Money Affairs

We’ve heard some pretty crazy idea’s on savings and earnings, however, our latest interview with a kid in their 20’s blew us away.

What surprised us even more we did a survey and found most kids right no have the same thoughts.

Zach Speckard shares his thoughts on savings:

I don’t have any savings, but I also don’t have any wants.

I don’t know about you, but I like to enjoy my life. I like to go out to eat, buy clothes I don’t “need” and spend money with friends on memorable nights out.

This goes back to a piece of advice a very successful friend gave me: “Don’t save money. Make more money,” he nonchalantly stated, pushing me into a taxi.

Unlike most things people tell me, this advice did not go in one ear and out the other; it stayed with me and changed the way I look at everything from my career to my savings.

Before this piece of advice, I was frantic. I was always doubting and always feeling guilty. I lived in the most exciting city in the world (also the most expensive) and had yet to experience it.

I was trying to save, which meant trying not to eat. I wasn’t going out with friends, had yet to go to a club and had never seen the inside of a taxi.

I couldn’t enjoy my life because I was too busy worrying about my bank statement. I was too busy watching my savings instead of savoring my youth.

Why did I feel so guilty about spending money on myself and my life?

When did our 20s start to feel like our 40s? When did we get weighed down with the same pressure and stresses as a woman with four kids and a second mortgage?

We don’t have kids. We’ll be renting for the foreseeable future, and we have no problem eating McDonald’s when we’re skint.

I’ve recently figured it out: This pressure, this third-party stress, is ingrained within us. It’s this looming doom our parents carved into our unconscious, only to come out anytime we make an impulse purchase or have to spend the night without Netflix.

But like most things our parents have ingrained in us, we must consciously work to push it out. Because while they may have the best intentions, they don’t always have the best insight.

They want us to save because it provides us with a safety net, but that’s exactly why we shouldn’t. Their need for us to have a safety net is just a giant metaphor for the difference between our parent’s generation and ours.

They were getting married at 20 while we’re just getting our first apartments. They were saving for kids while we still want to be kids. We’re on different schedules, different paths and totally different savings plans.

We’re taking our time growing up, refusing to be shackled by mortgages and diapers. We’re not trying to live with safety nets; we’re trying to live on the edge.

When you’re too worried about your bank statement, you’re not making your own

When you live your life around your retirement fund, you may as well retire now. You can’t make a mark on the world if you’re too cheap to live in it.

Refusing to give yourself the luxury of enjoying your money negates the whole point of making it.

When you’re saving for yourself, you’re refusing to bet on yourself

People who are saving in their 20s are people who don’t set their sights high. They’ve already dropped out of the game and settled for the minor leagues.

Your 20s are not the time to save; they’re the time to gamble. $200 a month isn’t going to make the dent that a $60,000 pay raise will after spending all those nights out networking.

When you have something to bank on, you have nothing to reach for

When you have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.

You’d be surprised at how cautious people get with just a few thousand in the bank. This isn’t the time to safeguard — it’s the time to bet all your chips and hope to make it big.

When you live your life by numbers, you strip yourself of poetry

What memorable experience does money in the bank give you? How well-rounded can people become sitting at home, watching their limited funds gain interest?

Life is to be lived, not watched from the inside of your rent-controlled apartment.

When you die, you can’t take your money with you

When you’re acutely aware of your mortality, it makes spending money that much easier. Those who don’t plan for the future aren’t planning for their death.

When you deprive yourself, you don’t learn how to TREAT YOUR SELF

It’s good to be cautious and plan for unexpected events. It’s also good, however, to learn how to release and destress. Everything works out, and if you’re smart, able and had a job once, you’ll have one again.

Don’t waste your youth worrying about expenses when you should be worrying about experiences.

When you care about your 401k, your life is just “k”

When you’re 40, you’re not going to look back on your 20s and be grateful for the few thousand you saved. You’re going to be full of regret.

You’ll regret the experiences you didn’t take, the people you didn’t meet and the fun you didn’t have because you were too worried about a future that came and went.

Although all of his “justifications” for not saving money sounds good, it is exactly the type of thinking that is leading this country to the largest number of people ready to retire and are not ready for it. Check back later and we’ll let you know how everything has changed.

Usually we suggest to everyone that it is smart to donate some money to charities for the tax right offs. However, this story gives another perspective to why donating is always worth it.

When 7 year old Jack Swanson heard that the Islamic Center of Pflugerville in Texas had been vandalised, he decided to donate all of his savings – $20 dollars – to the mosque.

Vandals had torn pages of the Qur’an, covered it in faeces and left it outside the entrance of the mosque.

Jack’s mother told ABC News that her son had counted all of his pennies that he had been saving up and exchanged them to a $20 note to give to the mosque.

But the story doesn’t end there. When the local Muslim community learned of Jack’s generosity, they decided to surprise him with a gift.

They sent him an Apple iPad which he had been saving up for and sent a message with it saying,

“Dear Jack,
You had saved $20 in your piggybank for an Apple iPad. But then a local Islamic mosque was vandalized. So you donated your $20 to this local Texas mosque instead. Because of your amazing generosity & kind heart…Please enjoy this Apple iPad with our sincere thanks

Love
The American Muslim Community :)”

I don’t know if you have heard that food prices are going to be going up quite a bit in the next little while. Well I heard that along with a million other things and I didn’t pay that much attention. Some of you probably know that my husband and I work hard at saving money on groceries and having a good supply of food storage. We go about it in a couple ways. First we buy some bulk items from our church store, a nearby Amish store that sells bulk, and when there is a good deal from bulk warehouse stores.

Second, (for the most part) I do coupon shopping. Now I don’t have ANY time to clip coupons and I don’t want to, so I do it the easy way.

I found and signed up for a website called http://www.thegrocerygame.com It allows you to choose stores in your area and it then tells you everything per week that is on a good sale. Grey items are an OK price, Blue items are a stock up price, and Green items are free (or you get cash back for buying them.) It also tells you what coupons you need and everything (if you need one)

(Note- At first I used this site, which is awesome, but now that I am more familiar with prices and what is a good sale in my area and then just look at my local ads, choose what I want, and look for coupons that go with them.)

So I look at this website and instead of buying newspapers which are 2.00 each and then clipping and organizing. (Which takes forever!) I go to www.ebay.com or the http://www.couponfleamarket.com and buy only the coupons I want. It is really easy! There are usually in sets of 10 or 20 coupons and most the time I pay about 99 cents to 2.49 for 20 coupons and many have free shipping. We have saved a lot of money this way! I have been at the register and my total came to a little over 400.00 and I ended up paying around 80.00 after my coupons!

The reason I am posting this is because I have noticed something that worries me. On this site there are usually hundreds of deals to look through. I have noticed in the last couple months that the list is getting smaller and smaller.

So basically food prices are going up and fast. I just wanted to offer my help. If any of you are interested I will walk you through how to do this. Or if you don’t want to do it yourself I have started a facebook page that I post the top deals I find. So all you would have to do is order your coupons and get the stuff. It is really easy and it is really nice to know that if something happened like my husband lost his job, or a bad storm hit we would have plenty of food to last us for a good while. Also if you have a small house and don’t know where you could put extra food, let me help you. Check out my Small space food storage ideas post.

So I told everyone I knew of some good ideas/websites that had small space storage ideas and then my computer got a horrible virus and I had to send it off to my computer genius dad so he could fix it. So I started the search all over again to try and find my favorite ideas. I may be adding to this when my computer is back and put together.

First off I will share a few that I use myself. We have cute little house that was built about a hundred years ago (literally) and even though I love it I don’t love my storage options.

I use the extra space above my cupboards. You could use boxes or baskets as shown in the photo below or you can go the cheap way. Go to the Wal-Mart bakery and ask to buy the medium size buckets that get their frosting in. My Wal-Mart sells these for .50 cents a piece. I then covered them with contact paper (there are some really cute designs out there) and added a cute label. I have keep buckets with my basic staples up there such as flour, sugar, oatmeal (and oatmeal packets), granola bars, and I hide my candy up there where the kids can’t see it.

My very handy husband also created an awesome can rotation system for me a few years ago. He added to it and now it is on the wall in my very small kitchen. I love it! (I know how you can get one, if you’re interested.) It gives me a lot of storage, rotates my canned food, and doesn’t take up much space. (I didn’t have it completely full in this picture.)

Lastly I again take advantage of the inexpensive buckets at Wal-Mart. Their bigger buckets are $1.00 each and are food grade since the come with frosting in them. I wash and dry them very well and then use them for things like food, lotion, toothpaste, shampoo and conditioner. (Pretty much whatever you want) They obviously stack well and prevent anything from getting squished and spilling.

Below are some of the ways that I have come across. Keep in mind that some of these things may seem extreme to you but will work great for others.  I am only listing these ideas to get the ball rolling. You will have to take what you want and figure out how to best use it for your family.

BEDROOM-

My husband and I decided to convert one of the bedrooms into our food storage room. We took the smallest of the three, bought heavy duty shelves from Costco and ordered a Shelf Reliance storage system for our canned goods. The closet in our food storage room holds our wheat, powdered milk, and bottled water. We also raised our bed up, and have rolling totes underneath for additional storage.
-Samantha

I have wheat boxes behind my bed headboard against the wall, in a layer under my daughter’s mattress (she doesn’t have a frame or box spring), and under the TV (that layer is covered with a blanket). We hardly notice they’re around. I also have water stored under my bed (I used to store it under the couch – that’s a great place to store extra diapers, too).
-America

CLOSETS-

We put short bookshelves in our son’s closet and used them for food storage. Since his clothes were small they fit great over the top of the shelves. We also stacked boxes of #10 cans in the ends of the closets. Just make sure the boxes are labeled with what’s in them and put the things you will need to get into most often on the top or it can be a real pain to find things.
-Ellie

Create false bottoms in your closets! Clear everything out of the bottom of your chosen closet. Fill that space with either #10 cans or a couple of cases of canned goods. Cut a piece of plywood (or have it cut for you!) to size and place on top of the cans. Now, use your closet as you normally would!
-Danielle

CREATIVE SPACES-

What I’m planning on doing is curtaining off two feet or so along one wall of the dining room (IKEA has curtain rails you can mount on the ceiling) and putting all my food storage on shelves behind it.
-Cathie

The laundry/utility room often has extra space above the washer and dryer that can be used. Even if you don’t want to put food there, it works for storing toilet paper, dish soap, shampoos, etc.
-Gwen

FURNITURE-

The food storage boxes from the church canneries (the kind that hold six #10 cans each) fit very nicely between the wall and my couches. Every piece of furniture in my living room and family room has food storage boxes behind it. I stack them about 3 boxes tall, and then extend them as long as the couch. It leaves just the perfect amount of space between the wall and the furniture — nobody would guess there was anything back there. Those boxes also can be stacked to form a table — my telephone sits on one such table. It’s just boxes with a cloth over them.
-Marilee

WHOLE HOUSE-

We have used the top space in closets, a drawer in a bench, under beds (even propped the beds up on blocks so the food would fit underneath), lined every closet with food and/or water. Pull a dresser or couch away from the wall a couple of feet and you can fit lots of cans or buckets behind it where they won’t be seen too easily. We put food in the mylar pouches in the rolly boxes that go under beds and in giant 55 gal metal drums in the carport (the drums sealed so the insects/rodents/critters weren’t able to get to our food. Make a table with a board on top of a couple of cases of canned goods and cover it with a cloth. I’ve stacked 2 liter pop bottles of water horizontally between my filing cabinet and the wall. I’m also okay with the fact that my house doesn’t look professionally decorated—it’s disguise the food décor!
-Angela

Like I said you may not like all of these ideas and some might make you laugh but there are some really creative ideas that will help you get the ball rolling on ideas that work for you.

Shelley