The Save Money Blog

Archive for August, 2010

I have been on a bit of a run lately with doing some upgrades around the house to my appliances, heating equipment and even my gadgets. I love reading reviews to see what other people thought or think of the items I am thinking of buying. The reviews are pretty important because they are from people that bought the item already and know if it is good or bad.

For example, if you go to any electronics website you will see tons of reviews and ratings from consumers. I was reading some digital camcorder reviews recently and they are a good case point. There are so features and facets to today gadgets like cell phones, digital cameras and lcd televisions that it is hard to stay on top of. Reading reviews really gives you insight into things that you might not think of. Things that you might forget to ask the salesperson. If you are going to spend the money, you want to be informed.

Of course, you sometimes have to take the reviews with a grain of salt. Some people like to complain for the sake of complaining. After you read through a few of them you will be able to pick the bad reviews from good reviews.

I recently became one of the many in the world carrying a smartphone in my pocket. I made the jump to an iPhone4 this month and it has opened my eyes to a whole new world. The one thing I was amazed at was the number of barcode scanner apps that you can download. Some of them are free (which I obviously prefer) and some are the usual .99 cents. I downloaded a couple of the free barcode shopping apps and was suprised how easy it was to get prices on the items you use everyday. You just scan your items with your iPhone camera and from there you can compare internet and local prices and in some cases you can even read product reviews. If you have the time and are really interested in what prices you are paying then this might be something you are interested in. Here is a photo from one called ShopSavvy. There are many of them in your iTunes store.

I am all for being insured. I have had to use it a couple of times and I was glad that I had it. There are so many kinds of insurance available like health insurance, car insurance, disability insurance and so on. If you tried to cover all of your bases you could end up being what I call insurance poor. If you are struggling to save money or want to save money reviewing your insurance policies is a good place to start.

A friend was telling me her story last week about a car accident she was in. Her car was a beater and wasn't worth the collision payments she was making on it. She could have put her collision money away in a bank account and put that money towards a newer car. I was making mortgage insurance payments on a small mortgage I have while at the same time being covered under the terms of my life insurance. I was double paying.

Take a look at your policies and I bet there is a way you can cut down on your expenses.

I have reached a point in my life where I am in a need to update my skills and pad my resume with some courses. For the past few weeks I have been looking at some Online Schools to take some distant learning courses. It's not something I want to do but I started to look at it from a saving money point of view.

Here are some benefits of taking some online courses:

• the cost of the courses themselves are generally less expensive than going to school
• you save money on travel expenses such bus passes and gas money
• books can be cheaper depending on the courses you are taking.
• you can save on food, when I was going to school I spending tons on junk food and eating in the cafeterias or restaurants
• start and stop courses when you want so you don't have to drop tons of money on taking 4 or 5 courses at a time

Updating your job skills can't be a bad thing. I blogged about it once before. You can't take courses to try and get a job in a dead industry. You have to research the field that you are interested in otherwise you could be throwing your money away right from the start.

I love to save money. This week I did some bargain hunting on a few items we needed for the household and I saved quite a bit of money on my purchases. The reason I saved so good coin on my buys was because I had a plan right from the start and never deviated from that plan. I sat down and wrote out what I wanted to do, what I was going to spend or what I could spend and I planned how I was going to go about it. It was document management at it's finest.

Saving money is all about having set goals and then planning on how you can reach those goals. You can't just say I am going to try and save money. This is especially true if you have lots of debt to work off. You have to have a plan to get yourself debt free or save money and stick to it. You also have to carefully watch your plan and if it's not working then revise or adapt until it does work.