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.
A couple of weeks ago I returned home from a 5,500 mile cross country road trip. Living in Colorado, with the rest of my family living in Massachusetts and Florida, it always takes a big trip in order to see everyone. And since I gave up flying 3 years ago, I now only travel by car or by train – and this summer’s trip was via my Mini Cooper. I drove from CO down to Florida via all back roads (no major highways) so I could see some great parts of the country rarely seen, then I drove up to Boston for a visit and to attend a wedding, and then I drove all the way back to Colorado. I was gone for just about a month, and I had a fantastic time both visiting people and just spending some of the summer on a road trip.
It’s that time again – time for Money Magazine’s 100 Best Places To Live In America. Every year I cover their findings, as I think it’s really interesting to read about where people are living “the good life” in this country. Their findings are based on data about job opportunities, education, crime rates, health care, extracurricular activities, and a bunch of other factors that can make or break a town’s livability. They start with towns and cities with populations between 50,000 and 300,000, then they exclude places where median income is more than 200% of the state median, then they screen out retirement communities, towns with high unemployment, etc., then they factor in additional data on the economy, followed by visits to the towns and interviews with local residents. It’s quite an exhaustive process!
If you don’t have your taxes taken out of a paycheck, guess what – you have to pay estimated taxes to the IRS and your home state every quarter of the year. And even if you have taxes taken out of your paycheck, but you don’t have enough taken out to cover your paycheck or any extra income from self-employment work, interest, dividends, alimony, etc., well, you also need to pay estimated taxes. If you don’t make the quarterly estimated payments or pay enough taxes through regular withholdings, you also may be charged a monetary penalty – even if you don’t owe anything when you file your return for the year. Hooray for the tax code! I have been paying estimated taxes for the past 5 years, as I have been mostly self-employed, and it’s not as bad as it seems to be – you just have to make sure you set aside enough money to make those quarterly payments. That to me was the most difficult thing to get used to; it takes discipline to take out a percentage of each and every dollar that comes your way and sock it away for quarterly estimated payments. I set up a separate account inside my ING Direct account labeled “Taxes”, and it eventually became habit that I no longer really think of.
As many of my long-time readers may remember, I no longer have health insurance. Since my divorce was finalized back in November, I have been unable to get private health insurance due to dealing with cancer back in 2008. Not a single insurance company will take me on as a customer, even though I am seemingly healthy today.
You know that expression, right? This pretty famous saying is in the fable “The Milkmaid and Her Pail” where Patty, a farmer’s daughter, is daydreaming as she walks to town with a pail of milk balanced on her head. “The milk in this pail will provide me with cream, which I will make into butter, which I will sell in the market, and buy a dozen eggs, which will hatch into chickens, which will lay more eggs, and soon I shall have a large poultry yard. I’ll sell some of the fowls and buy myself a handsome new gown and go to the fair, and when the young fellows try to make love to me, I’ll toss my head and pass them by.” At that moment, Patty tossed her head and lost the pailful of milk. Her mother said, “Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.” The same expression fits perfectly here in the world of personal finances, where many of us spend our money either before we have it or above and beyond our means. Well, here are 10 ways that some people do count their chickens before they hatch, putting their financial security at risk.
