Dads’ nagging saves families £220 million a year – enough to buy 150 million pairs of socks

Tom Wilson

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Families typically save £220 on utilities when Dads nag about wasting energy, claims a new survey from a utilities provider.

Families typically save £220 on utilities when Dads nag about wasting energy, claims a new survey from a utilities provider.

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Deeds Done

Chestnuthill TownshipFannie Mae (By Atty, A/K/A) Federal National Mortgage Association, KML Law Group PC (Atty) to Glen H. and Nicole A. Ruehle, Lot 9, Section 1, Sunnybrook, $276,400Hamilton TownshipFrank K. Asante and Catherine T. Sam to Kulwinder Singh, Usha Singh, Pamela K. Moore, Lot 12, Section 1, The Meadows, $230,000Jackson TownshipMichael Browne and Lynda Sledzik Browne to Viktor Rozumnyy and [...]

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Besecker's Diner: A North Fifth Street institution

Food service in recent decades became a more crowded industry in the Poconos, according to one local business manager.“There are a lot more restaurants here than there used to be,” said Mickey Besecker, who runs the family-owned Besecker’s Diner at 1427 North Fifth Street. “It used to be a couple of diners and local restaurants — there’s a lot more restaurant chains now.”The economic landscape has seen change. New businesses came [...]

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Does Budgeting Seem Too Complex? Five Simple Alternative Strategies That Can Bring Real Results

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve had an affinity for numbers. My father loves telling this story about how when I was seven, I corrected a guy’s math off the top of my head… of course, that correction worked against my father and cost him some amount of money. I love playing with numbers in spreadsheet programs and I even enjoy writing computer programs to manipulate numbers – after all, that’s what I did for a living for years and years.

At the same time, I know that there are a lot of people who don’t have that same affinity. Their gifts and talents lie elsewhere, and tables and rows of numbers don’t come easily to them.

The idea of a budget – one of those formalized budgets that you see in personal finance books – seems like torture. Rows and rows of numbers and calculations and estimations… for some people, that alone is more than enough to push them away from a valuable tool.

Here’s the thing, though: that’s really only one way to budget. There are other ways to organize your money and make sure that you come out on top without looking at lots of numbers. It’s inevitable that you’ll have to look at a few numbers, but nothing that exceeds what can be done on a piece of scratch paper.

Here are five methods for budgeting that don’t require tons of numbers to get you on top of your financial game… but, first, there are a few key principles to know that apply to all of these budgeting strategies.

Core Principles

All of these strategies have one big feature in common: they don’t require you to look at tons of numbers to get your finances in order. For some people, that can be invaluable. However, walking away from those numbers comes with some real challenges, challenges that are addressed by traditional budgeting but might be overlooked with these strategies.

So, here are four things that you should take to heart if you try out any of these budgeting methods.

First, don’t use credit cards until you can make these budgets work. Just don’t use them. The purpose of a budget is to make sure you’re living within your means and a full budget can do that quite well, but when you’re eliminating the numbers, you’re eliminating a few of the guardrails that can keep you from overusing a credit card. The best thing you can do is simply cut credit cards out of your life for a while until you’re really sure that you’re spending less than you earn on a month by month basis.

Second, budgeting requires time and patience, much like riding a bike. Your first attempt might not go all that well, but that doesn’t mean budgeting doesn’t work. It means that, just like when you were learning to ride a bicycle, you need to pick yourself up and try again.

Third, tracking your spending is incredibly useful, even if you’re not number-friendly. Simply looking back through all of your spending, even without adding up the numbers, can give you a real shock when you realize how you’ve spent so much of your money. It’s well worth it to spend some time every month going through your receipts, your bank statements, and your credit card statements to see all of the places where your money has gone.

Finally, there is no quick path to riches. It doesn’t exist. You’re not going to budget for three months and suddenly find that all of your financial problems have resolved themselves. What you will find, however, is that some of your problems have started to abate and that if you keep it up, they will eventually disappear. This isn’t a sprint – it’s a marathon.

Now, onward with the strategies.

Subtraction Budgeting

Subtraction budgeting is probably the easiest form of budgeting that there is. It’s nothing more than a bit of addition and subtraction that you can do on a calculator on the back of an envelope, and in fact most people do some form of this already.

It’s easy. Just add up all of your bills in a given month. Then, take the amount you bring home and subtract from that the total of your bills and then subtract an additional amount for savings. The remaining amount is how much you can spend in a given month.

The “savings” part serves a few purposes. For one, it helps to cover you in the event of an emergency, like a car breakdown. It can also be used to cover irregular bills, like insurance. You’ll want to stick that “savings” part directly into your savings account.

But how much savings? One good way to do it is to save as much as you have to freely spend. So, if you have $400 left over after paying your bills, save $200 of it and use the remaining $200 to spend freely.

I suggest leaving the amount that you’re saving in your checking account and moving it over at the end of the month, simply as accidental overdraft protection. Just remember that you need to keep your balance above that amount.

When doing this, it’s important to remember all of your bills, including ones that are paid automatically. If you forget the automatic bills, you’re very likely to find yourself overdrafting.

This is so easy, anyone who can manage addition and subtraction on a calculator can do it. You’re just adding up numbers, then subtracting a few numbers, and that’s it. It tells you how much you have to spend.

Cash Budgeting

One challenge that people sometimes have with budgeting is that the money isn’t directly in their hands. It’s abstracted, in the form of credit cards and checks and debit cards, so they can sometimes lose track of things and not truly grasp how much – or how little – they have available for spending. When that happens, it’s incredibly easy to make financial mistakes.

One great approach to solving this problem is to move to cash budgeting, which is sometimes also called envelope budgeting.

This one’s also very simple (which, I suppose, is the theme here). You just do all of your budgeting in cash, or as much of it as humanly possible. You cash your check, take it home, sort out all of the dollars and cents, and then directly use that cash for everything.

Yes, for bills, it’s easier to put it into your checking account and use online banking most of the time. However, for things like entertainment or groceries, cash is incredibly easy to use.

For the sake of convenience and for online purchasing, it can make sense to use some of the cash to fund a prepurchased credit card. That card can potentially be used to pay for small recurring bills like Netflix.

What’s the advantage of doing this? If you do budgeting this way, you see exactly where every single dollar goes. There’s no question about where your money is going because you see every dime and hold it in your hands.

Over the course of a pay period, you can literally watch your money deplete over time. The dollars and cents get spent on all kinds of things – food, household supplies, rent, utilities, entertainment (and probably more on entertainment than you realized), and on and on and on…

When you see the money going out like that, you often start to realize that maybe some of the things you’re spending money on aren’t the wisest of choices, which is the real benefit of budgeting.

Proportional Budgeting

This is a very clever simple budgeting technique, first introduced widely in the excellent personal finance book All Your Worth, written by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi.

The idea behind this kind of budgeting is to split all of your spending into three categories – needs, savings, and wants. Things that fall into the “needs” category include basic utilities, taxes, mortgage or rent, basic food, basic transportation, and insurance. “Wants” include things like entertainment (cable and Netflix, for example), additional food (like high quality stuff or eating out), extra rent or mortgage for a large home or apartment, extra costs for an expensive vehicle, and so on – in other words, anything that goes beyond covering your basic needs.

Proportional budgeting means that you split your money among these three categories in a very clear way. For example, you might want to spend 50% of your money on needs, 30% on wants, and 20% on savings – you could describe that as a 50/30/20 budget. On the other hand, maybe you’re well off and spend only 20% on need, 50% on wants, and 30% on savings – a 20/50/30 budget.

This type of budget gets right down to the crux of two important personal finance issues that people should address in their lives.

First, it helps people clarify the difference between needs and wants in their life. The truth is that even the most frugal people often spend a lot of their money on wants, even if they define them in their head as needs. Home internet access? It’s a want. Cable television? A want. A big house? Most of that is a want. A brand new car? Anything above a reliable late model used car is a want.

Because of that, it often helps people realize how large of a portion of their money is spent on fulfilling personal wants and keeping up appearances. It turns out that for most people a lot of their spending is devoted to things that really aren’t necessary in life. It’s spent on stuff that is there to make life more pleasurable and the truth is that none of that stuff is needed. For me, looking at things from this perspective became something of a call to get smarter with my spending and to spend less on fulfilling minor wants.

I ended up spending a lot of time thinking about how some of the things I spent my money on that would be qualified as a “want” was really important to me (like home internet access) and other things were not (like buying a Gatorade at the convenience store or buying golf clubs).

In the end, proportional budgeting is really most useful as an exercise to look at how you’re actually using your money. As you’re putting it together, you’ll really gain a great insight into where your money is going which sets up a great opportunity to reflect on those choices.

Two Bank Budgeting

“Two bank” budgeting is built around the concept of paying yourself first. In fact, that’s exactly what’s happening – you’re putting money in the bank for yourself before you do anything else with your money.

With this type of budgeting, you start by opening a checking account at a second bank. It’s in this account that your actual paycheck will be deposited in the future, so the next step is to instruct your workplace to deposit your check into this account rather than your normal one.

Once that’s in place, you instruct your new bank to automatically transfer money into your old account a few days after you’re paid. So, if you’re paid every two weeks on a Friday, set up an automatic transfer to occur the following Wednesday or so.

Here’s the trick – you don’t transfer the full amount of your paycheck. Instead, you just transfer most of it – maybe $100 less than your actual paycheck.

So, let’s look at a full example of this. You get paid $1,000 every two weeks. This money now goes into a checking account at a new bank. Then, a few days after that, $900 gets automatically transferred into your normal checking account. $100 remains behind in the new account each paycheck.

What happens next? You live off of the money in your normal checking account to cover the things you need and want in a given pay period. The money left behind in the other account stays there until you have an emergency or face a big expense. In other words, it serves as an emergency fund / car replacement fund / down payment fund … or whatever big purpose you might have for it.

Essentially, the purpose of all of this is to automatically enforce savings in a place where it’s not easily accessible. You can’t just go to your local bank or use your ordinary ATM card to tap this money – it’s at another bank, almost completely out of mind until you need it.

It also forces you to live on a little bit less money than before. This isn’t a bad thing; it simply requires you to chop off some of your least important expenses.

Automatic Budgeting

If you like this idea of automating your savings, you can take it to a grand scale and go with full automated budgeting.

To do this, you need a bank with a robust online banking system and, ideally, the ability to create “sub-accounts” to make things a little easier. Capital One 360 is a great example of this type of bank.

All you do with this kind of budgeting is set up every single bill to be paid automatically, so you don’t have to worry about it. You simply set up all of your bills to be paid automatically close to the due date, as well as set up savings transfers that happen automatically.

What about extra spending, or spending on things that have an uncertain amount, or spending that happens in stores? The best method for that money is to transfer it to a central checking account, out of which you only spend money on things like food and household supplies.

At this point, this is basically the kind of budgeting that we use for our family. Almost every bill is paid automatically, and money goes automatically into separate savings accounts for various specific goals (like our next car replacement cycle) and for our overall investments for financial independence. We also set money automatically aside for “free spending,” too.

Once you’ve got this set up, it’s about as easy as can be. For us, paying bills amounts to checking the account once a week or so to make sure everything is good or to transfer money from our “free spending” account into our main checking account.

The one big trick is that if a bill is suddenly larger than normal or someone makes some bad spending choices, this whole thing can go off the rails and you can start racking up some overdrafts. You have to have good control over your spending for this to work – and a good buffer in your checking account is a good idea, too.

Another strong idea here is to make sure you have sensible overdraft protection, ideally hooked up to a savings account with a healthy balance. That way, if you do make a mistake of some kind, it’s not going to impact you in a seriously negative way.

Final Thoughts

Each of these strategies has benefits and flaws. Some are very simple to calculate but don’t provide a whole lot of nuance or help in your day-to-day decision making. Others take a ton of up-front work but help a lot with day-to-day choices.

The overall point is this: budgeting doesn’t have to be a giant spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be endless lines of numbers. It doesn’t have to be endless calculations.

In the end, a budget is merely a tool to help you to reach a point where you can easily spend less than you earn, start paying off your debts, and start saving. All of these approaches manage to do that without overwhelming you with numbers.

If a bunch of columns and rows overwhelm you, don’t worry. There are other approaches. Good luck.

The post Does Budgeting Seem Too Complex? Five Simple Alternative Strategies That Can Bring Real Results appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Five Steps You Should Take Immediately After Doing a Balance Transfer

If you’re tired of struggling to pay off high-interest credit card debt, performing a balance transfer can be an extremely smart idea. With a balance transfer credit card, you can score 0% interest for anywhere from 12 to 21 months. If you use that time properly and really attack your debts, you could emerge from the experience entirely debt-free – or at least, much better off than when you started.

Still, signing up for a balance transfer credit card and transferring your high-interest debts may not be enough. If your effort stops there – and you don’t take any additional steps to improve your situation – you could easily find yourself worse off by the time your new card’s 0% APR introductory offer ends.

Five Crucial Steps After You Complete a Balance Transfer

If you want to use a balance transfer credit card to get out of debt and stay out of debt, you’ll need to perform several key steps even after your balance transfer is complete. Whether you’re considering a balance transfer or just completed one, here’s what you should do next:

Step 1: Make sure balances on your old credit cards and loans are down to zero.

When you transfer balances from one loan or credit card to a balance transfer card, it’s crucial to make sure your old balances are zeroed out. Occasionally some rogue interest or a small part of the balance will fail to transfer to your new card and linger in your old account — where it quietly can rack up late fees or penalties while you’re more focused on paying down your new card. Make sure to pay off any remaining small balances on your old cards or loans right away.

While it might be tempting to close down your old cards, it’s a smarter idea to keep them open (with a zero balance) provided they don’t charge an annual fee. Because the FICO scoring method uses the length of your credit history to determine part of your score, keeping old accounts open can improve your score. Likewise, closing old accounts in good standing can shorten your average credit history and actually damage your score in the short term.

• Related: What Happens When You Cancel a Credit Card?

Step 2: Stop using your credit cards altogether.

Getting out of debt becomes easier when you’re not paying interest on your purchases, but the task can quickly become impossible if you keep using your credit cards for regular spending. When you’re using a balance transfer credit card to make headway on your debt, the best thing you can do is quit using your credit cards altogether.

Some cards – like the Discover it® – offer a 0% introductory APR on purchases for a certain length of time, and those offers can be tempting. But it’s important to remember that interest will begin to accrue the second your introductory offer is up. In the case of the Discover it®, you get 0% APR on purchases for only six months.

The best thing you can do is transfer your balance to one of the better balance transfer credit cards, then stick all your cards in a sock drawer for safekeeping. If the temptation is too great, you can even cut them up; you can always request a replacement card once you’re finally debt-free. Remember, you’re not going to get out of debt if you keep digging a deeper hole.

• Related: Back in Debt? A Strategy to Pay It Off for Good

Step 3: Create a written monthly budget.

A desire to get out of debt is crucial if you want a balance transfer to work in your favor. Yet, it’s also important to figure out what got you into debt in the first place. What happened with your spending that led you to the point where you needed a balance transfer? And how might you change those behaviors?

For most people, tracking their spending and creating a written budget – at least temporarily – is the smartest way to get a handle on their spending problems. If you want to make a change, the first step to take is to figure out where you’re going off track – and how to change it.

Tracking your spending – as in, getting out your last few months’ bank statements to see where your money is going – is a crucial component of this journey. Once you see where your spending has caused trouble in the past, you can begin each month anew with a written budget that sets realistic spending limits but reins in the areas where you tend to go off track the most.

• Related: Money Management 101: Why Everyone Should Track Their Spending

Step 4: Figure out how much debt you can pay off.

Once you have a handle on your spending and income, it becomes a lot easier to figure out how much debt you can feasibly pay off during your card’s 0% introductory period.

Let’s say you owe $8,000 in credit card debt and just transferred it to the Chase Slate®. Because the Chase Slate® doesn’t charge a balance transfer fee for the first 60 days, your new credit card balance is the same $8,000 you owed before. And per this card’s introductory 0% APR offer, you now have 15 months to pay off your debt for good.

By dividing your $8,000 balance by 15 months, you’ll see you need to pay around $533 each month to become debt-free during your new card’s introductory offer. If you can’t pay that much, you’ll want to pay as much as you can to get your balance as low as possible before the introductory period ends. Remember, regular interest will begin to accrue once your card’s 0% introductory APR runs out.

• Related: Debt Payoff Calculator

Step 5: Create a contingency plan to follow toward the end of your card’s 0% APR introductory offer.

If you won’t be able to become completely debt-free during your card’s introductory APR period, it’s crucial to create a backup plan toward the end. If your card offers 18 months with a 0% introductory APR, and you won’t have the whole balance paid off before it ends, you’ll want to start shopping around for another offer around 16 months into it.

That’s right; there are no rules that prevent you from transferring a balance at 0% APR to another balance transfer credit card. Plus, there is nothing wrong with this strategy provided you’re not spending on credit any longer and you have launched an actionable and realistic plan to get out of debt – and stay out.

By shopping around for a new offer as your old offer ends, you can start the process over and buy yourself even more time to become debt-free without paying a dime of interest.

The Bottom Line

If you’ve just completed a balance transfer and want to make the most of it, these steps can help. Remember, transferring a balance to a card that offers 0% interest for a limited time isn’t enough to get you out of debt on its own. To create the debt-free lifestyle you really want, you need to identify your spending weaknesses, attack your debts with fervor, and, most importantly, stop digging.

Credit Card Directory

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How to Make Your Own Kombucha for Less Than $1 a Bottle

I was first introduced to kombucha by my high school English teacher, and once I tasted that sweet yet tangy deliciousness, I was instantly hooked.

Refreshing and healthy, my thirst for kombucha was limited by its cost, about $4 a bottle. Just walking past the beverage cooler often made my wallet hurt. Thus, I stuck to consuming this fermented favorite in moderation.

As delicious and refreshing as kombucha is, paying $4 a bottle seemed crazy expensive, especially since it’s tea, sugar, water and bacteria. There’s a reason Whole Foods is lovingly called Whole Paycheck, and kombucha is exhibit A.

Thus I began the journey to saving money by brewing my own kombucha.

What Do You Need to Make Your Own Kombucha?

Gathering materials is pretty simple. You likely have most of the ingredients and equipment already in your kitchen. I know I did.

Water? Check. Tea? Yep. Sugar? Got that, too.

Scoby (also dubbed a kombucha mother; it’s a colony of bacteria and yeast that looks like a pancake)?

OK, so I didn’t have that, but you can easily buy one, get one from a friend or even make your own from scratch or the remnants of some store-bought kombucha (unflavored works best). Sites like Craigslist and local DIY communities are also great places to look for a scoby.

As for equipment, you’ll need a quart jar, coffee filters and a rubber band.

Thanks to my voracious coffee habit (I prefer French press, but there’s the Mr. Coffee for rushed mornings), a salvaged Classico spaghetti sauce jar and several sturdy rubber bands from broccoli I bought at the grocery store, I was in business.

What If You Don’t Have Any of That Stuff Already?

Let’s take a step back though, as not everyone will be as fortunate to have most of the necessities on hand.

If you have to buy all of the ingredients, there’s a $6-$20 startup cost depending on how fancy you want to get with your sugar, tea, jars, etc.

Here’s a sample breakdown:

Black tea (20 bags): $3

5-pound bag of sugar: $3

Scoby, jars, coffee filter, rubber band: Free-$14

That small investment will get you through at least the first 10 quart batches, probably more, which works out to $1 or less per 16 ounces, or about 6.3 cents per ounce.

A 12-pack of 16-ounce bottles can cost you up to $170, though even the $50-80 range isn’t cheap. Sure, it’s healthier than soda, but that’s pretty steep. Even scaling down to 8-ounce bottles, a 12-24 pack runs about $30-45.

Even if we assume you have to buy all your supplies and get a mere 10 quarts from them, that’s a 50-75% minimum savings when compared to the store-bought variety.

Is It Hard?

Kombucha, I discovered, isn’t as difficult to produce as it may seem.

The initial activation took about 15-30 minutes. Check out this recipe or video to get started.

The first culturing session takes roughly 30 days, and it’s pretty hands off. Ideally, store your jar at room temperature and out of direct sunlight.

My tea spent a month on the top shelf of my pantry nestled between a bottle of Kahlua and a fifth of Jose Cuervo. Hey, you can’t survive on kombucha alone.

Water Kefir: Another Cheap, Easy Fermented Drink

My kitchen curiosity was piqued. What other delights awaited the empty Ball jars decoratively displayed above my stove?

Enter water kefir. No, that wasn’t a typo. You’re probably familiar with milk kefir from wandering the grocery store aisles, and water kefir (compare to a beverage like La Croix or Zevia) is a reasonable facsimile.

It’s essentially liquid fermented by bacteria and yeast grains. As the name suggests, water kefir ferments, well, water — sugar water, to be exact.

If you think kombucha is simple, water kefir is even easier. Just brew up a batch of sugar water, let it cool and plunk in a few gelatinous water kefir grains. A much shorter fermentation time later — about four days — you’ve got your first batch ready for flavoring and bottling.

Unfortunately, harvesting water kefir grains from scratch isn’t quite as easy as with kombucha, but it’s quite affordable, with some grains costing as little as $10. A quick Amazon search yields loads of results.

So what do you actually use water kefir for? It’s perfect as a base for drinks and foods, ranging from homemade “sodas” to desserts, and even toppings like salad dressing.

Add some lemon juice, and you’ve got lemonade. A few teaspoons of vanilla extract and you’ve transformed that water kefir into cream soda.

One of my favorite concoctions? The Shamrock Water Kefir Shake, which is a delightful combination of avocado, kale, mint extract, honey, coconut milk (I substitute almond milk), ice cubes and water kefir.

Sure, the mixture may sound odd, but it’s amazing. Pro-tip: be heavy-handed with the mint extract and honey to offset the garden undertones from the kale.

Like a kombucha scoby, water kefir grains can be reused in subsequent batches, and they actually multiply. I inherited a batch from a friend who needed to discard excess grains, so mine were free — ask around in case anyone you know has extras!

Could Kombucha and Water Kefir Help You Save Money?

Both drinks are packed with probiotics. Once I began consuming probiotic-loaded drinks on a regular basis, let’s just say I found my three-a-day probiotic and digestive enzyme regimen unnecessary.

If you’re a fellow probiotic fan, you know all too well just how pricy a bottle can be, and these fermented beverages helped alleviate the need to purchase those dietary supplements. I now had a near-limitless supply, plus the satisfaction of knowing I made it.

The Drawbacks of Making Your Own Kombucha and Kefir

Kombucha for a fraction of the price, nixing probiotics from your shopping list… by now you’re probably asking yourself “what’s the catch?”

Like anything living — and yes, to quote Dr. Frankenstein, “it’s alive” — booch and kefir need caring for. You have to feed them, or brew a new batch at regular intervals.

For kombucha, this means about a week to a month, but with water kefir, it’s every day or two. With water kefir especially, if you’re not quickly drinking what you’ve amassed, you may run out of bottles. If you’re getting overwhelmed, check out this guide to taking a break.

Still, it’s a small price to pay for the probiotic and savings benefits. At least you don’t have to walk your kefir when it’s freezing or raining outside.

Your Turn: Have you tried brewing your own kombucha or water kefir? How did it go, and did it help you save money?

Disclosure: A (kombucha) toast to savings! Thanks for allowing us to place affiliate links in this post.

Moe Long is a Durham Movies Examiner, and Contributing Writer for AXS, Cliqist, and Blasting News. When he’s not writing, you can find him drinking way too much coffee, listening to vinyl and watching “The X-Files” reruns.

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