Monday Money | The Genuine ScLoHo aka Scott Howard

New or Used?

by Scott Howard | Dec 31, 2012 | Monday Money, Really? The Personal ScLoHo

Continuing with another Monday Money article with a question for each of us to consider:

Should I buy a new ______________ or used ____________________?

This question we can apply to a good percentage of our purchases every year.

Automobiles.

Houses.

Appliances.

Clothing.

Furniture.

to name just a few that have used options.

Other items such as gasoline, food and other grocery store items don’t offer the new or used choice.

Being thrifty or frugal doesn’t necessarily mean an all or nothing approach to spending. We find that by cutting costs in some areas, we can splurge in other areas.

So where can we save?

Thrift Stores often are like a year round garage sale.

There’s the chain-retail thrift stores like Goodwill and Salvation Army in our city and several independents that are often operated by non-profits.

Some of these even have sales.

My old high school has a $5 bag sale every couple of months. Saturday I noticed a nearby thrift store was having a storewide half off sale.

You cannot tell what I bought Saturday from what I got brand new.

The type of store often determines the price you pay.

Several years ago I saw some vintage dishes, just like some I grew up with at an antique store for a few hundred dollars. A couple months later, I saw another set of the same dishes for $30.

As we look towards a new year with resolutions to improve our lives perhaps this is an area you want to examine too.

Saving Sometimes

by Scott Howard | Dec 17, 2012 | Monday Money, Really? The Personal ScLoHo

One reason we don’t change our habits and become more frugal and thrifty is it seems like to big of a change.

This weeks Monday Money is about taking small steps.

There are times when a major step needs to occur, like if you are spending more than you are earning and are sinking deeper in debt with credit cards.

Other times, you can decide to weigh options and find ways to save sometimes.

We recently had some family members move out and we looked at the guest room and hallway and decided we need to do some carpet cleaning and other cleaning before Christmas.

We usually would call our loyal, friendly, professional carpet cleaners and they’d come over in a few days, do a good job and it would cost us $99 bucks.

This time I decided to check prices for renting a Rug Doctor machine. I also found a couple of coupons, 3 bucks for cleaner, 5 for renting the machine.

I was guessing I could save around 50% in exchange for my time.

Saturday came.

I went to my neighborhood hardware store and they took both coupons. I walked out with the regular Rug Doctor machine, a bottle of rug shampoo and total cost was $30.89. A few hours later, 3 rooms and a hallway were clean and I saved 2/3 of what I normally pay to have the pros do it.

Are we always going to do it ourselves?

No.

But this time I saved over $60 bucks, got a little extra exercise and found another way to save sometimes, write about it and share it with you for Monday Money.

Caffeine On A Budget

by Scott Howard | Dec 10, 2012 | Monday Money, Really? The Personal ScLoHo

Last week I was having a conversation with several Fort Wayne Twitter friends about coffee shops which inspired me to write today’s Monday Money article.

Caffeine is our topic today.

It was a dozen years ago that my soon-to-be-wife introduced me to the local coffee shop scene. Starbucks had not arrived in Fort Wayne yet and there were several thriving local coffee shops including Higher Grounds, the Firefly and the Mill.

The Mill was a combo coffee/bakery shop and you could get a cup of coffee for $1 along with a free sample slice of fresh bread with butter & honey.

Good stuff at a great price.

The Mill eventually sold their stores and prices went up as they changed their name to the Espresso Gallery. The location my wife and I would visit has cut their hours significantly over the years too.

I am a regular at the Firefly. I know the owners along with the owners of Higher Grounds, Mocha Lounge, and Old Crown. I have had marketing conversations with each of them along with other coffee shops that are now out of business.

You can’t sell a cup of coffee for a buck anymore if that is your main product. Firefly sells their drip coffee for $2 for a small (tall). Starbucks is around $1.50.

Different coffee shops have similar prices and each shop has a different taste to their drip coffees and espresso drinks, which was the topic of conversation with my friends.

But let’s focus on Money.

If you are a coffee drinker, the best deal is to make it yourself, at home. Folgers, Maxwell House or even store brands are going to be less expensive than any coffee shop.

If you really want someone else to brew it, my wife and I like McDonalds which has any size for a buck.

I actually contribute $1.50 a paycheck to the office coffee fund. That’s 75 cents for all I can drink.

But for all the time I spend in coffee shops, I can live without it. Really.

My favorite form of caffeine is Diet Mt. Dew.

The Arby’s near my house sells it, but fountain drinks are expensive.

I buy the 12 or 24 pack when they are on sale and keep a can or two cold in the frig at all times.

This brings the price down to between 25 and 40 cents a can.

That’s how I start my morning 6 days a week.

In the evening, when I am home, I drink water. No caffeine after 5pm means a better nights sleep.

How much do you spend on caffeine each week?

Multiply that by 50 or 52 and you may be shocked at how much you are spending to stay awake and perky.

How We Are Saving $2500 (Part 3)

by Scott Howard | Dec 3, 2012 | Monday Money, Really? The Personal ScLoHo

Since I wrote this, I’ve updated our phone service again. Read about it here.

Week 3 in this Monday Money series has to do with saving $912 per year on our cellphone bill.

A dozen years ago we became a cellphone family. I inherited my mom’s Tracphone when she passed away in 2001. It was an expensive prepay phone and it still had some minutes on it.

Eventually, I signed us up for a regular plan with one phone and a few months later added a second phone for an extra $10 a month.

We added a 3rd phone for my step-daughter and switched to Verizon when she went off to college.

She’s now married and off our plan and yet somehow our monthly cellphone bill had grown.

$167 for my wife’s old dumbphone and my new Samsung Galaxy S3 was the deal.

Actually that was what it cost for a few months before I upgraded from my Droid to the Galaxy, too.

I really, really enjoyed the Galaxy with it’s 4G speeds and all the features. It took me at least 10 days to decide to give it up.

Here’s the deal:

PagePlus is a prepay wireless service that offers significant savings over Verizon, but they use the Verizon network. Switching to PagePlus would mean I still get the same phone network that I’ve been using the past 5 years, but at a lower price.

Here are the details on $$:

My wife’s phone was $30 plus various fees with Verizon.

Her phone with PagePlus is still $30, but the only add-on is sales tax. She gets 1,200 Voice Minutes + 3,000 Text/MMS Messages + 250 MB Data for $29.95. She doesn’t use data but this is the best plan for her at the moment.

The remainder of our Verizon $167 month bill, say $130, is my phone.

By switching to PagePlus, I am paying $55. I get Unlimited Talk, Unlimited Text/Picture Messages, 2 GB of Data.

$55 for me, $30 for her plus tax is $91 a month. Doing the math, that’s a $76 monthly savings which comes out to $912 savings per year.

Thanks again to Dennis at Apex Wireless for setting this up. (260) 471-9100 is their number.

The last two Monday Money articles I showed you how we came up with $2122 in annual savings and now we are at $3034 annual savings each year.

There are a couple of footnotes to share with you.

1. When I bought my Samsung Galaxy 3S and signed a new 2 year agreement with Verizon, they were not going to let me out of that contract without a penalty. They wanted $350. So I needed to sell my phone and net at least $350. Considering the phone was selling for over $400 on ebay, this was easy. List price is $600.

But I really, really liked my Samsung Galaxy 3S with 4G speed. Yet PagePlus does not offer 4G, only 3G. Since I had my Droid with 3G, I decided to step back and pocket the savings.

2. There were setup fees of $35 for each phone when we made the switch to PagePlus.

3. My cellphone bill could go even lower. I will be monitoring how much data I really use each month. If I use less than 250mb each month, I could drop down to the $30 a month plan like my wife has. If you use wi-fi instead of the data from your phone company, it doesn’t count against your data allotment.

4. Final footnote. I modified the way my Droid works without “rooting”it. I use it primarily for phone calls, a camera, a few texts, and checking news, weather, gmail and twitter. I said “check”, because I usually don’t write emails on my Droid, I will use my laptop with the full size keyboard. Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social media platforms. I shared some of those details here.

How We Are Saving $2500 (Part 2)

by Scott Howard | Nov 26, 2012 | Monday Money, Really? The Personal ScLoHo

Last week I started a short series that I’m calling Monday Money.

At the end of October, my wife and I decided to look at our monthly expenses and see if there were any ways to live more frugally.

In the next 5 days, I found a way to save over $2500 over the next 12 months.

We still have 2 cars, the same house, cable TV and Internet, and phones.

In other words, we didn’t need to make big lifestyle changes to save over $200 a month and perhaps some of these changes you can do too.

First was how I trimmed our car insurance by $1102 over the next 12 months.

Today the subject is Cable/Internet/Homephone.

We have been Comcast subscribers for years. My Comcast bill was around $147 a month for Cable TV and Internet Service. Several years ago I switched our homephone from a Verizon landline to Vonage. My Vonage bill has crept up to $38 a month, for a total of $185 coming directly out of my checking account each month.

We were willing to drop the Vonage and not have a homephone, but I found an even better way to save.

(The Vonage number was being used by a few friends and family and had become the business line for my wife’s TheSimpliedLifeCoach.net business.)

I found that by upgrading from 2 Comcast services to 3 Comcast services, we would qualify for a new customer discount. Comcast Triple Play includes 80+ TV channels, Internet and Comcast phone. By going to a basic cable tv package, (they call it Starter), we are losing 65 channels. Of those 65, only one or two were being watched and my wife can watch those shows on her laptop. This switch will cost us between $100 and $120 a month instead of $185 a month. Saving $85 for 12 months = $1020.

Thanks to Dennis at Apex Wireless for setting this up. (260) 471-9100 is their number.

Add the $1020 to the $1102 I mentioned last week in savings with auto insurance and now we trimmed $2122 from our annual budget.

Next week on Monday Money, I’ll show you how we are saving another $912 each year for a total savings of not $2500, but $3000 per year.

Here’s a couple of footnotes.

We have 5 TV’s hooked up to Comcast and they charge about $2 a month for each TV beyond 2, so there’s an extra $6 that we pay, but may cut back on each month. Remember $6 times 12 months is $72 a year and since there are only 2 of us living full time in our home, we may make this move.

Also Comcast charged me $25 dollars to come to our home and hook up the phone, but it was worth it.

The basic price for the Comcast Triple play was $99 a month for the first 12 months on a 2 year contract. I know that my Comcast bill will go up $20 a month for months 13 thru 24. Even with that increase a year from now, I’ll be paying less than I am now.