Who says work and play need to be two separate things? Today, playing video games to make money isn’t just a teenager’s dream job. There are thousands of people who make real income by putting their passion for video games to work. Thanks to the internet and technological advances, turning your hobby into a profession […]
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Jennifer writes in:
I live in a single room efficiency apartment. The entirety of things that I have available for cooking are a sink, a table, a microwave, and a mini fridge. I simply don’t have the space or capacity to do dishes or prepare meals or anything like that. I can’t even really eat convenience frozen meals because there isn’t room for more than one or two in my mini fridge. What can I do to keep food costs low? It feels like my only option is to eat out all the time.
This can be a real struggle. For a period of time when I was in college, I lived in a similar situation as Jennifer, with almost no tools with which to make food. I also had very little money at that time, so I had to be extremely careful with my food spending. In fact, I used to “splurge” with a hamburger at the Wendy’s near my apartment once a week, and I still remember going in there on early Friday afternoon, as my last class of the week was done at noon on Friday, and enjoying that burger.
Many of the strategies I used then make up this article, along with some other useful tactics I’ve picked up along the way. Here’s my best food advice for Jennifer, and for anyone who is in a situation where traditional cooking at home just does not work no matter the reason.
When you’re in a situation where home food preparation is extremely limited or difficult, it can be easy to sway yourself into thinking that eating at a restaurant is your only option, and once you begin to establish that as a routine, it becomes even harder to break out of that mindset.
For me, the best way to alter this kind of thinking is to simply adopt a schedule in which you only eat at restaurants at certain times and have to figure out how to eat elsewhere at other times. For example, you might decide that you’re going to set a rule for yourself of only eating at a restaurant once a day or, if you’re really going to push things, once every other day. Don’t worry about the details of how you pull this off for now – we’ll get to that.
It really comes down to forcibly breaking routines that you may have established in your life and finding different ways to do things. When it’s not obviously easy how you can eat without just going to a restaurant, restaurant eating becomes the routine. You have to break that routine if you want to start eating with less expense, and the rest of the tips will help you do that.
Rather than eating three meals a day, instead aim to eat one or perhaps two meals a day with some occasional small snacks in between them. This isn’t unusual; it’s a pretty standard dietary pattern in many parts of the world.
There are several reasons why this will cut deeply into your food costs, with the biggest one being that it reduces your need to go to a restaurant to roughly once a day (or perhaps even less often, as we’ll see later in this article). If you’re only eating one big meal a day and snacking a bit throughout the rest of the day, you really only need to go to a restaurant for that big meal and the rest can be small items you carry around in your bag for snacking as needed throughout the day.
Using this strategy makes it much easier to downshift to eating at restaurants once per day for your primary meal, which you then supplement with a few snacks throughout the day.
Water, water, water. It’s healthy, it helps with feeling satiated, it’s essentially free, and it’s easy to get almost anywhere.
Get into a habit of having an empty water bottle with you everywhere. Spend a little bit of money and buy a sturdy reusable water bottle with a tight-fitting cap. Fill it each day before you leave, drink it throughout the day, and fill it frequently as you’re out and about.
If you’re a person who is used to drinking caffeinated and/or sugary beverages, get into the routine of drinking water with every meal and drinking it throughout the day and as long as you don’t adopt a new routine of buying bottled water, you’ll save yourself a ton of money and likely wind up healthier in the long run.
If you’re eating one meal a day, try to eat at a buffet restaurant if possible.
Buffets you to have a large and varied meal for a single fairly low price. You can eat until you’re satiated and have a wide variety of items to choose from. If you’re concerned about overeating, drink a lot of water with your meal. I usually drink a glass of water with every trip to the buffet if I go to one, and that definitely cuts down on the number of trips.
Also, most buffets offer a wide variety of all kinds of foods, allowing you to easily get in an appropriate number of servings of vegetables. Make your first plate simply consist of a large salad and a variety of vegetables to make sure you’re getting a well-balanced diet.
That being said, much of this depends on what buffet options are available in your area. In my area, there are a bunch of different buffet options – there are multiple pizza buffets (most of which have a salad bar and a general “buffet” bar, too), multiple Asian buffets, and a couple of other general buffets as well. All of them are pretty reasonably priced, too.
If you don’t want to eat at a buffet or don’t have one available to you, there are some things you can do at traditional restaurants to save money.
For starters, never order a beverage besides water. Beverages at restaurants are extremely overpriced. Just avoid them.
When you’re ordering your meal, order a huge entree with the intent of only eating a third or a half of it. The rest should be take with you in a takeout container. When you’re home, stow it in your fridge and stretch it to one or two additional meals.
The reason is that the price gap between a small entree and a large entree at most restaurants is actually pretty small, much less than the difference between a small entree and nothing. For example, at Noodles and Co. (a chain pasta restaurant), most of the “regular” servings are twice the size of the “small” servings (roughly) but cost only a small percentage more. Order the “regular,” eat half of it, and take the other half with you in a container.
Similarly, if you’re at a restaurant where they assemble food to order (like, say, Chipotle), look into tips for that specific restaurant on how to get the maximum value out of your order. For example, I’ve learned that with Chipotle, you get far more food in a burrito bowl than in an actual burrito, enough so that I can usually stretch a burrito bowl into an additional meal of leftovers.
This doesn’t mean that you should order add-ons like appetizers or extra salads or things like that. Those end up being more expensive than they’re worth. Stick to water and a huge entree and you’ll get maximum value from most restaurants.
Now, let’s turn to the food you can actually have and use and prepare in a small apartment without a stove.
When I lived in a one-room apartment for a while, I kept a lot of shelf-stable foods in a large plastic tub that served as my “pantry.” It included things that I could easily turn into simple meals with basically no kitchen equipment at all or, in some cases, things I could eat directly.
Things that were usually in that container included a loaf of bread, peanut butter, dried fruits (raisins, dried cranberries, and so on), a lot of dry cereals, fruit and protein bars, ramen noodles (don’t make this a regular thing, but it’s perfectly fine to boil some water in the microwave and have ramen on occasion), beef and turkey jerky (my parents used to make or acquire this and give me a lot of it), and cups of pudding and applesauce.
I didn’t have a whole lot of money at the time, so I would typically buy these things in significant quantity when I found them on sale. The only tools I needed for eating these things were a microwave-safe cup for heating water, a fork, a spoon, and a bowl, all of which were easily washed in the sink.
Another thing I highly recommend keeping in your “pantry box” is pre-made meals that are room temperature safe and able to be microwaved, like canned soups and many of the Trader Joe’s Indian Fare meals. You can find inexpensive and healthy options for these things and all they typically require is a microwave, a bowl, and a spoon or fork.
Oranges, apples, and bananas are perfect foods for the situation Jennifer finds herself in. You can just sit them right on the table in a bowl or even just out loose on the table and they’ll last for at least a week, often more. They can be eaten at room temperature whenever you like. They’re incredibly healthy. Most people like at least some of them. And they’re really cheap, too.
A lot of other fruits have a more … specialized taste or have a higher cost or don’t last as long on the tabletop. For example, I used to eat a lot of grapefruits because they could sit out on the table for a while, but not everyone is a big fan of grapefruits.
The point is that it’s pretty easy and pretty cheap to get fruits into your diet. Just buy some fruit that can last on the tabletop for days and eat them at your convenience.
(Plus, orange peel can make your apartment smell wonderful. Trust me.)
One of the best bargains in food, in my opinion, is the whole rotisserie chicken, which many grocery stores sell. They’re whole chickens, already fully cooked and seasoned, at a really nice price.
Just buy a whole chicken, take it home, and take it apart as you eat it. It’ll most likely fit in a mini-fridge – if not, break it down further and put the pieces into smaller containers that will fit.
A single rotisserie chicken costs between $5 and $10 and can provide food for several meals for a single person. Not only that, you can use the meat in a lot of ways. For example, take a few spoonfuls of the rotisserie meat and throw it into a container of chicken ramen, or add it to some soup that you’ve made.
There are a lot of very simple and tasty things you can make that don’t really require much more than a bowl, a cup, a microwave, and a fridge to make and only require room-temperature items. Learn how to make some of them.
One of my favorite things to make in this regard is “overnight oats.” Just put 1/2 cup rolled oats in a large cup, add an equal amount of liquid (preferably milk or almond milk), and then add a bit of sweetener of your choice, whether it’s a bit of honey or some pieces of dried fruit or whatever. Put this in the fridge overnight and you have a killer filling breakfast in the morning.
Another thing I used to make (and still do, on occasion) that really only requires a coffee cup, a microwave, and a fridge is the “coffee cup scramble.” Just spray the insides of a coffee cup with nonstick spray, crack two eggs in there, add just a little bit of milk and salt and pepper, beat it with a fork until it’s consistent, and then cook it in the microwave at 45 second intervals on high until it’s done. If you want, add a bit of shredded cheese on top. It costs about $0.50 and is easy to make with just what you have.
This is my final tip, and it’s a big one. Even in Jennifer’s situation, there are still a bunch of meals that can easily be made in a crock pot, with leftovers easily stored in a mini-fridge for later meals throughout the week.
“Dump meals” are meals where you simply put a list of ingredients into a slow cooker in the morning, turn it on low, and leave it on all day. At the end of the day, you have a ready-to-eat meal with plenty of leftovers if you’re a single person. That’s it.
If you have a handful of containers for leftovers – Rubbermaid makes really nice and nearly infinitely reusable containers for individual meals, like these, for example – you can just serve up a meal from your slow cooker right onto a bowl or a plate, then put the rest into a few meal-sized containers and pop them straight in the fridge. Eat them as they’re convenient. Clean up the slow cooker in your sink – it’s pretty easy to do – and move on with life.
For example, you can really easily make a “dump” beef stew. Just spray the crock of the slow cooker with cooking spray, then put the following in there: 2 pounds of beef stew meat (you can buy this pre-chopped at the grocery store), 1 packet of beef stew seasoning mix (found in the spice aisle at the grocery store), 1 bag frozen mixed vegetables, 1 pound baby potatoes, 1/2 pound baby carrots, 2 tablespoons dried onion powder, and 1 32 ounce container of beef stock. Turn the slow cooker on low and stir it around a bit. Then go about your day. 8 to 12 hours later, add a quarter of a cup of flour to the stew and stir it thoroughly, then serve yourself a bowl and put the rest in meal-sized containers in your mini fridge. Depending on your appetite, you’ll have four or five meals from this stew.
Like that one? Here are 56 more dump dinners for the slow cooker. Almost all of them consist of just dumping in a list of ingredients in the morning, turning it on low, going about your day, and coming home to a hot meal and a bunch of leftovers, no oven or anything required and only one pot to clean up easily in your sink.
If you’re in a situation like Jennifer is, where you have limited options for preparing food, you really have two main goals. One is to minimize how often you actually go into a restaurant by figuring out what you actually can prepare with your limited tools and space. The other is to get maximum value out of every restaurant visit when you do go by eliminating drink costs, utilizing leftover boxes, and taking advantage of buffets.
All of the strategies listed above center around these two core elements. Minimize restaurant visits (while recognizing that you’ll likely still go fairly frequently) and maximize value from those visits. It all boils down to that.
The thing is, once you feel comfortable preparing food with such minimal equipment, when the time comes later in life when you have a full kitchen available to you, preparing food won’t really seem very intimidating. Plus, you won’t have established a routine where the only source of food in your life is a restaurant. It will be very easy to move to a state where you prepare almost everything at home because it really is cheaper and more convenient.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go put some rolled oats to soak in the fridge for breakfast in the morning.
Good luck!
The post Being Frugal with Food When You Don’t Have the Space to Cook appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
As an ecommerce store, driving traffic to your website is only half of the battle. That in itself is a tall task, but so much more needs to be done in order for you to actually generate sales.
Take a moment to put yourself into the minds of the consumers.
Clearly, they’re somewhat interested in whatever you’re selling. Maybe they found you from an organic search of a product they need or maybe they clicked on a PPC advertisement. It’s possible that they found your site from a social media campaign.
The way they found you really doesn’t matter. What’s important is that they landed on your site because of interest.
You’ve done a great job of setting up your site navigation, making it easy for visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for. This brings them to the product page, which is what we’ll be focusing on in this guide.
Here’s what you need to realize. When a website visitor lands on your product page, they’re often just a click away from completing the purchase process. But that won’t happen if those landing pages aren’t optimized for conversions.
Failure to properly design and optimize product pages is a mistake that I see ecommerce sites make all of the time. That’s what inspired me to write this guide.
I’ll explain everything you need to know about crafting product pages that drive conversions.
Before we continue, I want to make sure you understand exactly what needs to be included on every product page. All product pages should have the same elements.
First and foremost, your product always needs to be the center of attention. While this may seem obvious, I’ve seen some ecommerce sites position their products in a way that appears to be an afterthought.
Branding needs to be everywhere on your website. While you may have branding on your homepage or other interior pages, you can’t forget to add this to your product pages. Depending on where your traffic is coming from, not everyone who lands on a product page will see your homepage.
Website design is one of the most crucial elements of a product page. Even if you include all of the other proper elements, it’s useless if the design isn’t functional or user-friendly.
You can’t sell products without text. That’s why your sales copy is a critical element. The writing needs to flow well with your design and branding to tie everything together.
Now that you know what needs to be on your product pages, let’s look at some more specific tips for product page optimization.
How does someone buy an item from your product page?
They need to click on a button that allows them to check out. But if that button is buried somewhere on the page, you won’t drive as many conversions.
Take a look at this product page from Blenders Eyewear.
There’s only one button on this entire page that can be clicked—add to cart.
It’s big, bold, and the only text on the screen with a background color. In fact, aside from the product itself, the CTA here is the most prominent part of the page. It can’t be missed.
Go to your website and look at your product pages. See if your CTA is as clear and obvious as this one.
If your visitors can’t spot the button right away, it’s a problem.
Your CTA must be in view at all times. If users have to scroll to find it, then it’s not going to have a high conversion rate.
Here’s something else to keep in mind. Don’t place your conversion CTA near other CTAs on your site. For example, the “buy now” button shouldn’t be positioned next to a “subscribe” button.
While collecting emails is important, that doesn’t belong above the fold on your product page, and it certainly shouldn’t be somewhere that will draw attention away from your transactional CTA.
Don’t get too cute or fancy with the wording of your call-to-action either. Something along the lines of “buy now” or “add to cart” is just fine. Trying to be creative here can just end up confusing your customers.
Unlike brick and mortar retail, online consumers rely heavily on images to make their buying decisions.
Your smartphone might take a great picture, but you should not be using it to take product photos. Everything needs to be handled by a professional.
Get a photographer to handle photoshoots with professional equipment and editing software. It’s worth it to spend extra on these things in order to get the best shot. You’ll need to take photos from every possible angle.
With that said, you also need to make sure that you’re taking the “right” photos for your product pages.
For example, let’s say you’re selling something like a wristwatch. A photo of a watch alone on a table doesn’t really add much value to the consumer. But if you put it on someone’s wrist, it gives them a better indication of the product will look if they buy it.
Take a look at the images on this product page from MVMT.
This is great photography. They used the “right” images because all of the shots show the product on a person’s wrist.
You can see how it looks from every angle. The first image shows how it looks from the first person perspective of the model looking down to check the time. Then it includes some other shots of how it will look from someone else’s view.
Oh yeah—they even show what the watch looks like if you’re jumping out of a plane.
These photos tell the full story about the product. It’s stylish, looks great, and can be worn as casual wear and active wear alike.
No matter how independent or unique a person claims to be, consumers will still follow the lead of others. Why should they buy a product if nobody else has?
They’ll have no way of telling if your product is good, useful, or just a waste of their money. If they’re unable to get these questions answered, then they probably won’t buy.
That’s why you need to include social proof on your product pages.
84% of people trust an online review as much as a recommendation from a friend. After reading between one and six reviews, 68% of customers form an opinion about a brand or product.
It’s your job to encourage customer reviews. After someone makes a purchase, send a follow-up email and ask them to rate or review the product. The more reviews you get, the better off you’ll be.
In fact, 49% of consumers say that they value the quantity of online reviews when they’re evaluating a business.
Blenders Eyewear, one of the examples we looked at earlier, had reviews on their product page. Just make sure you don’t let the reviews distract the user from buying.
Here’s another example of this strategy used by Brooks.
This product has 68 reviews and it’s rated 5/5 stars by their customers. You can see this information above the fold, and near the product description.
However, the actual reviews aren’t shown here. If you click on them, it will bring you to the bottom of the page.
That’s where the reviews belong.
If these were positioned elsewhere on the page, it would be too distracting and take away from the product and CTA. But by including some information above the fold, and giving customers easy access to find the reviews and read them, it helps aid their buying decision.
Visitors can do all of this without having to go to another landing page or third-party review sites.
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, how much is a video worth?
Earlier I explained the importance of allowing your customers to get a better understanding of your products with images. But a video really gives them a closer look at everything.
Videos can showcase your products more than a picture ever could.
In fact, 90% of people say that product videos are helpful during the buying process. 70% of marketers say that videos convert higher than any other type of content.
After watching a video, 64% of consumers are more likely to buy a product.
Check out this example of a product page from GoPro.
It’s a different approach compared to some of the other examples we’ve looked at so far.
Videos are especially important for this company since they’re selling a camera on this page. The video shows exactly what type of content can be captured with this camera.
Videos are great for those of you who have products that need a little bit more explanation. It’s not necessarily required if you’re selling something simple, like a plain shirt.
But with that said, you can still include videos, even if you’re selling something straightforward. Allbirds is a shoe company that has videos on their product pages of people walking in their shoes.
For those of you that have a product that’s a bit more complex and requires further explanation, adding a “how to” video or product demonstration can be very helpful to the consumer.
This is one of the more common mistakes that I see on ecommerce product pages. Everything looks great until the description.
While your product page should definitely be visually appealing with photos and videos, you still need to have some text on the page.
Keep it short. Don’t go overboard with long paragraphs. Nobody wants to read large blocks of text. You can use bullet points to shorten the content and make it easier for people to read.
Don’t be boring. Establish a brand voice. Know your audience and what they want to hear.
If your target market is business professionals over the age of 50, the description would be different then if you were trying to reach college students.
Look at this product description from Dr. Squatch, an ecommerce site that sells men’s soap.
This particular bar of soap was inspired by the scent of beer.
Take a closer look at some of the text in this description. They use phrasing like “drag a lawn chair into the shower” and “sip a couple cold cruisers.”
Their product isn’t for everyone. So they’re comfortable using slang to target a specific market.
Normally, I’d say steer clear of this type of phrasing. But in this case, it’s part of the company’s overall branding strategy.
Understand your customer and what they want in a product. Then work that into the description.
Don’t just rush through the process and say “soap that smells like beer.” Does this describe the product? Sure.
But will it make anyone want to buy it? Probably not.
Your pricing strategy is part of your product page since the price will obviously need to be on display.
This is your chance to justify your pricing and show your product’s value.
The description, pictures, videos, and everything else on the page needs to explain exactly why your product is priced a certain way. This is especially true for those of you who are selling products at higher price points.
Look at this example from Lululemon.
They have a quick “why we made this” description directly under the price.
In short, it explains that the product doesn’t have seams, is made with anti-stink technology, is ventilated, and made for training.
It’s not just a regular t-shirt for wearing to bed or around the house. So the high price tag of $68 for a seemingly simple shirt is justifiable.
Without that information, consumers may be a bit more reluctant to buy.
Truthfully, you won’t know for sure if your product page is fully optimized until you try different approaches.
That’s why every element of the page should be A/B tested over and over again.
The list goes on and on. It’s an ongoing process.
Even as your conversion rates rise, don’t assume that they can’t get any higher. Keep running tests to be sure.
Product pages are the most important components of your ecommerce site.
When a website visitor lands on one of these pages, they are moments away from converting. It’s your job to make sure that every product page is optimized to drive sales.
Use this guide as a reference to help you make sure that your pages have all of the crucial elements needed. Then follow the examples that I showed you and apply those same principles to your website.
I am a huge proponent of setting financial goals. A well-considered financial goal not only gives you direction toward some of the biggest things you want to achieve in life, but is easily broken down into steps that you can achieve today – and I do mean literally today.
The big problem with this kind of big goal setting is that the bigger and longer-term the goal, the more likely it is that your life will change in some significant way before you reach that goal.
Sometimes those changes are good changes. Those kinds of changes can accelerate you toward your current goal quickly (like a windfall) or even cause you to consider an even stronger goal (like a major career advancement or change).
Others are simply life changes that make your current goal seem irrelevant, like getting married or having children or simply reconsidering your life priorities.
Then there are the changes that cause a downward shift in your income level or add major expenses to your life. Perhaps you get fired and fall out of your career path. Maybe a loved one gets very ill and you take on the burden of caring for that loved one. It could just be a long series of smaller unfortunate events.
Whatever the case, sometimes our big goals drift from audacious but possible into the “impossible without an outside miracle” territory. You’re just not going to make it to the goal, no matter how much you tweak the plan.
It can feel a lot like failure, and that sense of failure can easily make you want to give up on long term planning entirely. Your dream of retiring early now just looks like normal retirement (if you’re lucky). Your dream of paying for your daughter’s college education just went up in smoke. Why plan for anything if this is what happens?
The important thing to remember is that a worthwhile goal isn’t so much about the destination, but about the changes you make to yourself along the journey’s path and the improved financial stability that almost every goal provides all throughout the journey.
Let’s say your big goal was to save for your daughter’s college education. Suddenly, when she’s thirteen, things change. Not only are you unable to save much for that goal any more, you have to dip into it to keep a roof over her head.
It seems like a disaster, right? But consider these things.
First, what would your situation be like if you didn’t have that money to dip into at all? Wouldn’t the impact on your daughter’s life be far worse if that “college savings” hadn’t been there to begin with? Sure, you might not be using it for college, but you’re using it for something of value.
Second, how big would your lifestyle changes be if you weren’t already living below your means when you were putting aside money for college? In order to save $100 a month for college (or whatever it is you’re saving), you had to be living on $100 a month less than you could have been living on. This means that your lifestyle adjustment is actually easier than it would have been without your big financial goal.
Third, even with the changes, you likely have some progress toward your goal that you can either retain or redirect toward a new goal. Again, maybe you were able to save $10,000 for your daughter’s education but needed to tap $5,000 of it. You still have $5,000 put away toward your daughter’s education, which is a pretty nice head start for her.
Finally, you know that you can set a big goal and make progress towards it. You aimed for a goal and you were able to make lifestyle changes to reach toward that goal. You know that you have it within you to do those things, even if unexpected changes caused you to no longer be able to achieve the goal as you envisioned it.
This is not the end of the line for achieving big things in life. You know you can make progress toward big goals in life, and you know that progress toward big goals can be helpful even if the big goal is now out of reach. Rather than giving up, it’s just time for some reassessment.
You can start by sitting down and considering what things are really important to you going forward. The big goal you were aiming for is now out of reach, but that doesn’t mean that it was the only thing important to you in your life. There may be other things to aim for that are still within your grasp.
You had a dream of paying for your daughter’s education and now that seems out of reach, but perhaps you can at least pay for all of her textbooks and buy her a really good laptop when she goes to school. You can do that by simply aiming to not touch her college savings again and contributing a much smaller monthly amount (or nothing at all). What do you need to do in your life to enable a $10 a month contribution? What do you need to do to ensure you never have to touch it again? Maybe a big emergency fund might help you avoid that.
Maybe instead you had a dream of retiring early, but now that’s not going to happen. What can you do instead? Maybe you can simply aim for a normal retirement with some money in the bank that helps make your retirement richer than just what Social Security can provide. Maybe you can still retire a bit early, just not quite as early as before.
You might find that the changes in your life point you to an entirely different goal. Maybe now you want to ensure lifelong care for a loved one who suffered a devastating injury. Make that your central goal. Or, maybe you are now focused on providing care for your baby rather than retiring at age 43. Make that your central goal.
Another key thing to remember is that the skills and often the resources that you built up in pursuit of your previous goal will apply to your new goal as well.
Self-restraint? It was useful then and it’s useful now.
Smart shopping habits? It was useful then and it’s useful now.
Automating your savings for a big goal? It was useful then and it’s useful now.
Breaking down big goals into smaller and smaller pieces until they’re easily achievable in the next day or two? It was useful then and it’s useful now.
Money in retirement savings or emergency funds? They were useful then and they’re useful now.
You still have the tools, even if the old goal isn’t a great fit any more.
So define a new big, audacious goal for yourself. It might be similar to your old one but a bit smaller, or it might be something else new entirely.
Then, do as you did before. Break it down into smaller pieces until you’ve got things you can be doing in the next few days. Spend less. Automate your savings. Make good spending choices. In other words, do many of the things you were doing that helped you achieve your previous goal.
A final note: the biggest enemy when a goal falls apart is simply being disheartened. It’s easy to feel as though goals are pointless (and thus working toward them is pointless) when you watch a big goal fall apart due to things outside your control.
Here’s the truth: life always hands us bad events. We are always going to be hit with unexpected events, and many of them are going to be unfortunate ones. We can’t control those unfortunate events; all we can really do is control our response to them.
Having a goal or a “system” in place is simply a guidance tool to help you progress toward a better life than you would have if you chose to do nothing and follow the path of least resistance in life. The best response to an unfortunate event isn’t to knock down all of those goals and systems; rather, just accept that life sometimes hands you a less than desirable hand and play it with the tools that you have. You know how to set goals. You know how to break them down into actionable elements. You know how to exercise self-control and self-restraint. You can learn what specifics you need to know about the new goal you have in mind.
It’s progress toward a better life, same as it always was. Your situation might be a little worse, but you’re still working toward something better. To do otherwise merely ensures a worse outcome.
Good luck.
The post What to Do When Your Financial Goals Become Impossible To Achieve appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Dear Squeaking By,
Try saying this: “I am stressed about our finances.”
Say it when you’re sober. Don’t say it after a hellish workday or in the middle of a fight over whose turn it is to scrub the toilet. Say it soon.
Then say: “I’d like for us to talk about our money plans and goals.” Schedule a time, day and place to have a talk.
You didn’t just wake up last week feeling the pressures of being the breadwinner. This has been building for nearly six months.
And it’s understandable why you’ve been avoiding the conversation. A job loss is often about so much more than the loss of income. We derive a huge part of our identities from our jobs. Think about how often we learn someone’s name and immediately follow up with, “What do you do?”
So it’s tempting after a significant other’s job loss to jump into the role of supportive partner and absorb as much of their burden as possible. But you’re not a sponge. You can only absorb so much stress.
It sounds like your anxieties are spilling out in the form of “You should get a job”-type statements. And any conversation with a partner that focuses on what they should or shouldn’t be doing is pretty likely to end in an argument.
But it’s much harder to argue with an “I” statement, e.g., “I’m feeling stressed about money, and I’d like to discuss that.”
Your goal in this conversation isn’t to assign blame; it’s to come up with a plan together. You’ll want to talk about what a realistic time frame might be for your fiance’s job search, how to adjust your budget while you’re living on a single paycheck, how to reprioritize your goals for now and his options for earning money while he’s unemployed.
Be prepared to listen as much as you talk. It’s not OK for your fiance to unilaterally decide to make you the sole paycheck earner, but understand that he may have serious anxiety surrounding the job hunt that he hasn’t communicated.
If you follow these steps and your fiance still refuses to talk or accuses you of nagging, I’d urge you to think carefully about whether this is a viable relationship.
You need to be comfortable talking about money in marriage. You’re not being selfish or unreasonable for wanting financial security and the ability to splurge on a vacation or a night out. You deserve someone who gives you space to communicate about your goals and what’s stressing you out, even when it’s a difficult conversation.
Sometimes silence is more powerful than words. If your fiance isn’t willing to have a dialog, what he’s communicating is a lack of respect for you. That, unfortunately, is a problem that will linger long after he’s found a job.
Robin Hartill is a senior editor at The Penny Hoarder and the voice behind Dear Penny. Send your questions about having difficult money conversations to AskPenny@thepennyhoarder.com.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
As I mentioned in other recent articles, my family and I recently spent almost two weeks vacationing in various parts of Colorado. We mostly spent the time camping, with a few days staying in a cabin owned by a family friend.
As is usual on our family vacations, we were able to explore a wide variety of free and low cost activities, some of them good and some of them not so good. Here are twelve things we did on our vacation that I would describe as either “free” or “low cost” that we all enjoyed. I chose four from each of the three general areas that we stayed in during the trip.
One great money-saving tip for a Colorado trip: get a Safeway card. Safeway is the predominant grocery store chain in Colorado and they have, at least as of this writing, a very good customer loyalty program that’s extremely easy to sign up for (they literally just handed me one without any need to sign up, as the cashier pointed out that I would save about $6 with the card) and results in quite a few additional discounts. As most of our meals were prepared at campsites or at the cabin, we were able to use the Safeway card for quite a few discounts on groceries and other items. Of course, now we have a Safeway card that we will likely not use again as there are no Safeways in our area, but it definitely saved us money throughout Colorado. So, if you’re camping and need supplies and stop at a Safeway, don’t be afraid to take advantage of any Safeway Club deals they have and simply ask for a card when checking out because you’re new to the area.
The first portion of our vacation involved staying in a cabin owned by a family friend with several extended family members near Steamboat Springs in northern Colorado. As such, almost all of our meals were just prepared at the cabin and many of our excursions were to natural landmarks near the cabin and near Steamboat Springs. Here are the highlights.
Steamboat Lake State Park cost $8 for a daily pass and offered access to a bunch of gorgeous hiking trails, including a challenging one to the top of Hahn’s Peak (~12,000 feet, which most of our family ascended) and many more of all kinds of difficult levels, a nice beach area, some great birdwatching, a bunch of geocaches… it’s just a really nice park to explore.
Movies on the Mountain is something we just missed due to other activities, but we saw it ongoing and it’s a pretty nice free way to end a day with your family. In Gondola Square in Steamboat Springs on Saturday evenings, they project a family-friendly movie and feed the audio through the park’s sound system. Just bring a blanket, kick back, and wind down after an active day with your family.
Fish Creek Falls and Uranium Mine is a small handful of gorgeous trails near Steamboat Springs that require a $5/car day use pass. Our family did a very flat and easy quarter mile paved walk to a wonderful view of the Fish Creek Falls, a hilly gravel-covered quarter mile walk down to the base of the Falls for another wonderful view, and a more challenging (I’d describe it as easy except for the several hundred foot elevation change) trail to an abandoned uranium mine with an amazing overlook of the area. We were just getting used to the elevation change at the time (going from the roughly 1,000 feet above sea level where we live to the 8,000 feet above sea level that these trails are on) and the incline of the uranium mine trail was a challenge, but I think it would have been much easier later in our vacation when we were more acclimated.
Yampa River Botanic Park is a free six acre botanical garden in Steamboat Springs that part of our family visited. It’s separated into about fifty smaller gardens, each with their own theme and focus represented by different plants and flowers, different arrangements, sculptures, and decorations. It’s a very pleasant way to spend a couple of hours on a leisurely stroll through beautiful gardens.
The middle portion of our vacation involved camping in a campground near Colorado Springs with my wife’s sister and her family. We visited the top of Pike’s Peak, which was enjoyable but doesn’t really qualify as “free” or “inexpensive,” so I’m excluding that part. Instead, here are four free and low cost things we found to do in the Colorado Springs area that we enjoyed.
Garden of the Gods is a gorgeous park owned by the city of Colorado Springs and completely free to visit. The park consists of walking trails that wind through a wide variety of natural red sandstone formations as well as a truly well done visitors center with maps, exhibits, and other information.
We spent a large portion of a day simply wandering the paths at Garden of the Gods and were actually chased away early by an incoming storm or else we likely would have spent at least another hour on the site. The natural rock formations are wonderful to explore. If you do one thing in Colorado Springs, this is it.
Red Rock Canyon Open Space is an open space near the Garden of the Gods that offers incredible views of the distinctive red rocks and hillsides in the area and amazing rock formations. I didn’t get to do this myself, but other members of my family did it and thoroughly enjoyed it. The views on the easy Contemplative Trail are incredible.
Penrose Heritage Museum is another wonderful free offering in the Colorado Springs area, one that I only got to taste briefly because we were running very late and it was about to close.
The museum features an enormous collection of artifacts of all kinds from the Pikes Peak area collected by the Penrose family over the years and bequeathed to a free-to-the-public museum. This includes a bunch of vintage cars that once raced to the top of Pikes Peak, materials from the construction of the Pikes Peak Highway, and many other exhibits that I would have loved to wander through for hours.
US Olympic and Paralympic Training Center is the most expensive item on this list, as tours cost $10 per person. However, I did want to mention it here because the center is completely self-funded through tours (and sponsorships) and doesn’t rely on public money and it made an enormous impact on my oldest son, who ranked it as perhaps the best thing he did on our entire trip and kept bringing it up afterwards.
The tour takes you through a very impressive athletic facility designed to help national team members in various sports perform well at their individual sports at upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games. Our tour was led by two-time Paralympian Tyler Carter and we spotted several Olympian and Paralympian athletes training, including watching Brittany Reinbolt (bobsledder) lifting weights (she’s amazingly strong) and an unidentified male gymnast doing casual backflips and leaps as part of his warmup, which caused my son to have a great deal of appreciation for the athleticism of gymnasts that he didn’t really have from watching it on television (he didn’t disdain gymnastics; it’s just not something that ever crossed his mind up to that point).
During the final portion of our vacation, our immediate family camped in Mesa Verde National Park in southwest Colorado. We largely stayed inside Mesa Verde during this portion of the trip, so what follows is focused entirely on what’s available inside of the park.
At Mesa Verde, much of the park is completely available with a park admission, which is $25 for a vehicle and is good for seven days, or with a National Parks pass, which normally costs $80 for an annual pass that is good at all national parks but there are various discounts available (including the wonderful Every Kid in a Park program, which gives a free year-long National Parks pass to the families of fourth graders, which we happened to miss out on this year because of age gaps between our children).
Mesa Verde is most well known for the cave dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people, constructed under amazing conditions between 800 and 1,200 years ago. You can see most of the dwellings in the park at a distance for free and some of the more worn-down ones up close for free; tours of some of the cave dwellings are available at a very reasonable price. I strongly encourage people to avoid the more expensive “package” tours sold outside of the park and instead sign up for the much less expensive individual tours of specific dwellings led by park rangers and sold within the park. These tours are kind of necessary because the better-preserved cliff dwellings are fragile and the rangers do a good job of keeping people from exploring the dwellings and doing things like chipping off bits of rock as a “souvenir” (which wouldn’t take too long to completely destroy the cliff dwellings).
What follows are our family’s four favorite things from the park, three of which were free upon entering the park and one of which is a low cost cave dwelling tour.
The Far View Sites are the ruins of several Ancestral Pueblo villages along a roughly 1.25 mile look trail that’s an easy walk. Our favorite part of this was the “Coyote Village” area, where you could actually walk through the ruins of an Ancestral Pueblo village at your own pace. The ruins here predate the cliff dwellings. This is a nice way to incorporate a nice walk through the terrain of the area with examination of Ancestral Pueblo ruins.
Sun Temple is perhaps the “mystery” of Mesa Verde and it generated a ton of conversation in our family. Sun Temple is a temple constructed sometime in the 1200s, late in the period of the Ancestral Pueblos, and it uses some very different architecture than the earlier villages and ceremonial structures. The building just looks different, even at a glance, as though people from other cultures may have come to the area and been involved in the design.
We spent a lot of time here, even though it was in the evening hours, and had a lot of conversations about what went on here. We had already learned why the Ancestral Pueblos left the area, likely as this was being constructed. Why? What role did this temple play? Why does it look so different than the other structures? There’s a lot to think about here beyond simply admiring the building.
Cliff Palace is an amazingly well-preserved cave dwelling that you can see pretty well from a distance, but you can tour directly with a park ranger at a cost of $5 per person. Our family of five did this tour and it was perhaps the highlight of our time at Mesa Verde.
The ranger led us down a series of stone steps and then up a ten foot sturdy ladder to the ruins. We spent an hour down there, with the ranger answering questions and explaining various features of the Palace. Afterwards, we exited the ruins by climbing three short ladders and going up another flight or two of stone stairs. The ruins are stunning and provide a wonderful example of the sophisticated architecture and planning of the Ancestral Pueblo people.
Knife’s Edge Trail and Prater Ridge Trail were two interconnected trails that my family and I hiked on the last day of our stay at Mesa Verde, near the Morefield Campground where we were camped. The Knife’s Edge Trail is an easy two mile one way hike that takes you out with some amazing views of the nearby Montezuma Valley. The Prater Ridge Trail is an easy-to-moderate hike with varying lengths (depending on which loops you take) that takes you up on top of a ridge and offers great views of various parts of the park.
Although this vacation was very long (thirteen days in all), it turned out to be a very inexpensive vacation, with a very low cost per day for our travels. There were several reasons for this.
First of all, our activities were loaded with low-cost and free options. We intentionally aimed for low-cost activities most of the time, aside from one or two specific things (Pike’s Peak was probably our only really expensive activity). The list above merely includes the low-cost activities that we really liked, but we did lots of things that were less memorable and enjoyable that were also low cost. For the most part, we went into the trip with the assumption that we could have a wonderful trip without opening our wallet for tourist activities constantly, and that was certainly borne out.
Second, we camped for most of the trip and stayed at a friend’s cabin for the rest. The cost of a campsite at a campground is low and it’s pretty easy to prepare your own food at a campground.
Third, most of our activities were very “picnic-able,” meaning that it made a lot of sense to just pack a picnic lunch and enjoy it in the area. Many of our lunches were picnic lunches, which meant that we ate a simple breakfast at the campsite or cabin, a picnic lunch, and dinner at the campsite or cabin most days. Our restaurant meals were very rare on the entire trip.
As I noted earlier, most of our food acquisition on this vacation was at Safeway, where we basically went in with a meal plan and a shopping list in hand.
The end result is that this was a thirteen day long summer vacation that really didn’t dent our wallets too badly.
If you’re considering a vacation in Colorado in the future, I hope you use some of these strategies and visit some of these locations for some low cost entertainment and a low cost overall trip. Good luck!
The post Free and Inexpensive Things to Do While Vacationing in Colorado appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
