Money Reasons

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10 Ways To Improve Your Chances To Become Rich

January 20th, 2011

Honestly, Are you trying to become rich?

I’ll admit there is more that I could do to try to breach the point where my passive income exceeds my expenses, but I choose not to.

Although I’m frugal, I’m quite sure that I could run an even tighter financial ship!

Below is a quick list of ways that I could improve my chances to become rich:

I could use budgets and do extreme couponing to whittle my consumption expenses down much lower!
I could try to get more free stuff via giveaways online. Free stuff is great and believe it or not, it’s out there with some work.
I could create a budget to identify where my weaknesses are and plan to fix them accordingly!
I could get another job by working during a second shift period. This would have a huge impact on my savings game since my first job covers all of my living expenses. This means I could pocket almost all of my earnings from the second job.
I could try to expand my hobby activities into other forms of social media. This could practically double my hobby income.
I could create a goals spreadsheet to track my saving goals and keep me on track… This is more important than it sounds! Feedback is a great thing!
I could create an investing goal to track my investments performance. This could help determine if I should start investing more into index ETFs etc…
I could borrow tools/things from family, neighbors and friends more. Why buy a sidewalk edger when I only use it once a year?
I could do a better job of reducing my taxes, a Roth IRA is a great vehicle to reduce taxes on dividends from stocks, etc.
I could do a better job of reducing my gas expenses, treat driving as a real expense instead of just ignoring it.

There are plenty other ways that I could improve my chances of becoming rich some day. Surprisingly, I now realize that I”m only putting in about half the effort that I should be putting into getting rich…

-MR

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28 comments »

Posted in Uncategorized, Wealth

Tags: financial planning planning rich Wealth

Past Unfulfilled Home Dreams

August 23rd, 2010

My Home Dreams have changed as I grew older. As a child (5 or 6 years old) I imagined owning acres and acres of land and having all the endangered species on it. Surprisingly, at this age, the house itself didn’t really materialize. As I grew older, I realized how hard that dream would be to accomplish and had to scratch it off.

My next Home Dream was to live near the mountains living off the land, with a small meandering stream-fed lake beside a log cabin. In this dream, I was a fisherman and a hunter (just for the record, I’ve never hunted). I imagined that I wouldn’t really have many neighbors. I had this dream until college, when I realize I had a bad allergy problem and how difficult and lonely this dream would be. This dream was more feasible from a cost perspective, but very inconvenient and an extremely hard life. Scaling back my dream, I still would like a cabin in the woods; but I currently have more important things to save my money for. Actually this dream is partially fulfilled by renting a cabin in the wood occasionally (we did that last year).

An occasional Home Dream would be to live by the Delaware River like my Uncle did. But those thoughts have always been squeezed out when I realized that I couldn’t afford such a plot of property.

Today, my home dreams consist of owning a small rental property, preferrable a 1 dwelling house (although I’ve heard this isn’t the way to go). I would like to find one dirt cheap that’s in great shape in a great market. Yeah, this is one of the more feasible dreams, but still hard to obtain the perfect combination that is profitable. Plus, I don’t know if I really would like to deal with tenants…

How have your dreams evolved of what your perfect home dream would be?

-MR

19 comments »

Posted in Uncategorized

Tags: Fantasy homes Home Dreams

Money Weekly Cache 2010, August 15

August 15th, 2010

Weekly Thoughts:

Let me start by saying that we are on vacation at Hilton Head Island. Next, let me say that it’s scorching hot down here!

Since I’m going crabbing tomorrow morning, I’ll keep this short and sweet, going right into some Great Bloggers that aren’t on vacation, and really cranking out some great stuff!

My Favorite Reads of the Week:

Buy Like Buffett: What Would Young Buffett Buy? Mark points out that yesterday’s Buffett would invest differently than today’s Buffett! Warren’s investment stategy had to change as both Warren and his company become bigger and bigger!

WiseBread‘s staff write Jennifer who has a blog called Little House in the Valley: – Fess Up to Your Addictions: How to Satisfy Them on a Frugal Budget It truly takes a balance of what is important, and what to skim on.

Get Rich Slowly: Life After Debt: What It’s Like in the Third Stage of Personal Finance - Wow, what progress in a short time. It would be nice to be in the position that J.D. is in. But what really sealed the deal on this post’s inclusion in my list it that great video in this post! It’s must see!!! Not Financial, but must see still!!!

Credit Card Chaser: Why the “Reverse Robin Hood” Credit Card Study is a Load of Crock - CCC goes on to explain solid logic on why that study he mention in the link is bogus and I agree!

Budgeting in the Fun Stuff: Why Buy Way More Expensive Gas?! Crystal, identifies one reason people aren’t more weath in this article. People who go to more expensive gas stations, really need to pay attention to the price of gas per gallon!!!

Everyday Tips & Thoughts: Turn Off All Your Senses When Grocery Shopping – Except Your Common Sense – The grocery stores are playing psychological warfare games on your senses! The mission: Make customer buy more, and they have done well! We really need to have a list and stick to it when we go shopping for food!

Financial Samurai: I’m Going To Kick My Own @ss - Sam is going to bring out the new Yakezie.com website on this Monday! We’re all excited to see what it looks like!

Invest it Wisely: How I Almost Got Scammed: Lessons Learned from Trouble in “Paradise” - This incredible story demonstrates how easy it is, even for the most wise of us to almost get suckered into buy timeshares! This one that Kevin talks about sounded pretty elaborate!

My Favorite Post from Money Reasons:

My favorite post this week was: Staring at the Financial Crossroads! It basically me trying to get grip or find direction on what and how to invest money!

Have a great weekend!!!

-MR

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Posted in Uncategorized

Planning Ahead To Buy My Next Car

August 9th, 2010

Both of the automobiles that we have are getting old and will soon need replaced!

So I don’t want to incur that cost of buying 2 cars as close together as we did the last time! So, I decided to think through it this time around.

My plan it to replace our minivan (wife’s primary car), sometime before 2015. My car, I’ll just keep driving until it totally disintegrates.

I don’t want to take out a loan, and had plan on going in and writing a check for our next “new” used car! But lately, I don’t want to spend the money on the car either. Once I spend that money, it’s gone!

What I would like to do is invest the money in dividend yielding stocks or bonds for the next 3 or 4 years, then use the money from the yield to make payments on the next car.

I would continue to invest money, building the principle, then use the money to make payments on my next car… and so on and so on…

Of course if there ever came a point where I would just be able to pay for the entire car in cash without affecting my wealth level, I would do so.

I would use the same process that I’m using for my lunch experiment. Saving up the money, invest it, then use it to support my purchase of future vehicles.

What do you think? Am I being delusional? Should I just pay cash for the cars and start over each and everytime?

9 comments »

Posted in Uncategorized

The Reasons I Like Money Over Gift Cards

August 2nd, 2010

First, let me say that the rules around gift cards has improved as seen in the Denver Post article: Feds overhaul gift-card rules!

Prior to this change being implemented by the Feds, I was a Gift Card policy victim! You see, at work I rewarded an Amazon Gift Card which I firmly held onto it for more than a year, waiting for that something perfect that I wanted, so as to reward myself for doing a great job at work. When I found that perfect something, lo and behold it expired!

Back then, $100 meant a lot more than it does today (don’t get me wrong, I still respect the purchasing power of $100!). So I was upset… But what really pushed me over the edge was that fact that if I lived in California, they would still have to honor the value of the card!!! HUH? Yep, Cali realizing that the principal of having the card expire was somewhat underhanded and created a law that made it illegal to be so in Cali (2 points for them!).

Since I don’t come from Cali, I was very livid. The side effect of me getting basically screwed was that I vowed not to purchase anything from www.Amazon.com… and I haven’t since! So yeah, they may have made a pure $100 on me the day my card expired, but I’m sure they lost much more than that on profit they could have had from me…

But there are more reasons that I like cash over gift cards:

If you invest the money, you make money off of your money gift!
Invested money can be a hedge against Inflation.
Cash money doesn’t comes with a ”no-usage” fee or any fees.
There is no need to go to an exchange gift card site, and thus accept less value for the card.
Cash Money doesn’t have a magnetic stripe that can go bad.
Paper Cash weights less than a gift card.
Cash can be rolled up and put behind my ear! (Why?, good question???).
Cash is King, it can be used for anything, not just at Starbucks or Best Buy

So, you may be wondering if I have other gift cards? Yes, I do! But I made sure they don’t expire nor that they had fees associated with them!

Reader have you ever gotten burned by not using your gift card in time?

If so, perhaps the new laws will benefit you too. Or even better ask for cash only instead of gift cards!

-MR

Disclaimer: I’m not entirely sure that Amazon really screwed me, it could have been the Gift card company that runs their gift card option. But, either way it was painful for me at the time!