The first 30 years of my life I was convinced it was the other way around. I believed that in order to be successful you had to make a lot of money, at any price, even if it meant that you hated what you did for a living. After all, what was more important than making a lot of money?
I always talk on here about watching your spending, staying out of debt, to stop spending on useless “stuff” that doesn’t bring real benefit to your life, etc.. But that doesn’t mean you should be a cheap bastard with your money, either.
OK, times are tough – We all know it. Right now, you might be worrying about how to pay for groceries or the gasoline in your car, and we can use all the help you can get to stretch each and every dollar. Luckily, I have a few friends that have plenty of tips for saving money and I asked them to send them all to me so I could assemble a list for you – the person looking to save money.
At my house, basic digital cable TV cost over $69 per month (plus taxes) and I watch maybe 10 or 15 of the 150+ channels that they provide me, meaning that I pay for many channels that I have no interest in. With the price of just about everything headed skyward, and paychecks plummeting, paid cable and satellite TV is often one of the first things to go from anyone’s budget.
I just received yet another medical bill from a pathology office that my Dermatologist used a few months ago. After a small biopsy on one visit, and then surgery and stitches on another, I thought I had wrapped up paying off this latest round of skin cancer medical bills – but boy was I wrong. See, I had finished paying off the $700 in doctor’s bills, but not the bills for the lab that did the pathology testing and diagnoses. I had forgotten that my doctor said that those services would be billed separately! Thus, a new bill showed up the other day for $382 from these guys, and just as I was preparing to call them up and pay off the bill with my rewards credit card, I remembered something pretty important: my doctor gave me a discount on his services because I don’t have health insurance and I was paying in cash. Would the pathology organization be willing to give me a discount as well? What could it hurt to ask?
Sure, the convenience of those big-box stores is nice because you can get almost everything you need (and a bunch of stuff you don’t, if you are anything like the average person – myself included) in one place, but do you know where your money goes after you give it to the clerk? It heads right back to the big-box headquarters, paying out giant bonuses and perks to the bigwigs while leaving the workers to fight for minimum wage and meager benefits. I fight the urge to buy everything at the big-box stores as much as the next person, because of convenience and price, but when I think about where my money is going it does make it a little easier to try to search out smaller shops. When I lived in New Mexico, I lived in a very small town where most of the stores and restaurants were locally-owned, and I tried to make it a point of buying from them instead of driving the 63 miles to the nearest Target Superstore. (There was a Walmart in my town, but I never shop there for reasons I won’t get into here and that you guys have heard before) Sometimes it took going to 2 different stores to find what I needed, or spending an extra $.50 over the price it would have been “down the hill”, but it was worth it because there was a local human behind the storefront.
As of August 15th, 2010, there are new laws in place regarding overdraft fees from your bank. Up until that date, many banks and credit unions automatically enrolled customers in an overdraft service that could run as much as $35 each time you over-drafted your account. This service was there (in addition to padding the bank’s bottom line) to “protect you” from having your card declined due to having insufficient funds in your account. Granted, if they had just left the $35 IN the account, maybe you wouldn’t have gone over the limit, but still – this was an automatic enrollment and not something you could opt out of. Well, that all changed on August 15th, when the overdraft section of the financial legislation overhaul went into effect.
About two weeks ago, I was having a pretty in-depth conversation with a good friend of mine when the topic of money came up. Normally, I try to keep talk about both money and politics out of my discussions with my friends, but this time I decided to go with it to see where it went. We talked about how much money we used to make in our twenties compared to today, and if we were doing better now than we were then. While I make about 50% of what I used to make at my highest earning level in corporate America, I am much happier than I was then – I make my own hours, work when I want, and have downsized my life enough that I can still live comfortably. My friend, on the other hand, makes a great deal more than me but yet wouldn’t stop complaining about not having any money.
Just this week, I applied for health insurance that I may actually be able to get. After going without insurance since last year, and being rejected by all the private companies I could find to apply to, a very important part of healthcare reform has started – the ability for those of us with pre-existing conditions to get some form of health insurance. This part of the law created a new program to make health coverage available to you if you have been denied health insurance by private insurance companies because of a pre-existing condition. Hands up – that’s me! Administered either by individual states or with assistance from the Federal government, anyone with pre-existing health conditions who have been turned down for private insurance in the past 6 months and is a U.S. citizen is eligible to apply. And apply I did.
