Posts Tagged ‘Ideas’

Where Else Can I Cut Back

This week DomesticCents was talking about what she was willing to do without, and that got me thinking. I’ve often had this conversation with a friend of mine, when she asks me about my debt repayment adventures. When I complain that I’m often impatient and am just sick of having this debt hanging over me, she’ll reply with “Well, where else can you cut back in your spending to help out?” Which is a great question if you haven’t figured out where you spend your money, if you haven’t already cut back on most of your variable spending. Which I have. So asking me where else I can cut back is a little annoying. Unless I go cold-turkey and get rid of my cable tv, and my car, there’s not much else I can trim back. Where have I already cut back?

Cutting the Food Bill

In DecemberI blogged about how I was going to be super-frugal in my food spending to make a bit more of a dent in my debt repayment (again, because I’m impatient.) I called it Plan B, and it worked well, as I was able to add about $100-150 more to my debt repayment in January. But I was one unhappy camper. I realized that cutting back to the uber-cheap meals was not something I’m able to do. I wasn’t even going the Ramen noodle or KD route, but was doing some cheap and tasty pasta meals, but I must say that I was bored pretty quickly with that. So I definitely can’t do that on a regular basis, but it’s something I try to do once or twice a year.

Cutting the Fuel Bill

This one’s an easy one right now, since I’m now a work-at-home freelance writer! But when I was still commuting, I made sure to buy gas when it was cheap, I drove slower on the highway, made sure to use my cruise control whenever possible, and kept my tires properly inflated. This definitely helped me cut down on the fuel costs, as did the lowering cost of the price of gas. If it was still up at the $1.30/L mark it was at in November 2008, then I would have had to change my job situation much sooner than I did. But after Christmas it went back down below $1, and then it hovered around 75 cents (+/- 10 cents), which is a much more manageable situation. But now that I’m working from home full-time, that cost is reduced dramatically.

Stop Buying Clothes

An easy place to cut out the extra expenses is on clothing. I realize that I’ve got a ton of clothes that I don’t wear on a regular basis, so it’s easy for me to cut out the extra expense here. Sure I have bought a few things here and there when I needed to replace something, like new socks, but I have been quite good at passing on the “ooh, that’s a good deal on a coat/shirt/pants/whatever” situations. I might walk around the store holding the item for a bit, but then I just put it back on the rack and walk out. Makes me feel good. Last year I even did a Clothing Experiment where I tried to see how long I could go without doing laundry. Click here to read the final results. It was a fun thing to do, and I highly recommend it to all of you who think you don’t have anything to wear.

Cutting the Cable Bill

The last place I can really cut down on variable spending is with my cable bill. I’ve got digital cable, which means I have a few extra packages on my bill for those great specialty channels like the Game Show Network or the Biography Network. Depending on how frugal I’m feeling, I modify my cable package pretty much once a quarter, so I’m definitely aware of where I could cut back there. In fact, I might just take a look at my packages this afternoon and see where else I can cut back. I’m one of those that couldn’t get rid of the tv entirely, but I can definitely cut back on some of the channels. I watch far too much tv anyways, so getting rid of the channels might have the added bonus of causing me to do more freelance writing and earn more money! So I guess in the end it’s a win-win situation for me.

How have your efforts to cut back been going? Has it been tough for you and your family? What lessons did you learn from your experience? Share your stories in the comments, I’d love to hear them!

Increasing My Income – Redux

Part of any good debt reduction strategy is to try and increase your income as much as you can. Step 1 for me was getting the new job last summer, as that increased my monthly take-home pay. Step 2 is to possibly get a part-time job to supplement my income on a temporary basis. So this year I started drumming up my freelancing writing career. If I haven’t mentioned it before, I work as a technical writer for a software company, and have been doing it for the last 8 years now. Over the course of that time I’ve always had full time positions, even though the majority of tech writing jobs tend to be contracts. This summer I realized that I really wanted to work contract rather than full time, and so when I started looking, I was looking for contract jobs. But then that really good full time job fell in my lap, and since I thought I wanted to move out of the big city, I took it.

Turns out I was wrong! I am a big city girl now. Phew, okay, I said that out loud. I feel better now.

Plus I’m just tired of “working for the man” and having to go into the office, so 2009 is the year of the freelancer…me! I spruced up my freelance website, and have started networking and applying for freelance jobs. I’m quite excited about this on a number of fronts, but the main one is simply that I could possibly bring in a few extra dollars here and there. That is the number 1 goal for doing it. But if I can get the monthly income and client list up to a decent level, I am most definitely going to chuck the full time job.

But wait, what about the current state of the economy? Aren’t you worried?

Surprisingly no, I’m not worried. Technical writing is a small enough market that if you’re good at it, you’ll always have a job. And it’s one of those types of jobs that lend themselves to contracting because it’s a great way for companies to save money. They get you in to work on the project they really need done, they pay you a fair wage, and they don’t have to pay you any benefits or retirement savings matches. One other cost-saving measure for them is that I am able to work online, from home, so they don’t even need to set me up at a desk in their offices. Technical writing covers such a gamut of topics that I’m not worried at all. Tech writers work for software companies, hardware companies, banks, insurance companies, the government, the military, your local transit commission…I could go  on here. So I’m not even limited to just tech companies.

This is why I am excited about starting on this adventure. While I haven’t landed any freelance contracts just yet, I know that with my current efforts, I should land some soon. Wish me luck!

Snowflake Idea: Selling My Used Books

Today is Internet Sunday chez moi, and I’ve spent most of the day doing things online. Everything from working on my freelance website to listing used books I have for sale on Amazon.ca. This last one is a new idea I had just this week. I was originally going to bring the books to a used bookstore, but I was lazy and didn’t want to bring the box down to the car. So instead today I remembered that I can list things on Amazon.ca as well, so I just spent the last 40 minutes and listed about 15 items on there. A few of them are books from my university career that I no longer want, the rest are just books I’ve accumulated along the way. Again, they’re all books that I don’t want any more. The books currently in my library are ones that I want to keep, but not this box. I’m excited at the prospect of selling them, although I do realize that most of them will probably not sell at all. But I figure I’ll keep them up for 4-6 months, and if they don’t sell by then, I’ll make the trip to the used book store.

Have any of you had any success selling used books on Amazon?

Why Pre-Authorized Payments Aren’t Always Good

For the longest time I have had most of my monthly bills (cable, internet, cell phone, etc.) on a pre-authorized payment plan. If you don’t know what that means, here’s the low-down: you provide your payee your credit card number or bank account information, and you agree to let them charge (or withdraw, in the case of the bank account) the amount of your monthly bill. Nice and easy. I’ve always used the credit card option for this program, because I don’t like the idea of these companies having their fingers automatically in my money, you know? And I started using this program because I missed a few payments. I found it quite confusing to have the bills arrive at different times during the month, and then having them be due at different times. Setting them up as as a pre-authorized payment meant I wouldn’t have to worry about missing the due date, AND I would only have to pay one bill a month, AND I might earn some points or cash back depending on the credit card I was using.

In a post she wrote this week, Krystal talked about how she didn’t like pre-authorized payments because it meant “once you pay your invoice, you have acknowledged and agreed to the charges on the bill.”

Hmm, very interesting.

I had never thought about it that way, but I realized that she was quite right. There’s always the fine print on these types of agreements, and the fact that you might be agreeing to all the charges on your bill when the company automatically withdraws the payment is a little worrying. I was debating this week whether I should stop my automatic payments simply because I had wanted to stop using my cards completely this year, but Krystal’s post has definitely gotten me thinking. I’ll have to weigh the pros and cons again before making my decision, adding this one into the mix.

How about you, do you have any of your payments on pre-auth? Why or why not?