The Save Money Blog

Archive for May, 2008

It has been months since I replace virtually every incandescent light bulb in my house with the new energy saving compact flourescent (CFL) lights.

Lighting accounts for nearly 20% of the total energy we use in our homes and that is quite a bit. If we want to save money we must start thinking about cutting this expense down.

CFL's on average will use 60%-75% less energy than a regular incandescent light bulb and will last 10 times longer as well. The initial cost of CFL's may be more than incandescent bulbs but the above fact should be enough to sway you to purchase them. You are going to save money using them, period.

Some points to consider. Don't cheap out. Like anything else, they are cheap for a reason. Go to a Home Depot and ask about the different brands or research them online. Two, they do contain some mercury. The amount is trace and will not harm you but you need to dispose of them properly. Find a hazardous waste depot nearby or call you local government to find out where you can get rid of them when they expire. Finally, the do take a bit to warm up if they have been sitting idle for periods of time. Don't worry the room will light up just fine.

There was an ad in our local paper the other for a company that would come over and free of charge they will take your old engery wasting refrigerator away and recycle it. A perfect idea for a blog post on saving money. How much of a difference does an old refrigerator make? An article on CNN today oddly enough gives the straight facts. If you ditch your pre-1993 fridge, you'll save enough on energy costs to buy coffee for nearly 80 days. Refrigerators qualified under the new Energy Star guidelines use less energy than a 75-watt light bulb left on full time. If your current model was built before 1993, it costs at least double to run than new Energy Star-rated models of the same size. That's and impressive savings no matter how you look at it.

What about the cost of purchasing a new refrigerators? You don't have to run out and buy a new one. There are lots of places like used appliance stores, ebay or even free internet swap sites or buy and sell sites. People are replacing their appliances all the time and you can benefit from this.

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I came across this the other day and I thought it might interest you. It's called Kill-A-Watt and is from ThinkGeek Gadgets. The Kill-A-Watt allows you to connect your appliances and assess how efficient they are. A large LCD display counts consumption by the Kilowatt-hour, just like utility companies. You can figure out your electrical expenses by the hour, day, week, month, even an entire year. Monitor the quality of your power by displaying Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor. It's pretty inexpensive at $25. You can then compare some of your older appliances against you new ones and see just how much electricity they are eating up.

It's come down to this, people are turning to Scooters to fight the high cost of gas. With gas prices hitting $4 – $5 a gallon motor bike and scooter sales have been reported to be brisk this spring. Why not? If you can get 75-120 miles per gallon it makes perfect sense. Low end Scooters can be picked up for as low as $800 and range up to $8,000 for a top of the line model. Certainly something nice could be found for $2,000. Reports indicate that they will pay for themselves in fuel saving over the first to three years that you own one.

If you live in an area with nice weather and have a small commute to work if might be something think about this summer. It beats filling up your car to get you to work. And who cars if your friends see you riding it.

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I have a bachelor friend that is constantly complaining about the number of phone soliciters that call him. I suggested that he cancel his line and get a cell phone. When I think about it, my tip was also a good one to save him money. You can get cell phones with services pretty cheap these days. Cell phone companies are fighting for your business. When is the last time your phone company offered you a good deal when your term ended? Never. You have been paying the same amount of money since the day you signed up with them. It's something to think about, unless you are a 14 year old girl that is on the phone for six hours a night you really don't need a lan line. Shop around by looking at flyers, search online and even scour through ebay for a used phone and then find a package. I am sure you will find something that will offer you what you need for less than what you are paying now. 

We all know that one of our biggest payments in our life is going to be for our car. That is why finding the best possible car loan rate is very important to saving money. We found a site that makes getting Used Car Loans easy. Basic Car Loans that makes obtaining a car loan at the best possible rate a snap. They offer services for both new and used vehicles and offer low and competitive interest rates no matter what your credit situation is. Applying for a loan is quick and easy via their secure server on their website. They have credit specials available twenty four hours a day to answer all your car financing questions. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by applying for a car loan today.

Something my other half just started doing made me realize how much extra money she is spending each and every day. She started to stop at the local corner store every morning and buys a copy of the local newspaper. The same copy which I read later on when she brings it home. If you are one of those that can't get enough news online and need the print, follow these three tips to save yourself some money.

By buying it everday instead of subscribing we are paying about $1 more than what we could be.  Not to mention that many newspaper companies off huge subscriptions deals if you sign up for a year or more. Check with them and see.

If you have subscribed before then use your spouses name or the name of a friend to see if you can get a new subscriber rate. Newspapers like cable companies will offer better deals to new customers.

Check the internet and see if the copy of the paper you read is offered by any third parties. Like magazine subscription companies that offer magazine at a fraction of the news stand cost the same applies to newspapers.

A quick scan around some of the majors news sites on the web today I saw a few articles talking about proposed electricity rates coming this summer. Not only are you paying more at the pumps for gas but the high cost of fuel is also going to mean higher electricity rates. "Dominion Virginia Power announced yesterday that it would seek permission to raise electricity rates 18 percent this summer to make customers pay for part of the increased cost of coal and other fuels." The message should be clear to us. Now more than ever we have to change our habits to cut down on our hydro bills. It's scary to think just how much of our pay check will be going to gas for our cars and our utility bills. There are a number of tips on how to save on your utility bills and car costs within this blog. Please have a read over them and feel free to suggest other tips that you may come across.

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I have been surfing around the internet looking at lots of different sites and I am seeing threads on forums, blog posts and journal enteries detailing what they are going to spend their stimulus check on. Sure it's free money and a good chace to pick up that LCD TV or that iPod or that top of line Cell Phone. Those that are looking to save some money or get themselves out of debt shouldn't be looking at what they can spend it on but how they can use it to improve their financial situation. If you are sitting with maxed out credit cards, bad debt or house that is in bad need of repair you should rethink how you are going to spend that money. The government Stimulus Check provides a great opportunity to pay down one of those high interest credit cards, get your bad credit back on track or replace some of those old windows or appliances that are killing your heating and hydro bill every month. I know what you are saying, I have to live to and it's nice to enjoy it but that's looking at the small picture. Use it wisely today so that you can enjoy more of those things in future. Having a nice LCD Big Screen TV doesn't do you much good if you can't pay your cable bill.

When you Google must have plugins you will find a million of different blog posts telling you which ones are important. There is no one answer on which plugins you should have installed but these are a few that have helped me develop my blog and make the task easier. 

1. Google XML Sitemaps – This is a simple tool to use. It creates sitemaps to submit to  Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. If you are going to blog submitting your sitemaps to each of these sites is very important.

2. Ultimate Tag Warrior – Tagging your posts is important, it allows your to organize your related posts, allows your readers to find other similiar articles on your blog. This is the "ultimate" tag plugin.

3. WYSI-Wordpress - This is the only text editor you will need for writing your blog posts, it has everything you need. The image uploading feature is second to none, you can upload your photos and make thumbnails or resize them anyway you want.

4. Spam Karma 2 - If your blog is new it won't be long before you under siege from spammers. This plugin stops it dead in its tracks. Everytime I log into my blogs I am amazed how many spammers it has stopped. A definite need.

5. Subscribe Me - I like Subscribe Me, it a quick and easy plugin to display your RSS Feeds. Takes two seconds to set up.

6. Social Bookmarks - Adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. There are lots of them out there. This one does the trick and is easy to use.

These are just six basic must have WordPress Plugins. They are nothing fancy but will save you alot of grief down the road and help you build your blog. Next time I will go over some of the more fancier plugins.