spending

Big Budget Destroyers are Little Expenses

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Once upon a time, businesses sold you goods and services. You paid once and then used them until they wore out, broke, or no longer served your needs. Then, you went and bought something new. This works pretty good for customers, but can be hard on businesses who have to constantly come up with new ways to sell you something. These days, business has found a better way to consistently fund it’s profit and loss statement, but it may have ruined its customer’s budgets along the way. Little Subscriptions When you make your budget for the month, chances are you properly account for those standard monthly bills like electricity, phone, cable, HOA dues, car payments, rent / mortgage, water, heat, and so on. Chances are also good that these payments eat up a fair amount of your budget. But, are you accounting for all of those little subscriptions out there? If you try replacing any of those above services, chances they come with different monthly subscriptions. Cutting the cord on your cable company? Netflix, or Hulu Plus are monthly subscriptions. You can also subscribe to Amazon Prime on a monthly basis. If you want to replace your DVR, Tivo wants …

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Spend Your Values

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I have written here before about how people are not robots and that earning, spending, savings and investing money is seldom done in an emotionless vacuum. Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t understand what is the “right” move according to an unemotional spreadsheet, but actually living with your money and personal finance is much more important than trying to pretend you should strive toward never doing anything but what the calculator says is right. Spending My Values The concept of spending your values, is not mine. I’m not sure where it came from originally, but now that I’ve heard of it from someone else, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at it, and pass the idea on to you. When we look at spending money responsibly, the first thing we do is look at a budget, whether formally written down and calculated, or just sort of sketched out mentally. The main component of spending responsibly is not spending more than you have. After that, personal finance at its most basic level is paying your obligations in any given month, and then, determining where to spend and save whatever is left over. For many of us, …

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