from basic personal finance tips to full blown investing analysis. Money is not an easy thing, and we hope that this blog will help simplify some of the process for you. By keeping you up to date on the latest an greatest news in the world of finance, you should be able to make better decisions for all that you do.
We’ll spend a lot of timr talk about personal finance, since that is such an important core topic for everyone involved. If you can’t managed and save your own money, nothing else we talk about will mean anything at all. Hopefully we can help you understand how to get this part of your financial life in order.
I also hope to cover more exotic topics such as mortgages and insurance. These can be tricky, so it helps to have somebody go over the basics to make sure you know what you are doing. At any rate, thanks for stopping by, we hope you will find this information helpful for your needs.
Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »