Change one habit and save.

Change one habit and save.

Oct 10, 2016 | Personal Development, Wealth & Money

One really simple way to save money and create your champagne lifestyle is to look at your spending habits and 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 too 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, 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 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 Sports 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 DVDs 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 of books, magazines, DVDs 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 or print it out.  Or join Magzter for online magazines.

Dining out with friends.  Have a My Kitchen Rules month with your friends.  Take it in turn to create your own “pop up restaurants” at each other’s homes.  Add the extra challenge of setting a budget per person. $20- $25 per person is actually easily doable 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 a starter, Jack & Tracey bring the 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 a starter, James & Fiona bring the main
Event 4: Tom & Jan bring wine, Jack & Tracey bring a 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 in 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, and 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?

Why every one of my dollars is a “blazing sunbeam”

Why every one of my dollars is a “blazing sunbeam”

Jun 20, 2016 | Personal Development, Wealth & Money

“Sunshine Cash” is the opposite of saving for a rainy day.

For me, Sunshine Cash is the money I earn on top of my regular income.  It is not intended to pay the bills or be saved in the emergency fund.  It is FUN MONEY!!  However, it does trickle in sporadically depending on what I am pursuing at the time, so I have a separate bank account for it.

Making the dollars s-t-r-e-t-c-h

It is not so much the saving of the amount, as maximising the value of it.  I want every sunshine dollar to be a blazing sunbeam!!!

example: If I choose to spend my Sunshine Cash, I might choose a fine dining restaurant that is promoting a two-for-one deal.  Or we might choose to buy some really expensive ingredients and cook a restaurant quality meal at home, complete with the “good” china and crystal.

Daily deals sites are brilliant for eating out. We often use Groupon, Living Social or Our Deal to have a meal out at restaurants that we would not think of.

Use deals for gifts.

Daily Deals sites also have some good ideas for gifts too.  Just last Christmas I bought these awesome hampers for just $39.00 !!!

I ended up buying 6 of them.  The recipients we MOST impressed with a (what they thought) was a very expensive gift.

Have a clothes swap party.

Instead of going out shopping, get your girlfriends together (with a few snacks and glasses of wine) and host a clothes swap.

Stay in for a movie marathon.

Love going to the movies but don’t like the high price tag.  Host a movie marathon at home. For a “large screen” experience, hire a projector (or borrow one from work if your department has one.)  Make some popcorn and ice cream snacks and enjoy the saving.

Always look out for deals at the supermarket.

I am not talking extreme couponing here. I am saying, while you should always shop with a list. Don’t be a slave to the brands on that list. eg; Instead of putting Cornflakes on the list, just put Cereal.  Have a look in the aisles, you might just find something different at a cheaper price. Same with fruit and vegetables. Don’t just write “Kale” think “green leafy” you might find baby spinach or Asian greens at a fraction of the cost.

Look for deals on gift cards.

Check your autoclub to see if you can access discounted grocery cards. I regularly get our major supermarket cards at 5% discount. These are “ecards” so there is not even any postage cost. 5% on 200 grocery bill is $10.

How do you maximise your dollars?

25 Solutions to “not enough” money.

25 Solutions to “not enough” money.

Jun 18, 2016 | Free Resource, Personal Development, Wealth & Money

25 ways for kids and teens to earn some cash.

From the time I was a little kid, I never seemed to have enough “fun money”.

Sure, Mum and Dad gave me pocket money for doing chores around the house, but I was made to put half of it in the bank.  (Who remembers the good old “dollarmites” school banking?)

Money Box

After depositing my hard earned cash into the bank, there wasn’t enough leftover for the latest Barbie fashion or tastiest lolly that I “just had to have”.    It was just soooo hard. Everyone else’s Mums gave them lots of pocket money 🙁   It just wasn’t fair.

 Something had to change.

I complained to Mum about it LOUDLY!! and was told basically to “suck it up – that is life”  🙁

I looked for other ways to get money.  A paper round with my brother was a good earner, but hard work in the cold and rain at 6:00am.  I made a bit for a while polishing my Girl Guide troops’ brass badges ( coz it is a YUK job that no one liked doing, but we HAD to have shiny badges)

I soon found there were many simple ways a young girl could make a little bit extra, and did many different things over the years.

Growing up, we lived in an inner city location with not a lot of “suburbia”. This made looking for the usual ways of looking for odd jobs from the neighbours a little more difficult.

There were, however, shop around and most of these shops were “Mum & Dad” type businesses with few if any staff.

I soon discovered that I could earn money by offering to do jobs such as

  • cleaning the front window of the shop, or
  • taking the garbage out to the big central skip bin, or
  • restocking shelves or even just
  • sweeping the floor.

I struck a deal with Mum and Dad that anything I earned from these odd jobs was MINE and did not have to go into the bank.  They agreed, and my Sunshine Cash earnings began.

As I got older, I was always on the lookout for ways to supplement my pocket money.

A suburban goldmine.

When I was a teenager we moved to the suburbs and this was a veritable treasure trove of  Sunshine Cash.

  • Baby sitting
  • Dog Washing
  • Car Wash
  • Lawn Mowing

Finally, when I was old enough to have a regular job, I would still look for ways to receive extra money to “live the lifestyle I wished to become accustomed to!!”

A world of opportunity.

As a young adult, a whole new world of Entrepreneurship was introduced to me and I was soon earning good amounts of  Sunshine Cash.

A super simple method was to buy things from op shops and resell them in the weekend classifieds (nowadays we use eBay, Gumtree, Craig’s List etc).  I would look for clothes that were in good condition. I could often find clothes that had been donated in Brand New condition, or that just needed simple things mending ( like a button missing or a new zipper)    Furniture was another great seller. A couple of coats of gloss white paint and a $20 table could sell for as much as $100.

Over the years I have rarely been without something generating a bit of extra cash on the side of my regular job.  When I had children, they too were taught to look for ways to earn their own “Sunshine Cash”

As a special freebie for you today, I have put together an eBook with over 25 ways that either I have done personally or friends have done to earn a little bit on the side.  Just sign in below to gain access to this and other free downloads.

Enjoy 🙂