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Thursday, February 11, 2010

Ten Tips to Help You Save

By Muhwezi Daraus, Ultraserve Limited

Making smart choices with your money is a lifelong process. The good news: you don’t have to follow a traditional budget to develop better spending habits, and you can start at any age.
Start saving now: Consider the ten tips below and find the ones that work for you.

1. Use Bargains and Benefits
Of course you don’t feel like a senior, don’t look like a senior, and certainly don’t act like a senior. Don’t let that deter you from using age to your, and your pocket book’s advantage. Bargain to your best for discounts and ensure that you have a penny saved.

2. Make it Fun and Generational
Instead of a budget, challenge yourself to a game. The goal: to find new ways to spend less on your everyday purchases. Turning this process into a game puts your subconscious to work, so there will always be a part of you on the lookout for ways to save.
Encourage family members to join your new way of thinking. This budgeting game could be a perfect opportunity to teach grandchildren better spending habits of their own.

3. Allow Choices
The rebel in us makes it hard to stick with a budget that feels like a diet.
Instead, frame your spending habits in terms of choices. For example: you can have both the beans and fried chicken, but perhaps not both on the same day.
You can use an online budget calculator to look at how much you spend and determine what areas may need adjustments.

4. Use Systematic Withdrawals
Don’t give yourself unlimited access to investment funds. Instead, set up direct deposits from your investments into your checking account. This provides a consistent paycheck and helps prevent overspending.

5. Use Organizations
Benefit programs, such as the one offered by Ultraserve Limited allow you to get quality food (information) for half the price. This is not a need based program, so you don’t have to go through any qualification process to use the benefit.

6. Consider Housing Alternatives
Roommates offer companionship and help you both save money. You can find roommates to help you reduce on spending. You can also lower costs by staying in the high maintenance house/yard for flat, in an active living community; somewhere where you can walk to shopping and entertainment.

7. Use Public Transportation
With gas prices on the rise, look for ways to use public transport means when available. Talk to neighbors to see if there are opportunities to carpool. Even better: find local markets within walking or biking distance.

8. Pay less for vacation
Enjoy your vacation from relatively cheap, attractive and good places such as cottage areas, national parks, gardened hotels, etc.

9. Stay Healthy
A gym membership and healthy cooking lessons may be the best investment you’ll ever make. To keep your medical expenses down spend time learning how to stay healthy and fit.

10. Manage Debt
Use debt wisely. A reverse mortgage, for example, may be the right use of debt. If you get too much of the wrong kind of debt, such as high credit balances, talk to a credit counselor.

5 Key Components to Your Relationship with Money

Evaluate and Improve Your Money Habits

By Muhwezi Daraus, Ultraserve Limited

"As in any strong, healthy relationship, there has to be harmony between all the working parts, and your relationship with money is no exception." This is what Vickie Champion, author of Simple Steps for Listening to Your Intuition with Money, So You Can Sleep Like a Baby has to say.

She breaks your relationship with money into 5 parts.
1. Managing it - This consists of the day to day tasks involved in taking care of your money as it comes in and goes out, or the cash flow. This might be paying bills, tracking deposits, paying school fees, keeping a budget, etc.
2. Spending it - Basically, this is how you spend your money.
3. Earning it - This is how you make money.
4. Saving it - This includes the methods and how much money you hang onto.
5. Investing it - This is about ways you get your money to make you money.

Vickie helps her clients realize that if any of these five components are neglected and out of kilter, it will cause all of them to start crumbling down. We've all heard, "You are only as good as your weakest link."

She says, for instance, if you don't earn enough, it's extremely hard to save and invest it. Then there's little desire to even bother with managing it, which causes spending to spin out of control.

Or, if you don't manage your money well, you will tend to over spend, which causes you to under save and invest. This results in a lack of motivation to earn more of it.
Vickie believes that in order to keep your relationship with money healthy, you have to take care of, and respect, all parts of your relationship with it.

Take Vickie’s money quiz to assess your current relationship with money. I just took it myself, and found it to be quite thought provoking.
We all have attitudes about money that may hurt our ability to make wise decisions.

Do you have a weakest link? Then identify it.