One-Year Tightrope » Money

Find Motivation by Budgeting Savings

Michael — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:01:01 +0000

A key to motivating oneself during times of hardship is to set tiny rewards for working toward goals. Another wise idea for motivation is to always have something in mind – the positive end result – while making progress toward a goal. One way to do this financially is to budget a savings account.

By budgeting, people normally mean balancing spending so that there is as much or more money coming in than leaving. For this kind of budget, however, we are going to use a familiar denomination: percentages.

Take a moment now to write down any financial outcomes sought. They may include placing a substantial down-payment on a home, funding a semester of college for either oneself or a child, or saving up enough money to retire one year early.

Next, we will assign a value to each ending. My personal long-term savings goals are for my own and my partner’s retirement, buying my first home (with some furniture), and having a child (diapers are expensive, after all). My short-term savings goals are for an emergency fund of $1,000, a new pot and pan set, and a KitchenAid.

Anybody versed in personal finance knows about Dave Ramsey’s snowball method of debt repayment. We will use a similar method to gain momentum in meeting savings goals. Short-term goals will receive a hefty priority – say, 50% for me. The short-term goals are broken up as follows:

Emergency fund – 50%
New pots and pans – 30%
KitchenAid – 20%

That means 25% of my total savings will be dedicated to building an emergency fund.

Long-term goals are broken down similarly:

First home purchase – 80%
My retirement – 5%
Pete’s retirement – 10% (His retirement age is closer than mine)
Children – 5%

The exact amounts may need to be tweaked if I decide something in particular is more important.

As for keeping track of everything, you may choose to go the difficult route and open up separate savings accounts for each individual budget, or you may choose the easy (and easy to screw up, if you’re not careful) method of using an Excel spreadsheet. I, personally, use the latter choice.

How do you budget your savings? Do you just have one account that you contribute to because you feel you should?

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Spending Time and Spending Money

Michael — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:17:35 +0000

Rather than have a personal finance post this week, I would like to give some link love to one of my favorite blogs: The Simple Dollar. Trent has written an interesting post asking readers how they spend their time and how they spend their money. The point is that there are some areas, like gym memberships, where we may spend a lot of money, but not very much time. There are others, like cooking, where we spend a lot of time but have not invested very much money.

The Simple Dollar is always a great place to look for realistic advice for saving money and using it wisely. If you want a good read, check it out.

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Finance: The Pareto Principle

Michael — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:26:17 +0000

Anybody studying economics, business, or many other areas has heard of The Pareto Principle: the law that states that 80% of results come from 20% of effort. It is a common rule used in businesses to express that 80% of business will come from 20% of clients, and 80% of clients will come from 20% of marketing effort, and so on.

While not necessarily and inherently accurate, it can be used in a variety of situations to some degree of truth and honesty. One such situation is that of a very important sector in personal finance: saving money.

If 80% of your savings will come from 20% of what you do to save, then it is important to identify the 20% and do more of it, while discontinuing ineffective areas.

Where I spend the most time to save money is through coupons. Locating, clipping, organizing, and coordinating with sales clocks in at about four or five hours per week. I could do it in less, but I have a sort of obsession with it at this point.

I am not currently employed, but I do have better things to do, so I value my time at about four dollars per hour. This means I am spending $20 per week in time to save money through coupons. I do not save $20 per week through coupons, so this is a futile effort. I should cut down on time spent until I create an equilibrium, but I consider it a form of amusement as it relaxes me.

We also save money by living with my parents, where we pay $275 per month in rent and utilities. This is a flat rate, so there are no savings to be found here.

Monthly cellphone bills, our gym membership, and our Netflix subscription are another thing. We could theoretically give each of these places a call and ask them to lower our monthly fees. This could save us, say, 25%, which is $50 per month. This is more than I save with coupons with a lot less of an investment.

Similarly, I could ask for a lower interest rate on my credit cards and threaten to change banks, but I do not currently carry a balance, so this would be pointless.

Where are you spending 20% of your time to create 80% of the results? Where are you spending time that you probably should not? Do you use coupons? Do you consider them money-saving form of entertainment?

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