Vacation Budgeting

Some prefer approaching vacations like the open road.  You start driving and see where it takes you.  However, financially this can cause lots of issues making your vacation activities more expensive or, even worse, impossible.  For example, in my last post, if you plan ahead and carry enough cash, you may end up paying some extra fees whether by using your credit card or from merchants who only accept cash.  We only encountered one such situation on our vacation: one of the holiday parks we were planning on staying at only accepted cash so we were forced to try another place with a higher rate.  While these may be minor annoyances, they can add up over the course of your vacation and can be avoided with a bit of forethought.

How Much Fruits/Veggies Cost

Here is a really interesting chart about how much Americans pay for fruits and vegetables.  I found this article on National Geographic and they used research from the USDA in this colorful chart.  They looked at the differences in cost per serving vs cost per pound and fresh fruits/veggies vs frozen vs canned vs dried vs juice.  These obviously seem cheap since they are on a serving level and I'm sure we all have different expectations of how many servings we actually eat for a given meal.  But it shows that fruits and vegetables are not that pricey.  Apparently, the most bang for your buck lies in green beans and watermelons.  What would be even more interesting if they had a chart for costs per nutritional value if there was some metric to use for that.

2012 Expense Analysis

2012 Income Analysis

Retirement Planning Excel Sheet

I apologize for the small image and the late post but I have a small treat today.  I've uploaded a link in this post below if you are interested in downloading it and playing around with the spreadsheet. This is a simple little excel model I created to project one way of how to plan for retirement.  I'll quickly talk about how to think about this tool and how to use it.

Income Analysis 2012 YTD

There are always two sides to the financial health equation.  The past couple weeks I have been taking a closer look at the expense side of things, analyzing how much I spend on food, transportation, and bills this year compared to last year.  Why do we automatically think that budgeting means controlling our spending?  There is the income side that you need to look at as well.  The thing is that controlling expenses is relatively easy while increasing your income can be difficult to do, at least in the short-term.  However, arguably there is much more potential to improve your financial health by increasing your income.

Expense Analysis 2012 YTD

Although it sounds extremely dorky, I actually enjoyed looking at the data and making the charts for my last post looking at my credit card rewards for the first half of this year.  I took a slightly more in depth look at my expenses overall, especially with my handy budgeting app, and wanted to share the results.

Credit Card Expenses YTD 2012

Some of the benefits of budgeting is that you can get a really good look at how your expenses shape up year after year.  Are your consumer habits changing?  Maybe you didn't realize that eating out every day rather than every week was having that big of an impact.  Taking the time to check with a budget can be really helpful.  I am going to take a look at my records for the first half of 2012.

The Eisenhower Box

We all try to make the best use of our short time here on Earth.  It is important to manage our time wisely to maximize its value, so I thought I'd spend a post talking about how to become more productive and how best to plan ways to budget your time to reach your goals.  I thought I'd focus on a really interesting method to prioritize your to-do lists called the Eisenhower Box.  I will also talk about Pareto analysis and the POSEC method in a future post.

Membership Programs and Mailing Lists

There are always two sides to the budget equation: revenues and expenses.  If you want more spending power, you have to look toward increasing the revenue side of the equation, meaning you have to either get a raise at your job (or get a job if you don't have one) or find alternate sources of income.  This is generally pretty difficult considering you have no direct control over how much you can move this bar.  However, increasing your revenues will often lead to a bigger change in your budget than penny-pinching your expenses, which is often much easier to do.  This post is going to look at a couple benefits you can get by finding some discounts right under your nose to help with the expense side.

2011 Spending in Review

Happy New Year everyone.  I thought I'd take a post to look at my expenses for this previous year and use it to help give me a good idea of how much I should be spending in the future.  Also, for those of you still looking to get your first credit card, it may help to see which credit cards I use most often and what returns I get through their cash back programs.

Why You Should Manage Your Personal Finances

I've been regularly posting on my blog for more than half a year already, yet I think I have neglected one of the most important topics that need to be addressed: why should you even bother learning about personal finance?  Of course, some of us may automatically say "obviously, it's to have more money."  But that isn't the real reason. There is a reason why we even want money in the first place—so that we can pursue our interests and find what makes us the happiest.  Everything always comes down to seeking happiness and how it comes to each and every one of us is almost completely unique.

Weekday Vegetarian

I don't have time these two weeks to make a very formal post about a new topic, so I thought I'd share a very motivating TED talk I have heard in the past and taken to heart.  It is about vegetarianism and the guy talks about a unique way of thinking about your health.  I started it about a year ago after watching this video and I really believe in its benefits.  In a previous post, I mentioned how buying in bulk can help you better budget.  Buying groceries are a better alternative to eating out at a restaurant and with weekday vegetarianism, you can help your budget (the environment, and your health) even more.  Click read more to see the video.

Haven't Made A Budget Video

This is one of funniest educational videos I have ever seen.  It was recently blogged on Get Rich Slowly and I couldn't resist sharing it here.  It is basically a story about a guy trying to get a girl and realizing that she wants someone financially responsible.

If you aren't sure about some of the terms they use in the video (like ETF or 401k), you can try to find the posts I made about them in my history on the right hand side.  Anyway, enjoy!

Best and Worst Ways to Raise Cash

There was a similar post on investopedia.com, so I thought I'd reblog with some of my own input on this idea.  We'll take a look at several ways to raise emergency cash and the consequences of doing so.

The best method to raise cash is to keep an emergency fund, which I posted about recently, and not needing to raise cash.  Some good storage places for your emergency fund is a high yield online savings account or a money market account.

Creating an Emergency Fund

An article recently quoted an FCC survey citing that 64% of Americans would be unable to get $1000 for an emergency.  To me, it isn't that alarming, but hopefully college students understand the importance of having an emergency fund available for easy access.  It is quite risky living paycheck to paycheck without access to cash, which is probably more common as a college student.  However, we also probably have access to parents in times of emergency but it is especially important to have our own fund.  Once we graduate and live in the "real world," we will have to deal with these issues independently.

Save on Electricity

Most college students probably won't have to worry about this for a while, but if you care for the environment or already pay your own electricity bills, here are some tips to cut down on your usage (and of course, costs).

Encourage Healthy Eating Habits

Sometimes, what's good for our health is also good for our wallets.  Here are some tips for what healthy choices you can make that also cut down on costs.

In general, shopping at grocery stores instead of eating out will cut down your food expenses and also be healthier.  Learning how to cook on your own will allow you to control what goes into your food so that you can more carefully monitor how much sodium and sugar you get.  Fruits and vegetables are high in fiber and can help you feel more full more quickly.  Some of the most nutritious foods are quite low in cost such as bananas, carrots, potatoes, whole-wheat flour, and dried beans.  There are people who think fruits and veggies are too expensive, but these same people might spend $3 on a pound of candy rather than $1 on a pound of bananas.

Textfree

This post is probably not as applicable for my peers, so I understand that the majority of people won't benefit as much from this post (which is why I'm putting it up in the middle of the week), and my blog doesn't get much traffic anyway.

But, if you aren't a frequent texting fiend (which most high school and college students are) and you have a wifi device (such as an iPod touch) with easy access (such as on a college campus), then you could save $10-30 a month by dropping your text plan and signing up for text free (or your parents could save it in which case most students would probably stop reading here).  It is an app in the apple store which lets you text any phone number through a wifi connection.  The savings is fairly significant, accumulating up to a few hundred dollars a year.

The Case for Generics

Everyone probably thinks of drugs when hearing generics versus brand names, but it certainly applies to other products.  When going down the pharmaceutical aisle, though, it is easy to see the discrepancy in price between generic drugs and brand name drugs, even though they are the same compounds in the same quantities.  Are brand name products really worth the price?

The answer really depends on your comfort with the company.  For some people, brand name products may be worth the extra price if that company has established a good reputation with the customer.  If you don't have confidence in the quality of a generic producer, it may make sense to pay for brand names.