Get Your Money Back

Living Large equates to living well within your means while thoroughly enjoying those thing in life that you love.  Making spending choices requires thought and consideration.  Once you've made a purchase, don't be afraid to change your mind.  When your money is on the line, you should be absolutely certain it's well spent. Whether its simply the wrong choice or an inferior product or service, don't be shy about asking for a refund.

Yes a return usually requires the extra step of contacting, visiting, or shipping items back to the company of origin, which keeps many from requesting a refund, but protecting your hard-earned resources is worth the effort in my book.  Sometimes you don't realize your purchase wasn't sound until well after the specified return timeline. Don't consider your money gone. It can often still be recouped. Case in point is my recent Quicken experience.

Spending within the boundaries of your income requires you to self-monitor, which starts with budgeting.  My long standing software choice for organizing my personal finances on a PC has been Quicken for Windows, made by Intuit.

As a PC owner, I've relied on Quicken for over a decade to accurately help me track, budget, and simplify my finances. Options such as manual entry or automatic downloads from financial institutions, quick pictures or detailed reports of current or projected financial status, and payment reminders or automatic entry make it super customizable. While I still recommend Quicken wholeheartedly for PC users, my purchase of Quicken for Mac proved so substandard to its PC counterpart, that I don't even think there should be a charge for it.

I argued this point with Intuit recently and received a full refund of my purchase price, well outside of the 60 day refund period. It took me 20 minutes to draft the letter, 5 minutes to research the address of the corporate office and a forever stamp and walk to the mailbox to process.  Completely worth the time and energy, not only for the actual money restored to me for an incompetent product, but in this case, to have my complaints and feedback ingested by the source.

If you dropped three Andrew Jacksons out of your pocket while walking, you'd take the time to zig zag back on your route to look for them in the name of being a decent steward of your money.  Do the same with your purchases.  If the product or service is not what you want, get your money back. Otherwise you're throwing money away.

Traveling on the Cheap

Rental Bike in Paris, Courtesy of The Alternative Consumer

Love to travel but hate how much money you blow every time you go out of town?  You don’t have to spend tons of money to enjoy jet-setting.

When it comes to flights, buying your tickets 30 days early seems fair, but CheapAir has concluded that if you buy exactly 47 days in advance, you’ll likely be getting the best rate for your trip.  Scouring at the last minute for trips to anywhere can be cost-savings as well.  Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays are usually the most cost-effective days to fly, so start there.  Subscribe to your favorite airline or travel site alerts so you can be advised when flights are on sale for specific destinations or last minute discounts are offered.  

Luggage fees can add up.  If you can choose an airline that allows free checked bags, do it.  If not, check the size requirements and bag fees before booking, as $20 versus $50 per checked or carry-on bag can make a huge difference in your transportation expense.  Become a master packer and work with just a carry-on to avoid fees altogether, as most airlines still allow 1 carry-on for free.

Save money on lodging by rate shopping and check out all the hidden fees.  $250/night vs. $150/night can seem like a savings unless you forgot to add in the hotel tax, entertainment fee or local sales tax, which is some locations can skyrocket upwards of 20% per day.  Use the regular sites like Orbitz, booking.com and hotels.com for comparison purposes, but don’t forget to call the hotel directly, not just the 800#, as in many cases the best rates come directly from the business.  If you’ve got time, or if the hunt is part of the fun, wait till you arrive and go door-to-door, where I’ve experienced savings as much as 35% less than published rates.  Don’t want to arrive without lodging, but can wait for the best rate, download the Hotel Tonight app which allows you to books last-minute rooms for same day and next day, with an average savings of $25/night.  Use promo code HT30 after registering, and receive $30 off of your first booking if spending over $100.

Avoid tourist traps by avoiding hotels altogether and rent a house, condo, or apartment on Vacation Rentals By Owner or Airbnb,  Most places have a partial or full kitchen, which lends to buying groceries and cooking or preparing at least some food ‘at home’ instead of dining out every meal.  Take it one step further and ask to stay with a friend, relative, or acquaintance in the area where you want to visit.  You could take that lodging money and either save it, or re-appropriate it to other vacation expenses such as entertainment, and still have plenty left to buy a nice thank you gift or meal for your host!

Once you arrive at your destination consider alternative options to mainstream traveling habits to save money.  Walk, take the bus or train, rent a by-the-hour bicycle, or use an Uber to get to and from locations, including the airport, in your destination city instead of taking expensive cabs or renting a car that requires additional overhead expenses like fuel and parking fees.  

While there’s hundreds of ‘tricks’ to saving money and stretching your dollars when on vacation, traveling on the cheap is best achieved by using good common sense.  Research, plan, and budget your trip in advance if possible, then stick to your guns!  Save the money in advance that you plan on spending during your trip.  Take cash or travelers checks to spend instead of a debit card, as you will naturally stay within your budget, as once the cash is gone, you’re done spending.  Make smart decisions on the fly regarding expenses.  And whatever you do, don’t  use evil credit cards to finance a vacation you can’t afford. 

Stick to Your Guns

Photo Source:  pageonce.com

Living Large is not always easy.  While living well within your means and enjoying the things you love most in life sounds like a no-brainer, it actually requires discipline.  And restraint, whether it applies to your interaction with your kids, your employees, or yourself, can be taxing.  It is totally doable, though, and you’ll be happy you stuck to your guns on following your budget once the end of the quarter or year rolls around and you’ve managed to save more than you thought or spend less than you’d bargained.  

Once your budget is in place (click here if you don’t have a budget yet) the key to success is following it.  Assuming your budget is thoughtfully construed, meaning it's a relatively accurate account of expected expenses and is zero-balance based, meaning all money coming in over a specific time period, is accounted for as going out, whether to expenses, savings or investment, you’ve won half the battle. 

Planning and flexibility is required to stay on point with your budget. While you’ve probably already anticipated unexpected expenses in your yearly budget, you may not have considered the will power necessary to spend just the allowances set aside for each category, especially when shopping on the fly.  

Even though I have subscribed for years to the mindset of only purchasing what I’ve planned on buying, and nothing more, each day can be a new challenge. Just today, I visited a new gym I had planned on joining with my wife.  I had already researched the gym’s website and acquainted myself with its fees, its offerings, and its commitment and cancellation policies, yet I still decided we should visit it to get a feel before joining online.

I knew I hadn’t budgeted money in our recreation category for the year.  My wife already owned a pre-paid membership at a gym downtown and I had an existing membership at local pricey gym, currently on hold because I was on a long road of recovery from a recent knee surgery and was facing another one in the upcoming months, which will keep me off my feet and unable to utilize the gym for quite some time.  However, our situation had changed recently in that my wife’s gym was no longer easily accessible after a job change and I was recently given the clearance to use an elliptical machine, which I desperately wanted to try.  I was confident, however, in the fact that if I finessed the budget a bit and spent X number of dollars on gym memberships this year that I hadn’t planned for, I could spend the same X number of dollars LESS in another category in order to make my zero balance budget jive.  I just needed to adjust to the situation.

Armed with a dollar amount in my head that we could spend this year on memberships, we visited the gym, prepared to try it out and join on the spot if we liked it.  But we were met with roadblocks that made us reconsider.  There was no “trial” the gym offered for before joining unless a $20 fee was paid per person per day. No thank you.  The low monthly, no-commitment-based fee with an almost nonexistence sign-up charge was no longer available as of 2 days ago, but was replaced with a decent wad of cash for a joiner fee.  Top that off with the full-court sales press toward the super-sized membership that touted bells and whistles and had a price tag double the monthly fee plus a year-long commitment, and our day was all of a sudden not so clear cut.

My wife and I had to take a minute to regroup on our own without the salesman.  We considered every angle of the membership info that was thrown at us.  We quickly moved past our inability to “try the gym out” for the day before deciding and went right into negotiations.  We went back and forth with our separate lists of wants and needs, haggling the terms for half an hour.  Our visit ended with the two of us walking out, each from a separate set of doors on opposite ends of the gym because we were barely speaking, with no membership at all as we couldn’t make and combination of concessions work for our budget on the spot.  

On the longer-than-I’d-like-to-drive-in-a-car-to-get-to-a-gym car ride home, we bickered over the outcome of our gym visit, and ultimately I decided the location was too inconvenient an option for me to personally consider.  My wife went back and purchased the mac daddy membership she had, unbeknownst to me, wanted all along, for the exact price we had allotted for the total money spent for gym memberships.  She received unlimited guest passes with her sign-up, so I’m in for an elliptical workout or two a week with her.  It all worked out in the end after much scrutiny, but there was nothing enjoyable about keeping those scales balanced.

Some days are much easier than others and it just becomes a way of life.  It’s all a tradeoff though.  If you get into the habit of putting more thought into your purchases, maybe even just large ones at first, that will spill over onto smaller ones, it will become a routine.  Just like quitting a bad habit like smoking, it takes the same 21 days to institute a new good pattern, like sticking to your guns on your finances.

Give it a try.  It’s amazing what you can accomplish in just a short period of time.  And then your attitude starts to change when you see how much money you can actually save just by preparing for purchases and honoring your budget.  You’ve got nothing to lose…..but spending too much green!

Start with a Budget

Living Large by whole-heartedly enjoying the things in life that are most important to me happens most naturally when I practice the other piece of it, which is living within my means.  Simply stated, it’s spending only what I make or less.  It sounds simple, but it’s actually quite complex when you consider that the norms in our society include borrowing liberally to leverage our purchase power, creating financial peer pressure to spend more than we make.  Creating and sticking to a balanced budget each year, though, can not only keep your financial house in order, it can also help you choose your life’s passion. 

As a kid and teenager, it was easy to budget as I made so little money at my part-time jobs that I could only spend so much on clothes and outings before my wallet or bank account was empty.  When you were out of money, you simply couldn’t buy anything.  Those years were fun and simple.  Turning 18 threw a wrench into the plan for me.  Credit card company promotional tables lined the commons that first week of college with their reps taunting, “Buy it today and pay it off later,” and “Establish your own credit history,” as they handed me my free dorm-room-shower-caddy for opening up a revolving credit account at 21% interest.  It went downhill from there and I loaded up on debt for six years. 

Consumer Credit Counseling showed me, among many other debt-reduction ideas, how to create my first written budget in my early 20’s.  The advisor used a sheet of paper and a pencil, I later transferred it to an excel spreadsheet, and now I use Quicken, but regardless of the platform, the format is still the same.  You simply have to write down every dollar you bring in and match it to every dollar you hand out.  Do it in your photographic memory, on a bar napkin, in your phone, or in a piece of DIY software, but you have to do it if you want to get a handle on your finances. 

Start with the basics of a budget.  While doing it by month seems to be the easiest for most, since many payments are due monthly, use whatever period of time makes most sense for you, such as week or quarter.  First track the amount of your paycheck(s), allowance, stipend, grant, support, alimony, and any other source of income.  If you don’t make a static salary or wage, but say work on commission, calculate an average based on your last 3 months’ income earned.  Next create a separate column of regular expenses.  Regular doesn’t necessarily mean just monthly, but can mean a one-time expense that happens each year, like registration fee on your car or a 3-Day Pass to Lollapalooza.  Write each expense on a separate line with the name and amount.   If you’re not sure of what you spend on a regular basis, start by guesstimating.  You can go back and finesse the numbers later.  While utilities and car payments and bus passes usually make it onto these lines, many people forget the everyday “little” items that add up to big expenses when multiplied to equal a year’s worth of expenses, such as personal care such as grooming, salon visits, and products .  Household expenses like paper towels and tissue and toilet paper many times get forgotten, and expenses like dining, entertainment, kids’ sports and activities, and drive-through coffee really add up.  Take, for example, the year I reviewed my budget in December and was shocked to see that $5K had been spent in stocking our bar at home!  While the number itself is relative to the situation, for me that number represented 5% of the total income brought into our household that year.  It was more than the amount we spent in groceries for the year, more than we spent on our vacation, and topped what we gave to charity in a 12-month period.  Priorities people. 

Once you have all of your income in one column and your expenses in another, add up the two columns.  Your income should be more than or equal to your expenses.  If it’s not, you need to balance out the numbers.  This may require a Come-to-Jesus talk with yourself and a sit-down with your family about prioritizing or it may be as easy as looking for glaring categories where you can spend less and alter the amounts to reflect what you WANT to spend instead of what you have spent in the past.  Maybe you spend $700/month dining out.  It’s less expensive to buy groceries and make meals at home, so in order to cut costs, you could prepare more meals at home.  My dad always says, “Every solution creates a new set of problems.”  Your new problem may be that you don’t currently have time to do that, as by the time you go to work, go to the gym, make meals at home, and spend time with your family, the hours in the day have been exhausted.  So maybe it means changes your priorities for a period of time, or maybe indefinitely, to allow for cost cutting.  Maybe you could lose the gym membership to both cut that category amount and allow for the cooking at home, allowing you time to work out with your spouse, kids, or a friend, after dinner.  Everyone’s different and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to budgeting.  Be creative.  You have to make the numbers work based on your values, priorities, and lifestyle.  Maybe you’ve cut all the proposed expenses you can and find that you’ll still be spending more than you make; time to look for extra income like a second job, or auctioning some of your possessions, or selling one of the items you own that you’ve financed, like a car or a home to alleviate the monthly payments.  No matter what your situation, there’s always options, some more palatable than others.

Once you’ve set up your budget of proposed spending, you then need to stick to it and track what you spend.  If you put $400 a month in your budget for groceries, then only spend $100 at the store each week.  Pick and choose your stores and purchases instead of shopping on demand.  Following your own financial recommendation is the key to success.  Track your daily expenses and tabulate your monthly expenses in each category.  Keep receipts, take pics of them, have them sent to you electronically, or keep a running tally in your head of what you’ve spent on what…it doesn’t matter how, just do something that makes sense for you.  Sounds dramatic?  It’s not.  Once you tabulate what you actually spend in a month, you will be shocked, as most of us don’t accurately depict our spending because we don’t have a handle on the facts.  Once you see what you spend, compare each month/quarter/or year what you spend to what you predicted and massage the numbers from there.

While budgeting helps me ensure my family’s financial security, which is hugely important, it also provides the bonus of giving me a reason to sit down and actually evaluate who I am and who I want to be.  How we spend our money tells a lot about us.  It shows me how I spend my time, how my family spends its time, what we hold near and dear, and what we’re teaching or not teaching our kids.  Sometimes I like what I see and I’m proud of our month or year.  Other times, I’m disappointed and ingest the data and use it to hone my priorities and passions, allowing me to refocus for the next year or period of time.  What does your budget or spending say about you?