Over the past month, I have heard horror stories about online colleges. One of them involves my daughter A and the other one involves a daughter of a friend, B. Both girls were enrolled in different online universities. Don’t get me wrong, I think being able to attend classes online is awesome! It provides an opportunity for people who could not necessarily attend classes at a campus to further their education, however, it is wise to look into both the cost and service they provide.
My daughter A inquired about taking classes at an Ashford University. She ended up applying for student loans through the school and registering for classes. She was approved for a pell grant and a student loan. She registered for classes and went through their tests to make sure she could log into her classes. At some point during the semester, she was unable to log into the blackboard. She contacted tech support who sent her a canned response. She did what they told her to do and was still unable to log in. She emailed them again and got no response. She called and left a message and got no response.
She got an email saying that if she did not log in she would fail the classes. She emailed tech support again with no response. She called and left a message with the admissions office and got no response. This went on until the semester was over and she had failed the classes.
B had a totally different experience. She wanted to go to school for nursing and decided to go to Kaplan University. Tuition didn’t seem too bad at their advertised cost of $353 per credit hour. She applied for financial aid through the college and was awarded both a pell grant and a student loan. She registered for 2 classes at a tuition cost of $2824 and did well. At some point during the semester, she discovered that the local community college offered the same course.
Her surprise came toward the end of the semester when she found that the total cost of her two classes came to over $4500. At this cost, if she was taking a full course load, this would have come to over $9000 per semester. Multiply this by the two years that it takes to complete the Nursing program and it adds up to over $36,000 and this price is not including summer semesters.
In comparison, the tuition cost for attending the local community college would be $1142 per semester. This includes all student fees. Books would be extra but she can not only buy them from the college bookstore, she can also buy used books. The total cost should be less than the Pell Grant that she received. The community college also offers some classes online. They also have a 100% placement after graduation.
Even though she was not unhappy with the service that Kaplan was providing, she decided that the wisest thing to do financially would be to attend the community college as she would finish with no student loan debt. The community college also offers a very comparable curriculum.
B called Kaplan to withdraw for the next semester. She spoke with a counselor who told her that they would have to check on something and call her back. She never received a call back. She has called and left several messages with no result. She is now getting email and letters telling her what she needs to do to complete registration. Her calls have gotten no response.
B has taken some steps to prevent being automatically registered at Kaplan. She has transferred the Pell Grant to the community college and has called the student loan lender to advise them that she has withdrawn from Kaplan so they will not be dispursing any further funds to Kaplan. Unfortunately, this does not prevent Kaplan from registering her and billing her for the classes.
I am not sure what contracts either of these girls signed but to their knowledge they are not required to continue for the full two year program. Online learning is such an awesome opportunity and it is a shame that some unscrupulous institutions are taking advantage of unsuspecting people. Here is another horror story from someone who opted let the school finance her education and they are now withholding her diploma until the entire $40,000 is paid. How does she go about getting a job in her field so that she can repay them without a diploma?
R is home and doing well with his new hip. We have been teasing him about being the bionic man. Seriously, he is doing very well considering and other than an intermittent fever, recovery has been smooth. I am very glad not to be running back and forth to the city which is an hour and a half away.
I have been trying to keep up with all of my chores and those of R’s that I can do. Of course, the animals have first priority and they take up a few hours morning and evening. The garden has gone wild!! We have had frequent showers and good hot days. I picked two gallons of limas, 10 okra, two gallons of tomatoes and still have peppers and another row of limas.
R is going to shell the lima beans and I am going to freeze tomatoes. We are eating tomatoes at every meal and still can’t keep up with them all. I have been peeling and freezing them in quarters but one of my readers suggested just freezing them whole in a paper bag. I am going to try a couple gallons that way as I can blanch and peel them as needed. I am also freezing green, chili and jalapeno peppers whole. Again it’s easier to process them as I need them instead of all at one time.
I am very pleased with our garden this year despite the issues that we have had with it. The wire grass has been a constant battle but doesn’t seem to be affecting the vegetable plants. It just makes picking much more difficult. I am disappointed that we lost all of the green beans to the bunnies but we have enough limas to make up for it.
If we can get a good batch of greens this fall, it will feed the two of us for most of the year. All of this for under $15.
Just wanted too give everyone a quick update. R had surgery yesterday for his hip replacement. He came through with flying colors but then spiked a fever last night. I was at the hospital until early this morning. His fever is back down but he is on IV antibiotics right now. Hopefully when the antibiotics are done, his fever will stay down. Other than that he is doing well and giving the nurses a run for their money.
Be back soon!!
I read an Liz Pulliam’s article on Why Credit Counseling Often Fails this week. It’s sad that so many people pay debt management companies to write their budget and reach a settlement with their debt collectors and then end up in default.
One thing that struck me was that debt collectors are now starting to accept a budget with a savings plan built in. One of the biggest reasons why debt management or credit counseling fails is when the person has an emergency of some kind and goes into default on their monthly budget. I see this as a huge step in the right direction.
But if you take it one step further, you are usually paying most debt management or credit counselors a fee. If the money that was going to pay them were put into a savings account, this possibly could have been avoided. If you have the resolve and patience to negotiate with your creditors, you can save money and get your debt under control.
These ten steps to DIY Debt Management give a clear plan on negotiating your own settlement and creating your own budget. These include a plan to build an emergency fund while paying off your debts.
Take Stock
The first thing that you need to do is figure out what money you have coming in and where that money is going. At one point in time, I had plenty of money coming in but when it came time to pay the bills, there was never quite enough. My money was leaking out all over the place. My biggest problem was not big purchases, it was the little under twenty dollar purchase that were draining my income away without me even realizing it. It’s easy to stop the big leaks because you tend to think about them and realize that you are spending the money. However, it is also far easier to justify in your mind those little ones, after all, it’s only ten dollars or twenty dollars. The problem is that those small purchases add up quickly. Have you ever wondered what happened to that one hundred dollar bill once you broke it? Try writing down every penny that you spend for a week.
Find the Leaks
Take a look at what you have written down and put an L by every purchase that you could have easily avoided. These might be things like impulse purchases, snacks and sodas, toys to reward your children for being good.. Ah, now I have hit on something difficult. Do you tell your kids when they go with you to the store that you will buy them something if they are good? I know that I used to bribe mine quite often. It was usually not a big bribe but it adds up and the kids would break, lose or be bored with the bribe in less than a day. Make a list of the leaky items and set it aside.
Make a Plan
Make a spending plan or budget. Make sure that the number one thing on that list is you. If you are going to have a chance at sticking to a budget, you have got to make an emergency fund/savings account a priority. You cannot stick to a budget if every time something comes up, you have to fall off the budget wagon and blow your budget. My biggest mistake in budgeting was not allowing money for entertainment, gifts, Christmas, and emergencies. I thought that until I paid off my bills, I could go without these things. Guess what? It doesn’t work! It’s like going on a diet and saying that you weren’t going to eat. Reduce your leaks but don’t try to cut them out entirely.
Write It Down
Write it down in a format that you will be able to send to your creditors. You will use this plan to negotiate a reasonable payment and interest with them. The plan you will send to them should not be too detailed. They don’t want to know how many sodas you will be buying during the week so keep your budget or plan categories general. You will need to include the debt payments as well as household expenses such as electric, telephone and cable.
Leave Room For Flexibility
There are some expenses that are ‘hard expenses’ such as utilities, insurance and rent or mortgage payments. You have to have a place to live, most of us also require electricity, food and a car to drive to work. These should be listed right under your payment to yourself. Next would be your miscellaneous expenses, I consider this my flex fund and I gave myself more than I thought I would spend. If you don’t allow yourself money for these types of things, your plan will fail. It’s almost guaranteed to fail because unless you are a monk, you are going to have to buy a gift or go to a movie or just get out of the house. This is your leaky fund and all of the items that were listed as leaks are going to come out of this fund. You will need to make a commitment to spend only the budgeted amount on them. After your expenses, you will list your desired debt payments. I have included a simplified example.
Income 2200
Savings: 200
Mortgage 400
Utilities 100
Insurance 55
Car Payment 255
Misc Expenses 150 (Entertainment, gifts, vacation, leaks, etc)
Groceries 400
Gasoline 100
Medical 50
Debt 1 150
Debt 2 140
Debt 3 100
Debt 4 100
Total 0
Make a Commitment
This is the most important and the most difficult part of DIY debt settlement. When you are paying someone to manage your debts, you make a commitment to them and some people find it’s easier to keep it when you have someone standing over your shoulder. If you are going the DIY route, you will need to make a commitment to yourself, your spouse, your parents, or your kids. If you are married, living with someone then they need to be a part of the plan and make their own commitment. Make it for a specific period of time or a specific goal. You are going to need to make a commitment to your creditors anyway for a period of time but my suggestion to you is to make a commitment to yourself to stick to this budget for a month before you call your creditors. When you start calling them, you will want to be able to pay the agreed upon amount right away.
Give your plan a month’s trial and then sit down and tweak it. Are you still leaking? Are they legitimate leaks or did gasoline cost you more than you expected? Were your medical costs higher than you expected? If you allotted a reasonable amount for your misc and medical expenses and you came in under it for the month, I would not lower them. Put the money into savings, because Christmas is coming and no matter what religion you are, there are going to be certain months when expenses are higher than normal.
Call Your Creditors
I have found that it is usually best to call your creditors and tell them that you are unable to make your current payments and that you want to work out a plan that will enable you to do this. Offer to send them your budget. In today’s economy, most of them will work with you. It might take a few phone calls to get someone who will negotiate but keep trying. Write down every call you make, who you talked to and what the outcome of the call was.
If you don’t get anywhere, write them a letter and include your budget along with your plan to pay them off. Wait two weeks and call again. Ask to speak to someone with the authority to negotiate a settlement and budget plan. There is certainly someone there who can do it. Remember when you are negotiating with them that most debt management plans fail so their job is to get as much money as fast as they can. Your job is to negotiate a plan that allows you to pay them back successfully and live at the same time. Essentially, you both have the same goal: getting your debts paid off.
Revise, Revise, Revise
Every month is going to be a little bit different. Some months you are going to have more expenses than others. You may get a raise or your electric bill may go up. A budget is not written in stone. If your electric bill goes up, you are going to have to find the money in your budget to pay it. This means that you have to do one of two things, reduce an expense somewhere else or increase your income. The easiest place to reduce is your misc expenses. These are things that are not usually a necessity and you can live without them for a month or so. This is the second reason that I told you not to skimp on these expenses. For a short term fix for a budget deficit, you can use the money alloted here to pay the extra expense. If it is going to be a long term deficit such as your car insurance going up every month, you are going to have to revise your whole budget. You have been tracking your expenses for at least two months now so you should have a pretty good idea as to where you can reduce.
Do not reduce your debt payments if at all possible. You have made a commitment to these creditors and you need to honor it. If you default on your agreement, they will usually revert back to the original terms. If it is absolutely necessary to reduce those payments, then call the creditors BEFORE your payments are due. Tell them the circumstances and renegotiate the payments. Again, since your goal is to pay off your debts, this should be a last resort.
Free Money
There ain’t no such thing as free money! Don’t fall into this trap when you get a tax return, gift of money, bonus, etc. This has undone me many times. Don’t splurge just because the money wasn’t in your budget. This will undermine you in so many different ways. It’s like an alcoholic falling off the wagon, once you get in the mindset to spend money freely it is hard to stop with just the extra money. Focus on your goals. Your priority when you set out was to pay off your debts. Don’t lose focus on that goal. Pick one debt and send a larger payment to get it that much closer to being paid off or pay off a smaller debt with it and pat yourself on the back.
It is hard to stay focused on paying off your debts. I have ready many articles that state that budgeting is easy but I am not going to lie to you about it. It may be easy for some but for me, it was very difficult. It took almost 50 years for me to figure out that most of the stress in my life came from my debts and my struggle to pay them. I would get started and do great for a month and then just lose focus on what I was doing. Then I would feel guilty and just shut it all out. The reason that I started this website was to help me focus on paying off my debts.
Congratulate Yourself
You will notice that I did not say reward yourself. Too often we associate rewards with spending money. We get a new job, we celebrate by going out to dinner. We buy new clothes, we splurge. That was the old us. So instead of spending money and undermining all your efforts, take a moment every day to congratulate yourself for your successes. They may be small successes at first, such as saving five dollars by packing your lunch or combining trips to town but they are still successes. Feel good about it!
When you get your first savings account statement, take a good look at it. It will come to be the measure of your success. Watch it grow. Nurture it. If you are putting ten percent of your income into savings, then you will see it grow quickly. My emergency fund is the biggest reason that I can stick to my budget and it is my biggest reward for doing so. It gives me security. It keeps me from feeling so much pressure that I go out and spend just to relieve it.
Draw two jars and put them on the refrigerator or hang them on the wall by your desk. Put your savings goal at the top of one of them and the total amount of your debts on the other. Fill the jar every month by the amount you have saved or paid. Make it visual so you can see the results easily. Congratulate yourself for every small step.
Your creditors are not going to congratulate you. Your bank probably won’t congratulate you for saving money. You are the one who is going to have to find ways to stay motivated to do it. If you want to share your successes or your struggles, feel free to leave a comment. No one understands how difficult it can be better than me and quite a few of the people who read these articles. I am always happy to celebrate a success or share in a struggle.
Take Heart
It gets easier. The first few months are the hardest. If you can stick to your plan for a couple of months, you will find that the whole process gets easier each month after that. You will find the things that motivate you to continue whether it’s watching your emergency fund grow or watching your debts shrink. You will find that there is less stress in your life and that you have more time and energy to enjoy living it.
Tags: budget, debt reduction, debt settlement, emergency fund
We started off the weekend on Friday with a buying trip to North Carolina. We had caught the bills up and carefully budgeted the trip so that we could go and still have money to buy horses. I had packed our lunch and dinner.
I was up at 4 am and we hit the road at 6 am. Yawn!! It is a 4 hour trip and we wanted to be there early. I had gotten about 3 miles down the road when I realized that I didn’t have the cell phone. I turned around and went back after it. I wouldn’t want to take that long a trip without it.
Everything went well all day Friday. The weather was great if hot. The trip up was uneventful and by late fridaynight, had bought two beautiful horses and was back at the hotel. It was very late and I was very tired. I fell into bed and slept for a few hours. At 7 am, I was up and headed back to the barn to check on the horses. I fed and made sure that all was well and then headed back to the hotel.
That would have been when the trouble started. The cell phone was missing. I checked the whole hotel room over and it wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the truck. I checked the hotel lobby thinking that maybe I set it down when I went up to get coffee. I tried calling it from the room and listening for it. The only place left to look was at the barn.
After breakfast, I headed to the barn to load the horses and find the phone. The horses loaded fine but there was no phone. Giving up on finding the phone, I climbed into the truck and started it up. I put it in gear, gave it a little gas and didn’t move and I mean not even an inch.
The transmission was gone. Boom. It had acted up the week before but straightened out after adding fluid. I had a mechanic drive it to check it out plus a couple of friends who are experienced with mechanical things. They all thought it would be fine, that it was just low on fluid. Apparently, everyone was wrong.
So here I am 4 hours from home with a trailer full of horses, a broken down truck and no cell phone. Oh boy! The barn was getting ready to close for the day so I quickly borrowed the phone to call home. I got in touch with R’s son and his girlfriend and told them to find someone to come get me and the trailer.
And then I sat there all day, waiting and not knowing if someone was coming or not. I did spend some time walking the parking lot looking for the phone. I walked up and down the road in case I had set it on the truck and it had bounced off. I rode the horses. I waited and waited. The security guard checked on me every hour or so but mostly, I waited.
After 6 hours, my friends made it to the barn. I was mightily glad to see them and mightily grateful to them for giving up their weekend to come get me. We headed home and arrived at about 11 o’clock minus one truck and one cell phone.
This week I have been dealing with suspending service to the cell and trying to get estimates on fixing the truck. When it was all said and done, it looked like it was going to be a little over a thousand dollars to rebuild the transmission. The cell phone is suspended until I can either find it or afford to buy another one.
The good news is that after deciding that there was no way that we could pay to have the transmission rebuilt, I got on the computer and found a rebuilt transmission for $250. I had someone interested in one of the horses I bought so I had a quick sale and got the money to buy it. It was another 90 mile drive to pick it up but we should save $750 to $1000 on it.
So once again, I have taken one step ahead and two steps back.
I was reading a series over on The Simple Dollar on Trent’s 14 Rules of money. The first rule that he wrote about was Spend Less Than You Earn. It made me think about my own situation.
Two years ago, I began my journey to ‘fix’ my financial situation. I began reading personal finance books and blogs with a passion and one of the rules that I saw the most was “Spend Less Than You Earn”. While at first glance it seems like great advice, it was almost enough to make me give up. I was over my head in debt and my income was shrinking not growing. Obviously, spending more than I earned had gotten me into this mess.
Spending less than I earned every month was pretty much an impossibility. I had so much debt and so little income that every penny that I made had a place to go. When I wrote down my first budget, I was so far in the red that I couldn’t see black. How could I possibly spend less than I earned?
I look back now and realize that it was the first book that I read “The Richest Man In Babylon” which helped me the most. This book was written in 1926 by George Samuel Clason. It was originally a series of pamphlets that were handed out by banks and insurance companies. Clason’s firt rule was to “Pay Yourself First”.
Pay Yourself First
In other words, no matter how much you owe others or how much you spend, you need to pay yourself first by saving some of your money. Clason suggests saving 10% by spending only 9 out of every ten dollars earned. I always questioned this amount but I can tell you that 10% works. It is a small enough amount that if you put it into savings, you will not miss it. Even when I was barely making enough to live on each month, that $10 on every hundred was small enough that I didn’t miss it.
At first, I thought I would put whatever money was left at the end of the month into savings. I quickly learned that if I waited until the end of the month, the money ran out long before the month did. There was always an extra bill to pay or groceries to buy or that extra tank of gas to go someplace. There was never any money left at the end of the month. The habit of spending what I had in my pocket was so deeply ingrained that it left without me even realizing it.
When I started to put that 10% into savings FIRST even when I knew I was not going to have enough money to pay bills or buy groceries. Every single month that I put money into savings before I paid bills or bought groceries, I made my savings goal and somehow I managed to pay the household bills and eat. I didn’t pay all of the bills but I could not have paid them without saving anyway.
Now I know that many of you are thinking that you would have used the money that I was putting into savings to pay the debts. Clason’s second rule is to control your expenses and to learn the difference between needs and desires. Clason’s second rule is to control your expenses and to learn the difference between needs and desires.In some ways, I agree with you but I had come to think of my small emergency fund as my survival fund. If something went wrong, I would not be able to pay the essentials like rent, utilities and food without some small amount of money in savings.
Emergency Fund
My initial savings goal was $500 to be used for emergencies. It seems like a small amount but it took me almost 6 months to save it. I tried snowflaking money into it by selling things on eBay and on craig’s list. I saved my change and added it to my savings. All of it helped but in the end the only thing that really worked was paying myself first.
Eventually, my income grew and my debt load shrunk. It is now possible to spend less than I earn but that first lesson is still the one that governs my financial life. No matter what else I buy or pay, no matter what I have to give up, I pay myself first by putting that 10% into savings.
After 2 years, I still do not have the fully funded emergency fund (6 – 8 months of living expenses) that is recommended. I would like to think that I will eventually build up to that amount but I have enough to keep my head above water for a month or so.
Beyond Emergencies
Paying myself first has become more than just a tool to build my emergency fund. The emergency fund also doubles as an operating account. I do withdraw money from it for more than emergencies. There have been times when I have had to take money out of it to keep the farm operating. My goal is to only take money out for emergencies and to pay for something that will increase our income.
Clason’s third rule is to make your savings multiply. This can mean as little as earning interest on your savings by putting it in a savings account or cd but it can also mean using it to invest in something that will increase your earnings. While we don’t take money out of savings to buy things that we desire, I do not feel guilty about taking it out to take advanatage of opportunities.
We buy and sell horses for a living. We generally budget a certain amount of our income to buy more horses. Every once in awhile an opportunity to purchase a horse for very little comes along and if we didn’t have some savings, we would have to turn it down. For example, a friend recently had a horse that she needed to sell quickly. It was a wonderful horse, registered, well trained and very pretty. She wanted a little more for it than we currently had budgeted for restocking, however, I knew that we could easily make double or triple that amount when we sold her. I took the money out of our savings to buy the horse and sure enough I more than tripled our money on her.
For those of you who are not in business, there are many chances for investment. You might invest in a college course that will increase your earning potential or you might be investing in your own home. The important thing is to not only save 10% of your income but also to make that 10% work for you so that it increases.
If you are new to personal finance and struggling to get your head above water, don’t be discouraged by the advice to spend less than you earn. Try paying yourself first and you will soon find that you are spending less than you earn.
There have been a ton of sales on chicken lately. I have bought 4 or 5 for 59 cents per pound. A whole chicken will last R and I at least two days. I have been searching for easy chicken recipes that will add some variety to our meals instead of plain old baked chicken. These are quick and easy chicken recipes that will cook in the slow cooker while you are at work.
I don’t use my crockpot nearly as much now that I don’t work outside the home but I still pull it out on busy days when I know that we are going to come in hungry and want dinner. It is absolutely my favorite kitchen appliance.
Easy Crockpot Chicken
- 1 whole frying chicken
- 1 small bottle salad dressing
- pepper
Wash and pat chicken dry. Rub inside and out with salad dressing. Any kind of italian, catalina, russian or french dressing will work. I don’t think that ranch or bleu cheese would do as well. Place into the crock pot and set heat on low. Chicken will be ready in 6 to 8 hours.
Salsa Crockpot Chicken
- 1 chicken or 3lbs of boneless chicken breast
- 1 jar salsa (fruit salsa or regular mexican salsa)
Cut up whole chicken. Wash and pat chicken dry. Place chicken into crockpot and pour salsa over it. Set slow cooker to low and leave for 5-8 hours.
Crockpot Lemon Chicken
- 6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1″ pieces
- 1/3 cup flour
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1/8 tsp. pepper
- 2 Tbsp. olive oil
- 1 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
- 3 Tbsp. ketchup
- 3 Tbsp. brown sugar
- 3 Tbsp. lemon juice
- 6 oz. can frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed
- 2 Tbsp. cornstarch
Mix flour with salt and pepper in a zip lock bag. Place chicken piece in bag and shake to coat. Shake off extra flour mix and brown in olive oil over medium high heat. Remove chicken and place in a 3-4 quart crockpot.Mix the vinegar, ketchup, brown sugar, lemon juice, and lemonade concentrate in small bowl and pour into the skillet. Cook and stir, scraping to remove browned bits, until mixture comes to a boil. Pour sauce over chicken in crockpot. Cover and cook on LOW for 7-8 hours or on HIGH for 3-4 hours. When ready to serve, combine cornstarch and water in small bowl, mix well and stir into the sauce. Cook on HIGH for 20-30 minutes until thickened.
All three of these recipes are easy to cook and inexpensive as well. Our kids and grandkids all love them and it’s really nice to be able to spend time with them instead of in the kitchen cooking the meals. Try them out and let me know how they work for your family.
The following ad on Craig’s list caught my attention this morning because it had a word that I had never heard before.
gleaning for 8mth unemployed family (central VA)
Have any fruit trees that you no longer collect the fruit or perhaps don’t have the time or health to do the picking? I am a Christian Dad that has been unemployed for 8 months now and am looking to store/preserve food for the future. If you have leftovers in your gardens or orchards I will be glad to pick for free or work out a labor barter agreement such as picking shares, mowing your lawn, cleaning gutters, etc.
Being an avid reader and writer, my vocabulary is pretty good, but I had never heard of gleaning before and I had to look the word up in the dictionary. Gleaning means to gather grain or other produce left by reapers. Once I had read the ad, it was pretty obvious what the man was advertising for but my google search for gleaning turned up some other interesting information.
There are several networks both secular and non secular who provide gleaning. These groups work with farmers to provide volunteers to go out to farms and harvest unmarketable fruits and vegetables. They then provide these leftovers to food banks and pantries. Often these gleanings are the only fresh fruits and vegetables that they can get to give to needy and hungry families.
The ad on Craig’s list was a surprise and it truly left me wondering how successful it would be and whether we would see more ads like this in the coming months. I don’t know if it’s a unique idea but it certainly sparked my curiosity. If the garden had done better this year, I would have been willing to let him have some of the excess .
If you would like to learn more about gleaning, there is the Mid Atlantic Gleaning Network, and the Society of St Andrew. There are several articles about gleaning including this one from the News Record Gleaning: Helps Hungry, Stops Waste and Petric’s memory of gleaning potatoes during the depression.
Gleaning is also a mandate from the bible Deuteronomy 24:19:
When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be left for the alien, the orphan, and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all your undertakings
In our rural community, it is common to share your excess produce with families who might need it. It’s a small town and everyone pretty much knows which families are having hard times and which are not. The extra cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, corn and other vegetables are often given away.
If you garden, what do you do with the extra fruits and vegetables? Have you ever participated in a gleaning?
Tags: gardening
I have had a chance to catch up on my RSS reading this week. These are a few of my favorites, some are newer, some are older but all are worth reading.
Squawkfox asks whether Frugal Living is a Fad? What do you think? Has the economy changed the way you think about money and once times get better will you go back to your old ways?
The Simple Dollar has a post that I wish I could tattoo on the inside of my children’s eyelids, Stop Trying To Impress Other People. It is one of his 14 rules that govern his financial and personal life.
Frugal Dad had me spellbound with his post about a family who lives totally off the grid in New Zealand. I used to dream about doing something like this. Does that make me a hermit?
I’ve Paid For This Twice Already makes her case for reducing debt before saving money. I would agree AFTER you have a minimal emergency fund. If you don’t have at least some money in savings, you will end up with more debt rather than less.
Christian Personal Finance reviews the book 10 minutes, 10 months, 10 years. It’s an interesting decision making process that can easily be used for making financial decisions as well as personal ones.
MoneyNing asks what to do when money conflicts with ethics. Do you choose to stick to your ethics when it comes to money decisions?
Sound Money Matters has some great tips for working at home. You can be more productive at home with less distractions if you stick to these tips. I know I could get much more work done at home than when I was at work.
Devastate Boredom is a new blog for me but she offers a great cheat sheet for finding organic produce. Her tips are good not only for finding organic but also on saving money on fruits and vegetables.
Debt Free Adventure is another new blog for my reader. His tips for keeping his Emergency fund for Emergencies is a classic. One of the hardest things to do is decide what is an emergency and what is not. He has 6 tips for how to leave your emergency fund alone.
I hope that you enjoy these articles as much as I did. Have a great weekend.
I have 4 children, the oldest is 32 and the youngest is 16. I sincerely wish that I was not financially adrift when the oldest ones were growing up, however, I had little or no financial sense. There were times when I had plenty of money and there were times when I had little or no money. It really didn’t matter, I spent whatever I had.
When I had a job, I automatically had money put into a 401(k) plan. It was thoughtless savings and when I left that job or fell on hard times, I ransacked the account, paid the penalties and counted my blessings. If I had only known then, what I know now.
I watch my children, young and old, making the same mistakes that I made. If they don’t have money, they spend it anyway. When they do have money, they spend it like there is no tomorrow. I cringe when I see the way that they spend money. Don’t get me wrong, most of them are grown and have the right to buy what they want and live the way they want but I feel like I should have taught them better.
These few things took me 52 years to learn. I wish that I could teach them to my children, it would make such a difference in their lives.
#1 – Save, Save, Save
Kids, I can’t tell you how long it took me to learn this lesson. Save a small percentage of your money and protect it from yourself like a mother protects her nest. When times are good, saving is comparatively easy and while it’s easy to save, it is also easy to rob that savings because it was so easy to accumulate it. When times are hard and you can still manage to save a little, your savings are harder to come by and will give you security. You will also value whatever small amount you can save. It’s hard to remember that times might not always be good and you might need that savings at some point in your life. So when times are good, save as much as you can; when times are bad, save as much as you can and remember when you dip into that savings for something that you might need it more tomorrow than you do today.
#2 – Debt Has Eternal Life
Most of the things that you buy today will have no value in 5 years. That new phone or new car or new tv will not be worth a tenth in 5 years. Quite a few of them will have no value in a year. Yes, they are cool today but you will get bored with it quickly and want a newer model. If you go into debt for it, you will probably still be paying for it long after it is gone. Save credit for a house and a car as they are probably the only things that will outlast the payment. Even after paying your debt off, it lives on in your credit report. If you have a 5 year loan, it will stay on your credit report for 12 years.
#3 -Learn About Money
No one teaches you about money. There is no class in school that teaches basic finance much less about saving and investing your money. You are pretty much on your own when it comes to budgeting, investing, saving and planning. There are tons of good books out there that you can read about finance. Take the time to learn about it. Investing is fascinating and it was a total mystery to me until a few years ago. I am still not sure I totally understand all the facets of it. If you don’t know what a zero based budget is, find out. You may not want to do it but at least learn about the choices you are making.
#4 – Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket
What led to my own financial troubles was relying on the equity in my house to be the biggest part of my financial plan. The unthinkable happened, real estate values dropped like a stone and I lost all that equity. In six months, equity of over $100,000 dropped to $0. I wish now that I had invested some of that in other things so that I might have had a chance to save some of it. If you invest your savings in one thing such as the stock market, and it falls, you can lose it all. Diversify. Keep some in a savings account, some in CDs, some in stocks, etc.
#5 – Budgets Are Not Evil
A budget does not mean that you can’t spend money on what you want. It is simple a decision making process to determine where you really want to spend money and how much money you will have to spend. It is a process that allows you to prioritize your spending so that you have money to spend on the things that are important to you. It gives you the security of knowing what you have, what you owe and what you will be getting. Budgets aren’t set in stone, you can change them easily.
#6 – Credit Cards ARE EVIL
The single most devastating thing that you can do to your finances is buy things with a credit card. Almost all credit cards charge ridiculously high interest rates even the best charge more than you would pay at a bank. If you pay the minimum payment, you will be primarily be paying the interest charge and you will pay it forever. If you are late, most credit cards will not only charge you a late fee but raise your interest rate. It is extremely difficult to pay off the balance especially when your budget is tight.
#7 – Emergency Fund
A credit card is not an emergency fund. You need to have some amount of money in a savings account in case of an emergency. Hopefully, you will have enough in it to support you for a couple months if you have no other income. At the very worst, you should have enough in it to get you and your stuff home. It is not easy to have the discipline to save an emergency fund but the more you save, the easier it gets.
#8 – Financial Freedom or Financial Peace
I don’t know if I will ever have financial freedom but I will have financial peace. There will come a time in my life when I know that I have enough money to live on in the worst case. Every dollar that I put in savings gives me more security and less worry. To me, financial freedom would be the freedom to be able to follow my dreams and to have the money to do so. I doubt at this point in my life, I will reach that but there is no reason why you can’t.
#9 – The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Marriage
Developing a financial plan and having an emergency fund is the best thing you can do for your marriage. Agreeing on a financial plan, determining your financial goals and relieving the financial stress will do more for your marriage than any counselor in the world. I have listened to all of you and your biggest marital problems are financial. You and your spouse need to sit down and reach agreement on what is important to each of you and find a meeting point. Once you have developed your financial goals, develop a plan to reach them and then stick to it. This will help your marriage more than any other thing that you can do.
#10 – Teach Your Children
Do what I say, not what I did. Once you have taken the time to figure out what to do with the money you have and don’t have, teach it to your children. Teach them about saving, help them to develop a habit of savings, let them see how their money can grow. Teach them about budgeting. Let them plan how they are going spend their money and let them suffer the consequences of not following their plan. It is a hard lesson but it’s easier when you are there to help them. Once they have learned about budgeting and planning, teach them about credit. Teach them everything you know and it still won’t be enough.
Tags: children
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