Save Money — Money Life and More

Why I Work Instead of Watching TV

I want to introduce everyone to Catherine Alford, our first regular contributor to Money Life and More! She’s pretty awesome and I’m sure you’ll love her stuff. Here is her first post!

I don’t want to come across as a “TV hater” in this post, because everyone knows that Modern Family + a glass of wine could cause me to waste about 5 hours straight (must I always mention wine?) However, in the past few years, I’ve almost completely weaned off of watching TV, and here’s why:

TV Costs Too Much

The first time I cancelled my TV was because I was trying to cut expenses. My husband had just quit his job and started school, and I really didn’t need to spend the $50 or so to keep it. I admit that it was kind of boring at first. After all, my entire Saturdays used to be spent watching one HGTV show after another. However, I gradually got used to my life without it, and eventually I didn’t miss it at all.

TV Makes You Lazy

When we had a nice TV, I admit that my husband and I often ate dinner in front of it. This didn’t do wonders for our physiques, and it definitely didn’t help us connect at the end of the day. Instead of talking to each other and catching up, we were wondering what type of cake Cake Boss would create next, and (gasp!) would the cake actually make it into New York City or would it smash into a million pieces? Don’t let lazy take over your life!

Turning the TV off gave me back hours in the day and forced me to be more active and find interests elsewhere.

TV Makes You Want Too Much Stuff

TV stars and reality shows definitely don’t show the world as it really is. So, when movie stars grace my screen dripping in diamonds, it always makes want more “stuff.” Additionally, when The Bachelor drops down onto one perfect knee and proposes after just returning from a trip around the world, it made my own romance of movie dates seem kind of lame.

I know it’s not logical to feel that way, but that’s the effect that TV had on me. So, without all those distractions or influences from the world, I am definitely more appreciative of what I have.

TV Makes You Unproductive

Sitting in front of the TV is easy and mind numbing. When you have one, you don’t have to be productive. It’s much easier to tell yourself, “I’m tired. I deserve to watch this show.” So, you get very little accomplished in the evenings.

That’s Why I Work

Now, instead of spending time watching TV after work, I instead work on my personal finance staff writing business. Instead of flipping endlessly through channels, I’m tweeting with my blog friends, getting posts ready for the next day, and pushing myself to make more income from my website than I do from my day job.

Ever since I started working instead of watching TV, I feel more productive, more connected to the world, and more motivated than ever. I also have more time to do things that are healthier for me, like taking a jog down to the beach and spending quality time with my hubs.

In fact, there’s a whole world out there people who are also using their downtime to succeed in big ways. I just had to turn off the screen to realize it.

Do you currently watch a lot of TV or are you a TV-free household?

**Lance’s Thoughts** I do probably watch too much TV but it is our main source of entertainment. We could probably cut back a bit, but we do enjoy our TV shows… That’s why I’ve made it known I won’t be cutting the cable cord anytime soon!

photo by: roxeteer

Filed Under: Life, Save Money

Saving Money On Weddings: If It Sounds Too Good To Be True…

By Lance Mlandm 16 Comments

The Dress as Advertised

Hi Money life and More readers! I am Tori, Lance’s other half and the behind the scenes editor of this awesome blog! (Lance: Her words… not mine!) As Lance mentioned, we got engaged back in February of this year. We have set a date and started the wedding planning process but Lance isn’t a huge fan of wedding planning! So, Lance and I decided that it would be fun to swap roles for a bit and I would write a series of posts about our frugal wedding planning escapades!

The “Proper Order” of Wedding Planning

As our family, friends, and the media tell us, there is a particular order that you must follow when beginning the wedding planning process. We have already set a date and time as well as the frugal wedding ceremony and reception venues. The next thing to do right away was to get a beautiful dress for a “wear it just once” type of price. Unfortunately in the small town we live in, there weren’t many options for bridal salons without having to travel a minimum of two hours. I was not thrilled with the idea of traveling to buy a dress, and then traveling to attend multiple fitting appointments. So what do we do these days? Buy online! That’s right, I bought my wedding gown online for a great “wear it once” price of $208! And even better, for $15 more they tailored it to my exact measurements I sent them per their instructions. How awesome is that?! I was so proud of myself for saving lots of money and getting a fabulous wedding dress! About 3 weeks after placing my order my dress arrived at my future mother in law’s house! Deep in my gut I could tell something was not quite right when she called and told me it had arrived, but in a small box…..

Convincing Myself to Like the Dress

That afternoon I went to see my dress for the first time! As soon as I saw it my stomach balled up in knots, but my mother always told me, never judge it till you put it on. I put it on alone and looked into the full length mirror. I hated it. I wanted to cry, for days…. I tried to convince myself to like the dress, make a small alteration here and there, and maybe lose a bit of weight. But it was truly awful. It barely resembled the picture advertised, did not fit, and the quality was less than adequate. For the next few days I told my family I liked it, but in reality I hated myself for falling for such a classic mistake. I have always been cautious about situations like these and normally succeed in not falling in the trap.

So What Now?

The Actual Dress I Received

After a few days of feeling sick to my stomach over it, I knew I had to find a new dress and tell my family. I called my mom first and she told me, “You don’t want to wear a wedding dress you don’t feel beautiful in. We will find a way to fix this in the budget”. She was right. As soon as I told her I hated the first dress that I spent $250 (after shipping) on I knew I had to tell Lance. He said the same thing and at least we didn’t learn the lesson on a more expensive online dress. Once he knew, I felt an immense amount of relief and began the new search for a dress! Just a couple days later I bought a new dress that I absolutely LOVE! Yes it is more money that I intended and wanted to spend on a wedding dress ($645), but I felt it was worth it because it made ME feel beautiful. I have also decided to not be mad at myself anymore and just remember the lesson learned. The important thing to note is, despite the dress fiasco, we are still sticking to our original budget. It stinks that I now have $645 less to spend on other parts of the wedding, but the dress was really important to me. If I had a horrendous dress I wouldn’t enjoy my wedding day anywhere near as much because I would be constantly obsessing over how I looked. Looking back, (because hind sight really is 20/20), I figured out what made me let down my guard and fall for this too good to be true trap. Ultimately I was avoiding actually going into the bridal salons and have the “Say yes to the dress” experience because I didn’t have my mom with me. She and my dad are still up in Virginia and it still makes me tear up thinking back to not having her here with me for this experience, but it was a decision I made when moving to Florida.

Total Wedding Cost So Far: $995

Venue: $100 Dresses: $895 Do you have any wedding fiasco stories or did everything go perfectly for you? Did you bust your budget on one part of the wedding and make up for it by cutting somewhere else? Or did you get lucky (or plan well) not run into any problems?

Filed Under: Life, Save Money

3 Reasons to Review Every Bill: Another Cable Bill Fiasco

By Lance Mlandm 16 Comments

Not My Cable Provider

Have you ever heard the advice that you should review every bill you get? I follow the rule religiously and I’m glad I do. I estimate that reviewing all of my bills, rather than just automatically paying them without a review, has saved me at least $4,000 over the last year.

Reviewing Every Bill Allows You to Catch Errors

When I opened my most recent cable bill I was irritated by yet another comedy of errors by my cable company’s billing department. We had just signed our death pledge and moved into our new house and this was the first bill at the new address. Naturally my cable company messed it up.

The first error was extra annoying. The cable company added a recurring modem rental fee to our account. I could understand them forgetting to remove the fee if I had rented a modem at my old house and recently purchased one. The problem is I hadn’t rented a modem from my cable company for months.

They were just trying to sneak an extra monthly fee on my account. They hoped I wouldn’t notice because it was only $5.00, but reviewing my bill caught them in their tracks! After talking to the representative they promptly removed the fee and all was right in the world… at least as far as the modem rental fee goes.

Yup… you guessed it! There were other problems.

Reviewing Bills Help You Stop Price Increases in Their Tracks

Companies that bill you on a recurring basis love to try to increase your rates. They hope that you have your bills on auto pay and you never look at the bill or your credit card statement. If you never look, you’ll never notice you’re paying the companies more money!

I could have been that person just last week, but I review my bill. The company tried to increase my rates after we moved to our new house. By moving, they tried to tell me that I had to pay a partial month at full price rather than the promotional price I had verified I would be charged after the move.

Unfortunately the lower level employee didn’t understand this and I had to speak to a manager. You must be persistent about getting the bill increases removed in order to get them fixed. Luckily, after talking to a supervisor, the problem was corrected, but not before they wasted 32 minutes of my Sunday morning.

You Won’t Catch Fraud If You Don’t Review Your Bills

This last reason is one of the most important reasons to review your bills. Luckily, there wasn’t any fraud on my cable bill but there are many other types of bills that could easily involve fraud. The number one culprit? Credit card bills.

As you may remember, I was a victim of credit card fraud just this year. Actually, the credit card fraud turned into identity theft… but you can read about those stories in the linked posts. Either way, if I didn’t review my bills it is very likely that these fraudulent charges could have gone unnoticed.

The credit card fraud was only for about $30 but the identity theft was over $3,000. I’d hope you would notice an extra $3,000 coming out of your bank account if you credit card is on auto-pay, but at that point it’d be too late and the money would be gone from your account.

You can still dispute the charge and likely get the money refunded to your bank account but it might take longer than you’d like to get the cash back in your account. It could also cause overdrafts, draws on your line of credit and many other fees that you don’t want to bother with.

It would be easy to ignore the bills that shouldn’t have activity on them. I have quite a few of these bills because I sign up for the best credit cards to get sign up bonuses and I rarely close them. However, these could be prime targets for fraudsters as they know you won’t be watching them.

Just remember… all of this can be avoided if you review every bill you receive! It saved me over $4,000 this year… how much has reviewing your bills saved you in the last year? What types of bills do you find the most errors, price increases and fraudulent transactions on? Is the cable company your worst enemy too?

photo by: The Consumerist

Filed Under: Basics, Save Money

Having Cash Reserves Pays Off When You Find Sick Deals

By Lance Mlandm 9 Comments

Opportunities can present themselves at not so opportune times. If you don’t have the means to take advantage of an opportunity you could hurt yourself by trying to take advantage and incurring debt to do so. If you go into debt trying to save some money it will very likely defeat the purpose. There is a simple solution to this dilemma… Enter the cash reserve.

There are a ton of advantages to having a decent sized cash reserve. Keep in mind, my cash reserve is not my emergency fund. Instead, my cash reserve is just a bit of extra money I keep on the sidelines in case an opportunity arises that is just too good to pass up.

Getting a Great Deal

Say I run into someone I’ve done business with before that is in a tight spot and needs cash. They might offer to provide a service or sell some goods at a steep discount that is well below market value. Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that if it helps both parties? Granted, you need the cash reserve to do so responsibly.

I had a similar opportunity when I bought my new car a few years ago. I bought when car companies were hurting for sales badly and got a great deal because of it. More recently I ran into one of those opportunities at a home improvement store and I am VERY glad I had the cash reserves available in order to take advantage of the opportunity.

Our Recent Cash Reserve Deal

We recently bought a new house and unfortunately the seller decided that the window treatments, including the curtain rods, were not going to be sold with the house. She did leave the window blinds behind, but we knew we’d eventually want to put curtains up in the windows as well. The sliding glass doors had no coverings whatsoever. We knew we would need to immediately buy curtain rods for the two sliding glass doors in the house so no one could see in our master bedroom and living room at night.

We went to Home Depot and Lowe’s to buy only the curtain rods for our immediate need, our sliding glass doors. The windows weren’t as big of a deal to us and they at least had blinds in them so we figured they could wait. That was until we saw that Home Depot was having a crazy clearance sale on a particular brand of curtain rods!

The longer sliding glass door curtain rods were 67 to 80% off! Granted, we’d never pay retail for them but these discounts were almost too good to be true. We continued looking and saw that regular window curtain rods were 60% off retail as well and at that point we had a decision to make. Should we get the window curtain rods as well or just stick with the sliding glass door curtain rods we had initially planned on getting?

Find Out Why The Deal is Good

First we wanted to figure out why they were so cheap. Anytime something might be too good to be true you should look into it because it just might be! It turns out that Home Depot was going to quit carrying this particular brand and wanted to get rid of their inventory. Sounds like their loss would be my gain!

After discussing the situation with my fiancee, we decided this was exactly what our cash reserves (reminder: not my emergency fund) were for. We went ahead and bought the two sliding glass door curtain rods we intended on buying and saved $80 from retail on those two alone. We then bought all of the curtain rods we liked for the other rooms in our house. Unfortunately that particular store only had 3 left of the design we liked. This saved us 60% off the window curtain rods or about $45 off of retail price.

We didn’t stop there though! There was another Home Depot on our way home so we decided to stop by and see if they happened to be having the same clearance sale… We were in luck because they were AND they had some of the same exact curtain rods we were looking for. We picked up 3 more for another $45 in savings off of retail and called it a night.

Overall, we saved $170 off of retail and only ended up spending only about $90 for curtain rods for most of our house. While we had initially figured that the sliding glass door curtain rods would cost around $50-60 if we found a decent deal, we were glad we had the cash reserves available to take advantage of the deal on all of our curtain rods.

Don’t Buy Just Because It Is a Good Deal

I would like to make a brief clarification on an issue that some people may point out. I personally can’t stand when people say they saved money by spending money that they never planned to spend in the first place. However, I feel this isn’t the case for us because we knew in advance that in the few months we would eventually be buying these curtain rods anyway.

If we were never going to buy the window curtain rods then we would have actually spent an extra $60 and not saved a penny! Don’t buy stuff just because it is on sale, make sure you’re buying it for a purpose or a need that already existed before you knew about the sale.

Have you ever run into a situation and wish you had cash reserves so you could take advantage? Have you ever been able to take advantage of a great deal because of your cash reserve? Or… have you taken advantage of a great deal without a cash reserve and regretted it later on? Let me know in the comments below!

photos by: KJGarbutt & PoshSurfside.com

Filed Under: Save Money

Finding a Frugal Venue for Wedding Ceremonies and Receptions

By Lance Mlandm 21 Comments

I announced that we got engaged a few weeks ago and a few people commented that they wanted to hear more about the wedding process and how we planned to save money along the way. We’ve already made a few decision regarding basics of the wedding, such as the date and the size of the guest list and those decisions are pretty basic.

We didn’t pick the date based off of anything special, we just did what worked best for us and what we could fit in the schedule. In terms of size of the guest list, it was a pretty easy decision because we have a very limited budget. We’re pretty much inviting only immediate family and we’re keeping the guest list under 20.

With those two items crossed off the wedding planning list we could now start making some more detailed decisions. The first thing on that list was the venue for the ceremony and reception. We had heard that venues could run up your budget fast so we knew we needed a plan of attack.

How to Find a Frugal Wedding Ceremony and Reception Venue for Your Wedding

Some of the best ways to come up with ideas for frugal venues is to ask people who are established in your community. We are relatively new to our area so asking friends who have lived here their whole lives was a huge help. They know the area and where to find the great deals.

Be sure to think off the beaten path and consider public areas. In general, you can rent these areas pretty cheap and it is a great way to support your local community government. If you haven’t been to the local parks in your area you might be surprised at how nice some of them are!

Make sure to check out places where you have relationships with the owners or organization. You could probably get a great deal at your local church or potentially a not-for-profit organization building that you volunteer for. Even if you don’t think they’ll let you hold an event, it probably wouldn’t hurt to ask.

If you heart is set on a more expensive venue there are still ways to be frugal. Try scheduling your ceremony and reception at off peak times of the year. Another option is to schedule it on a weekday rather than a weekend or to schedule your wedding ceremony or reception at a non-traditional time such as in the morning.

By scheduling when the venues aren’t as busy you can likely get a discount on the normal price.

Our Initial Ideas for Wedding Venues

We initially had been talking about two ideas for wedding venues that ended up not working out for various reasons. We were seriously considering having the wedding at the beach or in my parents’ back yard on the water.

The first plan was to have our wedding on the beach. We currently live just 3 blocks from some of the most beautiful beaches but we’re going to be moving into town before the wedding. The things we really didn’t like about the beach was it would be hard for some guests to be able to get to the actual ceremony (walking in sand is a horrible idea for older people) and we’d be at the mercy of the weather with no hope of cover. Weather can be very unpredictable in Florida and with my luck there would be an all day downpour on the day of our wedding.

The second plan was to have our wedding in my parents’ backyard. They have a great backyard that would be an amazing backdrop for the wedding but it had the same problems as the beach with the weather. The other problem is it just isn’t big enough, even for our limited guest list.

Our Frugal Wedding Venue

We ended up finding a great deal on a frugal wedding venue. We decided to have our wedding in a great public park in our city. All we had to do was talk to the leisure services board for our city and ask to reserve the park. The park has many great outside locations we could have the wedding and a covered area in case it rains so we’ll be fine no matter what the weather.

As far as cost goes, they do charge a fee of $100 to reserve the park for a 3 hour time block and a $250 security deposit in case we need to set up electricity or some other service. We’ll get the security deposit back after clean up and leave the park the way we found it.

Our Frugal Reception Venue

We had to do a bit searching to find a frugal reception alternative that would work well for us. We actually asked some of our friends for ideas and many recommended a local community center in a nearby community in our city. They don’t charge their residents for use but we had to pay a $50 use fee and a $100 deposit which we’ll get back after we clean the place up when we leave.

The reception venue isn’t anything fancy but it doesn’t matter because fancy isn’t important to us. It is a nice building that provides tables, chairs a small kitchen area and a decent outside space. We get complete access to the venue the whole entire day of our wedding so we can have people there earlier in the day to set up if we want. We thought it was a steal for the price!

So now that we have the wedding venue and reception venue settled I’m sure we’ll have a lot more decisions to make. What should we be looking out for and do you have any frugal suggestions?

Filed Under: Large Purchases, Life, Save Money