Comments on: How are you currently saving money? (comment to win $200!)

By: chris

chris — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 04:48:42 +0000

Me and my dad recently set up a magnet power generator our house. It was pretty easy and only took about 2 hours to set up. My dad said hes saving a lot now on the electricity bill for only 2 hours of work. the instructions to build one were pretty simple and easy to follow. We got them through here http://a2b60br4s0bz8pb6fb086-1d3o.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=2010 . I definitely recommend magnetizing your home, it’s good for the environment (using less electricity) and saves you a lot of money on the bills.

By: Michele

Michele — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:29:12 +0000

I quit smoking *doing happy dance* So I am having $50 a week set aside (about the price of 1pk a day) and seeing how much I can save. (unfortunately the hubby has been dipping in it so I had to take his card away) By Lent I should have 475.00

By: CCW

CCW — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:08:13 +0000

i’ve been paying down my debt for 18 months now…it’s gotten harder now that we’ve added a kid to the family but being frugal with food and clothing have made the biggest impacts.

By: J. Money

J. Money — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 09:25:34 +0000

*GIVEAWAY NOW OVER*

Congrats to Meg from CarsxGirl.com! You win the $200 :)
And thanks to everyone else for sharing your tips to save! Learned a lot from y’all.

By: Oscar At Real Life Money Management

Oscar At Real Life Money Management — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:43:17 +0000

I live on one modest income. My wife home schools our eight children. We have just a little bit of debt and mostly our mortgage. We've saved way over $100,000 back for retirement and other savings and are in our early 40's and hope to have as close to a million dollars saved as we can by the time we reach 65. If we can do it anyone can it just takes discipline, budgeting, and a lifestyle that allows. Check out my site to learn how we do it.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:52:30 +0000

I've been saving money this year by basically sticking to and working my budget:

-This year, I swiped one of your Excel budgeting sheets and tailored it to our needs…The rule is simple, if it's not on the budget list, it's not coming out of the account…"Fun money" is generally low so we just suck it up – however, you'd be surprised how it does wonders to see the changes (which so far have been all positive) in terms of increasing net worth and decreasing liabilities…I will say a great thing about not putting as much money into fun money is that it makes you think more and take advantage of all the "free" stuff you can do in terms of entertainment nearby…

-Secondly, everyone knows about the East Coast cold snap…Of course the electric bills were much higher than usual for us in NC…However, the great thing about when we built our house last year is that the heating is dual…Due to the hours we've been putting in at work, for the most part by time we were getting home, we were spending all of our time upstairs….Therefore, we readjusted the thermostats for the first and second floors to really take advantage of what the technology design could do…The temps on the 1st floor were set lower than the 2nd floor and we set up a cycle for what the heat would be at various times of the day/night…Just got the new electric bill…Implementing this change saved us a little over $50 in less than one month..From $207.52 to $157.01

-Lastly, there are short pockets in the year where we are authorized to get paid for overtime….Instead of being excited for the chance to spend "extra money", I still keep the same budgeting arrangements just as if it were a regular paycheck…I continue to be on track to max out my 401k this year…And part of that is by time money gets put away into "bill" account and savings, it leaves just under $250 for "fun money"….Therefore, with the overtime…I still keep $250 going into the fun money account…However, the savings account really gets pumped up…According to my rough calcs of the checks I expect to see during this time, I change my direct deposit (since payroll doesn't have to wait when you change the amount because the account number is already in the system) to place anywhere from $900 to $1300 into the savings account…Of course this budget was using some numbers provided by paycheckcity.com, but I made the committment to myself that if the payroll for some reason turned out to be more, then I would have to use the link between my fun money account and savings (at a separate bank so it takes a couple of days) to transfer over any excess of the $250 that normally is budgeted for the fun money account….

To be truthful, has it been hard? Of course…I mean how easy is it to "re-balance" a few items to get something in the short term while still beefing it up later in order to meet those long-term goals. However, for me, it just seems to defeat the purpose…So as I shared before, when I'm salivating for this cool chair I want, I continue to admire it via the internet…But I also admire the changes I am seeing when I pull up that Excel sheet…So it makes it all worthwhile :-D I know that I'll get the chair eventually, but it's not a priority (or even a need) right now….

Shelly – shirellej@hotmail.com

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:34:48 +0000

I have money automatically deducted from my checking account and put into my ING savings account each month. Now that I'm used to it, I don't miss the money, and it really racks up in the ING account.

-Allison

astombaugh@yahoo.com

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:06:36 +0000

I'm focusing on saving on groceries by planning meals, shopping sales with coupons, and cooking from scratch. I expect to save about $125 by Easter.

mcwalker711@yahoo.com

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:52:31 +0000

We're planning to save about $1000 by Easter. We actually started about two months ago, severely slashing our eating out expenditures and cooking at home. We also use Netflix and the library moreso than Amazon and Bestbuy. Plus we've set up saving goals for ourselves to motivate the family.

dan at danlerner dot net

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:36:16 +0000

GROUPON! And all of the similar websites that have started popping up. At this point there are about 7 or 8 daily deals for my city. We typically have 3 at a time on our fridge, most for 50% off at restaurants that we love to go to…great way to get out and save money!

danielajf@gmail.com