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Archives for October 2016

Change one habit and save.

One really simple way to save money and create your champagne lifestyle is to look at your spending habits make some quality changes.

Some ideas might be:

Coffee.
Nearly every savings blog or site you see always puts coffee at the top of the list. Certainly your daily (or three) cafe coffee can leave a huge dent in your wallet, but life is way to short for bad coffee.  in keeping with the champagne lifestyle, I am not going to suggest you drink instant 🙂   Look for alternatives.
Have a coffee machine installed at work.  If you work in a large-ish office, there are many businesses that will supply a coffee machine free to your workplace at the business just pays for the coffee used.  The price per cup is usually less than $1.00.
If a “proper” coffee machine is deemed too much hard work, what about a pod machine? You can buy any number of coffee flavours as well as hot chocolate.  Again the cost per cup is far less than cafe coffee.
Don’t have the capacity for a machine at all?   Have a look at single cup options like the good old French Press
Once you have your coffee making apparatus, ask at your favourite coffee if they sell beans to take home.

Gym: 
Look for cheaper options for fitness.   Many local councils run free fitness classes.  Check out the MeetUp site. Search for Sport and Fitness groups near you.  Who knows you might even find some new friends and get fit at the same time.

Entertainment:  Borrow books, magazines and DVD’s from the library. If you have not seen the inside of your local library since high school, you might be in for a surprise.  Far from the boring stuffy places of your youth, modern libraries have a great range books, magazines, DVD’s and music.   Many libraries have collections ready to download onto tablet devices and you don’t even need to go to the library.    My library offers a huge range of magazines that I download to my iPad.  Most months I cannot read all that I subscribe to.  All these magazines are ones i used to actually pay money for and still did not read them all.  If I see a particular recipe or article i really want to keep, I just screen grab the page and either email it to myself to store in my Google drive print it out.

Dining out with friends.  Have a My Kitchen Rules month with your friends.  Take it in turns to create your own “pop up restaurants” at each others homes.  Add the extra challenge of setting a budget per person. $20- $25 per person is actually easily do-able if you think about your menu carefully.
Embrace the “Pot Luck Dinner”  – task each diner to bring a course .
Rotate the course each time you hold the event. eg:
Event 1: Tom & Jan bring starter, Jack & Tracey bring main, Rick and Ash bring dessert, James & Fiona bring wine
Event 2: Tom & Jan bring main, Jack & Tracey bring dessert, Rick and Ash bring wine, James & Fiona bring starter
Event 3: Tom & Jan bring dessert, Jack & Tracey bring wine, Rick and Ash bring starter, James & Fiona bring main
Event 4: Tom & Jan bring wine, Jack & Tracey bring starter, Rick and Ash bring main, James & Fiona bring dessert

Alcohol: Have a cocktail party at home.  Grab some cocktail recipes and try some of those $15 cocktails you can never afford when you are out 🙂 (Dan Murphys have heaps here)

Spending:  Lock up your credit card for a month.  Pay everything by cash.  It might surprise you have it feel to actually hand over cold hard cash.

Give the gift of TIME:  Rather than forking out big dollars for gifts, give yourself.  If you have a hectic, busy life you no doubt rarely spend quality time with your family or friends.
Set aside time to visit with your family member or friend for a full morning (or day), it will cost you a few hours, but it will be priceless to your  recipient.

Check your bank statements:  Internet banking makes it super easy to check purchases online.  Make note of any “unknown” purchases.  Do you need to do a claim through your credit card provider?   One other nifty little saving trick is to “save your cents”.  While in your online banking have a look at your debt balance,  top up the balance to the next $1.00 ( or $5 or $10)  eg if your balance is $xxx,x23.68, you might add 32c to bring up to the next $, or  add $1.32 to bring to $xxx,x25.00 or even $76.32 bring it up to the next $100.

What are your simple methods for saving?

Declutter your way to Rich

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year or so, you will have heard about the KonMari method of decluttering.  Through her best selling book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying: A Simple, Effective Way To Banish Clutter Forever, Japanese author, Marie Kondo promises to transform your life one empty closet at a time.

Like many people, I took all this with a grain of salt.  The book and I admit, a bit of peer group pressure 🙂  did spur me on to do a decent declutter of our home.  Given that we live in a fairly small one bedroom apartment, i really did not think I would have much to “declutter”.  Well I was WRONG!!!

Fairly ruthlessly, I decluttered wardrobes, shoe rack, book cases, kitchen cupboards and the pantry.

The KonMari book recommends you get rid of anything that “no longer brings joy to your life”    That box of “one day I will fit into them” clothes most certainly did NOT bring joy, so listed on eBay they went.   Clothes, shoes, books and heaps of tupperware that we have not used in ages all got listed on eBay.  Over the course of about 8 weeks or so, my total “declutter wage” was just over $500!!!

The pantry declutter, left two groups…One small one of out of date foodstuffs that went in the bin 🙁  and a larger group of  “stuff” we had bought for a long forgotten recipe, or had been given as gifts (jams, sauces, biscuits and relishes etc  from hampers).   These were all still perfectly fine and useable and a lot of them quite Gourmet (White Truffle infused oil ).  I really did NOT want to waste these and have to throw out some substantial value.   Looking at each product, I decided to roughly menu plan some uses for them.

We had some “interesting” dishes over the course of the few weeks until they were gone.  Who knew that Mediterranean Tomato Chutney would make a truly delicious pizza sauce in place of regular tomato paste? or that Almond Butter in place of Peanut Butter is really good in satay sauce on chicken.

I do find, now that I have decluttered, the apartment is a lot easier to stay tidy. The bookcase/wall unit especially looks much more open without every shelf stuffed full of books.  I have even managed to dig out some ornaments for display.

There are loads of stories on the internet of people who have found all sorts of “hidden treasure” through the act of decluttering. I did not find much actual cash ( no more than a few coins in the bottom of an old handbag) but people have found cash in  pockets, old purses, and of course in the couch.

So get to it…start decluttering now.   Just start with one place and do it well.  List what you can on eBay, Gumtree, Facebook or Craigslist and let me know in the comments how much your “declutter wage” comes to.

 

 

 

 

Not Zero Days

Make everyday a “Not Zero’ day

I came across the concept of “Not Zero Days” this week.  WOW what a revelation.!!

The idea of a Not Zero Day is that whatever you are planning to do, whatever your goal is just do SOMETHING toward it everyday.

Sometimes we can set ourselves such big tasks that it all just gets to hard and we feel like giving up.

For instance;

Is your goal to do 30 minutes of exercise everyday?  If you jump right in and do that 30 minutes today, you might find you are sore and sorry tomorrow (and the next day) and you really won’t feel like doing it.   Rather than 30 minutes, just do SOMETHING- Not ZERO.  One push up or just a quick 5 minute walk. Just NOT ZERO!!

Is your goal to be saving 10% of your wage?  That might mean that if you do that this week you won’t have the money for that bill that is due.  Instead, maybe save $10 Just NOT ZERO!!

Is your goal to build a new business?  You know you really ought to spend a few hours a day to put some steps in place. When you get home after the 9-5 you are just tired and don’t feel like it.   Instead, do just 15 minutes ( pour yourself a drink – wine beer or coffee) spend that time doing something for your business.  Just NOT ZERO!!

I am really loving this concept.  I always have so much on the go at once, I often get myself overwhelmed and then do a “declutter” of my life and weed out the unimportant stuff. Then I find myself frustrated that I didn’t acheive my goals.

NON ZERO days are now factoring into my schedule.  One of my long held (and scrapped) goals has been to practice Yoga every day.  I have downloaded HEAPS of beginners classes and tried half heartedly to force myself to do 20 – 30 minutes each day.  It has never become a habit 🙁   Now with the concept of Not Zero Days, I went searching for some 5 minute yoga lessons.  Google showed me heaps of options, but this one caught my eye.  An app for 5 minute workouts.

The app has easy to follow home workout sessions that take no more than 5 minutes. You can choose from Abs, Fat Loss, Butt and Legs, Chest and Arms, Pilates and Yoga sessions, or you can mix sessions together and create your own workout. ( I am currently doing a mix of Yoga and Butt and Legs)   The free starter pack is adequate for quite a while, but it is just so darned easy to find 5 minutes a day (Not ZERO ) that I was more than happy to upgrade to the full package which gives a lot more exercises and the option to track your results.

This same developer has heaps of other 5 minute apps too.  Check them all out here.

What can you do to implement a Not Zero day?