Category Archives: money

Saving Money on Medical Needs

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t know about you, but medical bills have been hitting our house like no body’s business! I honestly can’t believe the rate they’re flocking in right now despite our relatively good health, and decent health insurance.

An ear infection here, a broken tooth there, and routine prescriptions are a truly massive part of our monthly budget.

Here are my tips for reining in your medical costs.
1. HAVE Insurance. Find a way. Consider groups that you could join that would allow you to access medical insurance, but just because you have medical insurance doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask your provider if a cash price would be lower than your actual deductible. Investigate this possibility. I was surprised to receive a bill for insurance for my $80 co-pay for an outer-ear infection (a scratch on my ear that needed an antibiotic to heal). The cash price for the visit since it was just 3 minutes would have been $30. I said a bad word.

2. Understand your policy. Completely. Deductibles, co-pay, in-network and out. Use in-network when you can. Here’s a great resource for the National Endowment for Financial Education.

3. Use a health savings account or cafeteria plan if it’s available to you. These can save a bundle and be used to pay for all kinds of things!

4 Rx Tips are their own little post I think but I can sum it up below:

a: get a discount card. AAA has a great one, Rite-Aid and Walmart and Target all have cards/programs, but don’t give up on a quality pharmacist who’s going to check your meds vs your allergies and contradictions.
b. Use generics when you can.
c. Ask your doc for samples if you’re starting a new medication, esp for long term use. I had a doc give me antibiotic samples recently, which was wonderful, as it turned out I was allergic. I’m sure glad I didn’t buy a month’s supply!
d. There are many prescription assistance programs, including the Partnership for Prescription Assistance which you may be able to turn to depending on your condition.

5. Dental care: if you don’t have dental insurance, you should still get your cleanings–this little expense may save you a lot in expensive repairs later. You can do this at a dental school, but pack your patience. I have had this done once (in college) and got my teeth cleaned just before graduation for $15. What a steal! It took two hours though, and the hygienist in training used a purple dye, which she cleaned off. Simple enough, but as sweet as this lady was, she was extraordinarily clumsy, and dropped the dye–on my nose. The purple dye was guest of honor at graduation, but my teeth continue to serve me well and I’ve still never had a cavity.

6. Perfect time for a segue–preventative care will save you a bundle. When you have insurance, its usually covered. Get those annual exams, the tests, mammograms, paps, and shots. You need them and early detection will save you a fortune and provide peace of mind.

7. When was the last time you had an eye exam? I recently found this great source for Rx Glasses. I always have three pairs, which costs a pretty penny–so next time, I’m giving this site a try: http://www.clearlylenz.com/ They advertise a full set of glasses for $36, but you do need to have your Rx information.

8. If possible, use a nurse hot line, emergency appt at your regular doc or a urgent care center before opting for emergency room care. Deductibles are very high in the ER, and waits can be very long.

9. Eat out less, drink less alcohol, quit smoking and walk more. Your bottom line (and your bottom) will thank you.

10. If you can’t pay, and medical bills are threatening to push you into bankruptcy –first try negotiating with your provider for a write-off or a lower rate. I’ve working on a review over at ProsperLending Review of a company called “IOUSOS“, which facilitates negotiation and collection of medical debts between patients and providers. The National Endowment for Financial Literacy also offers a manual about managing medical debt here.

Bonus item: Don’t forget to save reciepts on all medical costs for tax time. Some are deductible! (Ask your tax-preparer for more info).

Saving/Creating Money While Reducing E-Waste

Posted on by
2

I don’t know if you’ve seen the art exhibit about e-waste recently, but it’s shocking how many electronic gadgets we “consume” worldwide in the form of mobile phones, batteries, cameras, etc. Some of these have lived beyond their usefulness. I have on my desk, and old mobile phone/PDA and a digital camera that no longer works, and I went looking for a savvy way to recycle them.

I found Gazelle, which will PAY ME for the gadgets, and also, they’ll manage the shipping, and even send me a box. (So I do NOTHING, Literally).

Oh, and I get $53 (varies depending on the make/model of your equipment. Give it a try–the link is below.


Get Cash For Your Gadgets at gazelle.com!

Dishwasher Detergent Recipe

Posted on by
2

I posted a few weeks ago about making your own laundry detergent. Now I’ve been after dishwasher detergent. There’s a great web site called “Dollar Stretcher” and they have some recipes for home-made dishwasher detergent.

You just put one tablespoon Borax and one tablespoon baking soda in the detergent compartment. For “add rinse agent” put in white vinegar.

Similarly, you can “stretch” your existing dishwasher detergent with the 1/2 borax, 1/2 soda mixture if you really like something about your detergent.

Let me know what you think if you try this out. I haven’t yet, but will be trying it as soon as I run out of my Cascade.

Day 14: Spend Less Than You Make

Posted on by
Reply

Are you spending less than you make? Are you sure? Better double-check, just in case.

I’m getting ready for the Town Hall for Hope on Thursday and thinking about what are the true, simple and basic facts about personal finance. The bottom line really is that you must spend less than you make.

The origins of PennyWise Family are pretty sad. I started this blog the day after I was laid off from my “secure” job in hopes of helping other families adjust for layoffs. We had to slash our household budget immediately and needed to figure out how.
I’ve posted tips here ever since then, but thought maybe it was time for some more frugal living tips. Hands-down, the biggest hit so far has been the home-made laundry detergent. I’ve converted many friends to making their own, and we love it. To find other savings tips use my “Ligit” search bar and enter the subject of how you want to save money and it should direct you to the right posts.

I posted earlier about how we found we had cut $1500 a month from our household budget with ordinary and small cost-cutting.

Today I’m featuring a reader’s tips. These come from Abby S., in Washington State, who used to teach school in Alaska. A lot of necessities are expensive there, so she learned some spiffy ways to cut corners. Here are a few of her list:
  • Cut dryer sheets in half to make them last longer.

  • Use dehydrated eggs for cooking sweets (I use dehydrated milk for baking Abby, but I’ve never seen dehydrated eggs).

  • Make bread from scratch

  • Make milk from powdered milk and mask the flavor with chocolate powder or syrup.

  • Buy milk in bulk and freeze it.

  • Make home-made deodorant (if it works, please send us the recipe Abby… if it doesn’t, please warn us ).

  • Learn to can/preserve and freeze.

I’m also learning about making my own dishwasher detergent, but I want to experiment with my dishes before I post a recipe here. I’d hate to etch or damage someone’s dishes with a bad one, so when I’ve got it perfected I shall let everyone know.

Thanks Abby for sharing your tips!

This is day 14 of 30 in a series for April, which is “Financial Literacy Month”

Day 10: Are You Saving Enough?

Posted on by
Reply

Two FREE Audiobooks RISK-FREE from Audible
I’ve been listening to the Audiobook “Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey. This is available from Audible.com, and I highly recommend it. If you want to download the book, I’ve attached a coupon here for two free books.

One tip that Mr. Ramsey offers that I find especially interesting is that to know if you’re saving enough, you need to take the amount you have saved in your nest egg (savings/retirement) and multiply it by .08.

If you can live off the resulting figure, then you’re saving enough. If not, you’d better step it up (after paying off your debts of course).

I was surprised. I consider our savings rather paltry, but we actually *could* live off the results. Granted, we’d cut the cable and be living on rice and beans, but we would only have to cut our household expenses by another $300, which wouldn’t be hard.

What they say in the Total Money Makeover is true–the closer you get, the easier it becomes. We now are on the last of our “snowballs” (only one remaining debt to pay off), and it’s disappearing quickly because every extra resource can be dedicated there.

We haven’t followed one of the guidelines–we haven’t stopped saving. We’re still saving for retirement and for planned major expenses (one daughter’s adoption finalization, etc). If we’d stopped this, we could speed up the process even more.

If you’re just starting your Total Money Makeover, or considering starting the program, don’t loose heart. It goes so much faster than you’d expect. Good luck!

This is part 10 of a 30 part series on financial literacy for the month of April, Financial Literacy Month.

Day 8: Budgeting for the Technophobes

Posted on by
2

If you’ve checked out the past three posts about aggregators that work directly with your online banking and you’re not comfortable with that, I understand. There’s a pretty spiffy Web site that works similarly called BudgetTracker. It’s a calendar based system that works from information that you provide. It also allows you to track business finances online.

Day 7: If you’re not budgeting yet…. do it!

Posted on by
1

Ok, this catches us up to Monday, and we’re almost back on financial-literacy track.

For those of you who are brave, empowered and socially-fearless, you might like to try the “twitter of budgets” (As I’m so-dubbing it). Geezeo.com is a frightfully-social way of playing with your budget. I do think this could make budgeting fun for even the most carefree of souls.

Geezeo calls itself “Geezeo, the coolest, most fun way to look at your money without becoming one of those cheap people even you don’t want to hang out with.” (I take exception at that last part….)

I played with the site a bit today. They have a fantastic twitter-like feature called “confession booth” which you can either use with your own ID or anonymously to confess your financial indescretions and get back on track.

I’ll admit, I participated. I posted “Discovering that every time I get in the car seems like a good time for Starbucks. I’m thinking of filling my cupholders with concrete.” Ok, not too difficult. I wondered what others were saying and took a look at the feed… and I could read those all day! If you’re really brave, you can update Twitter from the “confession booth” if you’ve linked the two in your profile.

They have an aggregating feature which automatically downloads everything, excellent security credentials, and an “ask an expert” feature which I’m going to explore some more. Their blog also has some great posts including one today on four ways to save money on perscriptions. That’s a major expense in my household, so I’ll be studying up.

If you haven’t found our other budgeting solutions to your liking, give Geezeo.com a try. It looks like a lot of fun!

Just my $.02.

A belated day 5. Get a budget. Now! No, Really.

Posted on by
Reply

My apologies for the delayed posts. I took a few days to enjoy the Easter Holiday with the family, and I’m back to writing feeling refreshed, renewed and most of all, saved.

Today’s topic (well, Friday’s actually) is budgeting. We all know we should budget. Most of us even have a rough mental budget. But how many people truly account for every dollar in and out. You must stop and ask each dollar “who are you, and where do you think you’re going?”

It is my theory that once someone has done this for a month–they’ll never go back to winging it again.

Implementing a household budget and reviewing our progress weekly has saved our family $1,500 per month, and we consider ourselves pretty thrifty people.

How to go about making a budget? We began by using Mint.com which we found through the Motley Fool. I’ll tell you about some more budgeting options as the week goes on.

We linked all of our accounts and classified our expenses in Mint. It’s an aggregator, so you only have to link it once, and not a lot of downloading. From that, we could see our past 90 days of spending, and we created a budget from there.

Each month since then we’ve been able to further trim our budget, whacking quite a substantial amount out and paying down our debt at a faster rate than ever before.

I’ve converted a few other folks to using Mint.com and since I tout mint so frequently here, I thought it might be beneficial to hear the praises sung from someone else.

April Stensgard of MomJobSeeker.com says “Mint.com is a very useful site. I love the daily reminders about the status of our budget. Mint.com also pointed out that our bank was charging us $10 for certain online transfers. I didn’t even know about this bank fee until Mint.com discovered it. We brought it up with our banker and have resolved the charges.”

April also offers a few ideas for improvements to Mint: she’d like to print out reports on the budget. I totally agree. I take screen shots and print those, but a printout we could post on the fridge or something would be super.

Kelly Mainard also converted to Mint. She says “Mint.com is a great asset to controlling my finances. I can see where every dollar is going and I can plan in the future. For the first time in my life, I feel as though I have real control of my finances! It’s empowering.”

If those aren’t good enough recommendations to try this yourself, I don’t know what is. Grab your bank statements, put in a movie and sit down with the computer and start working out your budget with Mint.com. An initial investment of 2-3 hours is just about perfect to get mint.com rocking and rolling for you, and beyond that, weekly maintenance of just a few minutes to classify any expenditures. You won’t regret it. I promise.

Just my $.02 for last Friday. More to come later today to catch up for the weekend.

Day 4 of 21: For Community and PF/Literacy

Posted on by
Reply

This is day 4 in a series for the month of April: Financial Literacy Month.

I stumbled upon The Motley Fool a long time ago. I remember learning about stock-trading via a game they had (way back when E*Trade first launched). I have since kept using Motley Fool occasionally whenever I want to learn something new about finance. IRA vs 401K, what’s a 403B, I’ve always turned to Motley Fool for their reliable, humorous explanations, which are written in the plain-English that we non-CPAs understand.

Motley Fool provides excellent communities and message boards, and some affordable financial literacy classes (at least they have, I’m not sure if they’re still available).

I learned about Mint.com from Motley Fool.

They also have excellent tax-planning resources!

The site is free with a free membership but there’s a premium membership as well. I’ve never explored this, as I’ve found everything I’ve needed in their free pages.

My only word of caution is “beware the ads.” Their advertising borders on oppressive. It also frequently has a doomsday or get-rich-quick tone that I tire of. There is email “why the oil boom is coming SOON” and the site is covered with ads. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the content from the ads.

They also have so many Fool-branded affiliate relationships that I can’t always tell what all they’re endorsing, or what is going to get me to sign up for some fund or stock newsletter. I find myself only reading the first 1/2 of all their pages and never the sidebars because of the advertisements.

That said, the message boards are excellent resources, as are their tip articles like “60 seconds to get out of debt.”

If you’re new to personal finance or trying to learn something new–check them out, but beware the ads–here there by dragons.

Day 3 of 21: Debt is Dumb!

Posted on by
4

I’ve been a personal finance “hobbyist” since I first saw Suze Orman on TV a few years ago, and discovered that you don’t have to have money to be involved in your finances.

Seriously though, I got involved in my retirement planning, and household budgeting. We paid off our cars early and “burned the candle at both ends” to pay down our home mortgage (something we’re grateful now as most of our neighbors are upside down in their mortgages).

In my research of personal finance, I’ve studied the PF theories of two “gurus” of personal finance; Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman.

Dave Ramsey’s philosophy is a bit more stringent. He doesn’t believe in debt. He says never take more than a 15 year mortgage, and never, EVER use a credit card. I especially like his book “The Total Money Makeover,” which I downloaded as an ebook from Audible.com.

Suze Orman’s philosophy is a little more relaxed in that student loan debt is “acceptable” debt, and that a credit card used for job search expenses is OK. I found her philosophy and strategy very helpful in my first few years on my own. I especially like her book “Money For the Young, Fabulous and Broke!”

I find my own personal finance philosophy right in-between these two–shunning credit cards, but accepting mortgages and student loan debts. Mr. Ramsey encourages parents to pay for their children’s college, I’m of the opinion that they appreciate it more when they put themselves through.

I encourage you to check out the library or iTunes and their Web sites for some good ideas and information. Dave Ramsey has a daily podcast available for free from iTunes. I especially enjoy the Friday shows where he invites callers to call and scream “I’m Debt Free!” with him on the air when they’ve paid off their last debt.

Happy learning!

This is part 3 of 21 of “21 days of financial literacy” for April, which is Financial Literacy Month.