10 Ten.docx

Ten Many of you may feel that you are quite underpaid, you are not earning up to your qualification, and feel the need to be paid more by your employers for your expertise. Therefore, you must also feel as though you don’t make enough and have sufficient money to pay your bills for all the things yo...

Ten Many of you may feel that you are quite underpaid, you are not earning up to your qualification, and feel the need to be paid more by your employers for your expertise. Therefore, you must also feel as though you don’t make enough and have sufficient money to pay your bills for all the things you need and ‘want’. Many of you are paid a competitive salary or hourly rate for your profession or employment skills. Even though every month your paychecks seem to fall short of paying all of your bills. Your paychecks will probably cover all of your monthly overhead expenses if you have planned and budgeted for them before you spent money on other things. Perhaps you have forgotten about those $60 flowers you sent someone when a nice card would have sufficed? Or the extra 140 miles driven to take your friends to the mall, a picnic, and to a party this month? Those extra miles require extra gasoline, the average vehicle may get 22 miles per gallon. If gas cost $3.50 per gallon, it cost 6.36 gallons of gas or about $22.26 to travel 140 expressway miles. If it was city-driven miles your vehicle may only get 18 miles per gallon or 7.77 gallons of gas at $3.50, costing you $27.20 for the trip. You should categorize and prioritize all expenses and monthly expenditures into designated categories such as overhead: rent, utilities, food, and transportation. The non-essentials: personal care, take out, eating out and entertainment, etc. You should regularly review your budgets in search of those non-essential expenses you could either reduce or eliminate to see if there are opportunities to start a savings account. You are giving your future savings away when you pay for anything that you can do for yourself. A few things which delivered takeout food, washing, and ironing most of your own clothes, and saving on cleaner expenses. Many times, there is quite a bit of money right under your nose. Most people tend to be very impulsive spenders for items under $5.00 and/or those items they feel are on sale and seem to be great bargains. Many times, we accumulate many clothing items in our closet we haven’t worn in years and many still have the original price tags attached to them. Did you really need to purchase them, or did you just ‘want’ them? Take a moment to add up the prices of all the clothes with tags on them. These are perfect examples of ‘wants’ that are slowly sabotaging and killing your ability to save money for the things you may need in the future. If you are spending money on takeout food and having these orders delivered to you, are you aware of the total cost of these orders? If you are having these orders delivered by the restaurant delivery driver to your home or workplace, what are you paying for the deliveries plus tips? Many of these service fees are distance sensitive. For example, a $25 order from a restaurant with its own delivery person, with a $5 tip has a total order cost of $30. If the same order is delivered by an outside delivery service that same $25 order could cost, you a $4 fee from the restaurant is 15% and a $6 delivery fee from the delivery service. There are higher fees for orders less than $15, so that simple $25 delivery order with a $5 tip could cost you as much as $11 in additional fees for an of total $41. Those extra fees and tips add up to 38% more to your food order cost. If you use the delivery service four times a month rather than picking your order up yourself, you are spending an extra $64 per month on tips and fees for takeout food. If you do this a year, you’re spending over $768 on just delivery fees and tips. How many more $25 food orders could this $768 in these fees have purchased for you if you picked up your order? The answer is 30 more $25 orders! Perhaps, you need to pick up your own take-out orders yourself! This new wave of delivery services for food and Take-Out orders will ruin your budget. There are TV commercials encouraging you to use delivery services for just about everything you don’t feel like picking yourself. There’s always a much higher cost for the convenience of having someone waiting on you, doing something for you that you could do for yourself. Take the time to track all your delivery fees and tips for a month or two, to see the actual amount you’re spending; I’m positive you may be unpleasantly surprised. These fees are eating up your savings and future ‘Hidden Treasures of Wealth’ that you are unknowingly and willfully just giving away. The Chart below shows your monthly overhead and estimate impulse purchases. MONTHLY LIVING OVERHEAD EXPENSES Actual Actual Family of 1 2 1 EXP 2 EXP Mort/Rent 1000 1400 Tax/Ins 25 25 Water 0 0 Electric 50 50 Nat Gas 125 125 Public Transport 100 200 Auto/Ins* 300 300 Petro/Rep 100 100 Cable/Int 120 140 Cell Phone 80 100 Food 180 250 Med Benefits 75 125 Personal Care* 50 100 Meds/Misc 50 75 Hair/Nails 50 150 Entertain/Sports 25 50 Clothing* 50 100 Spirits/Cigs 0 0 Savings* 0 0 Student Loan* 0 0 Credit Cards 50 50 Supple/Gym 0 0 Eat Out Break & Lunch 900 1800 Eat Out Dinner 120 240 Happy Hour & Takeout 140 280 Total Expenses 3591 5662 Pre-Tax Mthly Pay 4278 7380 Annual Income Req 51336 88328 Many people who purchase prepared foods, groceries, online items, pet supplies and other things can easily lose track of what they are costing them monthly. Many online merchants are beginning to charge you for returning items that don’t meet your expectations. Also, if you are using Ride Share, retail and grocery store delivery services, please keep a record of what you are spending to have these delivered as well. You will be surprised at how fast and how much these convivences costs can be astronomical and may be enough to consider purchasing or upgrading your vehicle. Article: Consumers cough up $5,400 a year on impulse purchases. All those few unplanned purchases you made this week add up. Keep it up and your yearly tally from those spontaneous moments could reach $5,400 annually. That’s how much the average U.S. consumer spends each year on impulse buys, according to a new survey by Slickdeals.net. The study of 2,000 consumers shows they make three of those purchases a week, adding up to $450 a month and $5,400 per year. Most of the spur-of-the-moment outlays go toward food, with 70.5 percent of respondents saying that category was the major culprit. Here are the top five purchases. (1) Food/Groceries 71%, (2) Clothing 53%, (3) Household 33%, (4) Takeout 29% and (5) Shoes 28%. At the same time, 85 percent of survey respondents said their impulse purchase involved taking advantage of a deal or discount. By: Sarah O’Brien, Source: Personal Finance Feb. 2018 There are probably a few monthly expenses that you currently have which are not listed such as credit card bills, store brand cards, personal and student loans, gym membership, etc. Please make a list of all of your monthly expenses to ensure that they are included in your calculations when you create your budget. Hopefully, your budget will include a savings component. You are constantly being bombarded with advertisements from fast food eateries and convenience stores trying to separate you from your money. There are so many outside impulse purchases that you have routinely incorporated into your lives you could be easily eliminated. It starts with taking the time to figure out what your poor spending habits are really costing you. To better understand this, we’re going to call these convenience expenditures, ‘lazy’ habits’, things that you could do for yourself but choose not to. You’ll pay much more for convenience. In the chart above, let’s review the cost of the ‘eating out’ option. Here are many of them: morning coffee, pastry, breakfast sandwich, lunches, snacks, energy drinks, and beverages. Then you have take-out food and weekly happy hour expenses. If you are aware of how much these ‘lazy habits’ are costly to you, then you’re ahead of the game. If you have no idea, you are totally lost, this is for you. Let’s itemize your daily purchases, coffee at $3, pastry at $3, breakfast sandwich at $5, lunch at $13, a snack at $3, and a beverage at $3 for a total of $30 per day. Include dinner out three times a month at $32 plus an $8 tip, happy hour at $50 each twice a month, and take-out $20 each, twice a month. That pastry could be substituted with a candy bar, energy drink, or a snack such as potato chips. Over a 30-day month, totals for coffee $90, pastries $90, breakfast sandwiches $150, lunches $390, snacks $90, beverages at $90, dinners out $120, happy hours $100, and take-outs $40. If this is a good snapshot description of your monthly impulsive ‘lazy habit’ eating out activities; then guess what? It’s costing you $1,160 per month to continue this behavior. You would still need to eat dinners at home the other twenty-five days a month for about $250 per month or $10 per day. Your grand total for eating out monthly is $1,380. Assuming you would eat just breakfasts at home daily and pack your lunches, that extra $765 you’re spending a month eating out represents the cost of leasing an American or foreign vehicle including insurance and gas. Yum, yum, how does eating a vehicle taste? Or that extra $765 monthly could be saved toward your rent, six-month to a year ($4,590 to $9,180) overhead expense cushion or to build a savings ‘nest egg’ for the future. These are just illustrations of how easy it is to lose count of the amount of money you spend daily when it’s under ten dollars. Now, realistically you may not purchase all the food and snacks listed and your price point for the items may differ, the point is: do you know how much you’re spending on impulsive food purchases? These are usually the main expenditures that you are not in control of that you actually have the ability to control, through simple planning, sacrifice, and behavior modifications. If you are serious about cutting back and saving money, just getting up forty-five minutes earlier in the morning may allow you to have coffee and breakfast at home for about $1.50. That would include two eggs, toast with jelly, and meat. You can ‘brown’ bag your lunch and beverage for about $3.50, pastries for $0.50, a snack for $0.50, and dinners at home for $10 per night. Let’s do the math. Your coffees and breakfasts are $45, lunches with a beverage $105, snacks and pastries $30 and dinners $300, for a grand total of $480. That’s a saving overeating out of $636 per month and an opportunity for additional savings in the income of $636 per month or $7,632 per year and over five years $38,160. Wooooooow! Now that could be a hefty down payment toward the purchase of the house. Just for fun, let’s assume you and your significant other are both choosing the ‘eating out’ option, so just double the numbers. Your ‘lazy habit’ or convenience monthly food consumption expenditures habits are now $2,320 or you could have monthly savings of about $1,272. That would be an annual savings of $16,536 and a more shocking savings potential over five years would be $82,680 now. This is 20% to 30% of the purchase price of a nice house. Again, these are your potential savings. Who couldn’t use this kind of ‘extra new-found’ money that was always under your noses? Or the money found from the simple behavior modification change of making breakfast and lunch at home and changing how you are spending your money? Everyone should be raising their hand to the question, who could use an extra $82,680 over the next five years? Are both your hands raised? Why not? Just remember purchasing ‘prepared’ foods and other simple conveniences cost a great deal more money. You are paying for the cost of labor and profit of whoever is preparing the food or services for you. Also, be mindful of the total purchases you make from vending machines. There are times in the day you feel you need a snack or sugar fix right now and that vending machine is calling your name. These are other purchases that cost a lot of money. These are the times you could have planned to bring a packaged snack or beverage with you. It’s okay if this happens once in a ‘blue’ moon but purchasing daily from a vending machine can become very costly. The snacks, products, and beverages prices from vending machines are typically 25% to 40% more expensive than supermarkets, because of the convenience of being able to purchase products right now rather than having to go to a store. For instance, a candy bar purchased in a supermarket at $1.10, that same candy bar purchased from a vending machine maybe $1.50 or $0.40 more. It means that over 22 workdays in a month, your vending machine expenditures would be $33, or an annual expenditure of $396 per year. The same can be applied to those of you who enjoy Smoothies, making nutritional smoothies at home cost an average of $2. While purchasing them out at Eateries can cost $6 to $8 each. The monthly cost at home is $60 per month, purchasing them out at an average of $7 each comes to $210 per month. That comes to a savings of $150 per month or $1,500 a year without sales tax. These are perfect examples of how impulse purchases could blow your budget totally out of whack. Many of these expenses can be controlled or avoided with your proper planning and the discipline to have self-control over these types of immediate ‘wants’. Another trending marketing tool to be cautious of is those which encourage you to make repeat purchases at specific take-out food places, fast-food restaurants and convenience chain stores those Customer Loyalty Programs. They are also known as (aka) Rewards Program Apps, where the store offers you free items for frequent purchases, sometimes single purchases, and things of this nature. So, when you reach a certain dollar amount of purchases in ‘points’, you earn that free item(S). These programs entice you to visit the store more often than you would have without the reward incentives to spend higher dollar amounts to receive free items. These incentive items end up costing you much more than the price of purchasing the item without Rewards Programs if you really wanted it. Article: Acorns reports that the average American spends about $1,100 per year on coffee, which breaks down to roughly $92 a month. One-Third of Americans Spend More on Coffee Than on Investing, Are you one of them ? There are plenty of reasons Americans aren't investing as much as they should. For many workers, it's a matter of not having the money available after paying living expenses. For others, it's a matter of absent knowledge and fear. But even when these factors don't apply, Americans still tend to fall down on the investing front, so much so that 34% spend more money each year on coffee than on stocks, bonds, or other such moneymaking vehicles, according to investing app Acorns. You're losing out. Why invest? It's simple. If you don't invest your money, you won't see any growth in it. If someone hands you $100 in cash and you leave it rolled up in the corner of your sock drawer for 30 years, you won't have a penny more three decades from now. But if you use that money to buy stocks and see an 8% average annual return on your investment (which is actually just below the market's average), in 30 years, you'll have just over $3,000. Now you may not consider $3,000 a life-changing amount of money, but it's also 30 times more than the amount we started with in our example. What this means is that if you're willing to invest money consistently over time, you stand to amass a sizable amount of wealth by the time you're ready to retire. And that's important because you need your own savings to pay the bills once your career comes to a close. By: Maureen Backman Source: The NerdBook, Jan. 2018 Article: What Is ROI (Return On Investment) ? When you put money into an investment or a business endeavor, ROI helps you understand how much profit or loss your investment has earned you. Return on investment is a simple ratio that divides the net profit (or loss) from an investment by its cost. Because it is expressed as a percentage, you can compare the effectiveness or profitability of different investment choices. Wikipedia Let’s see what you as an individual could do with a large portion of that $5,496 per year saving from no longer ‘eating out’. Using the same return on investment percentage in the article of 8%, for just investing $4,000, over 30 years you would have about $120,000. You have the opportunity to invest the saving of $4,000 per year for five consecutive years, that’s the potential of earning over $600,000 in 35 years. Again, if there are two of you investing over five years then there is the opportunity to earn over $1,200,000 over 35 years by just cutting out your ‘eating’ habits. This sounds like a win, win situation for you. At a 4% APR interest rate, the numbers in the article above would be cut in half or 50%, that’s $300,000 for an individual and $600,000 for two of you. Even at an interest of only a 2% APR, your investment would be $150,000 and $300,000 respectively. Still quite a great return on your investment of money for foods you would have normally purchased and consumed because you didn’t want to prepare them at home yourself. Making this behavior modification change would be like giving yourself, a $636 a month, tax-free pay raise equivalent to an $826 a month per-tax raise. On an annual basis, it’s like a $9,922 raise. Trust me, that would do wonders for increasing your purchasing power. It’s one way to ensure you are able to pay your bills on time and keep raising your credit score effortlessly. Get the point! Some experts say it takes an average of 66 days to develop a habit, but; it can take longer to change an old habit. One would think the financial savings would be enough motivation to change your behavior. If this isn’t enough time, then give yourself at least twelve weeks but continue to count and record the weekly money you are spending until your behavior has changed. This twelve-week or three-month adjustment period will cost you $1,908 ($636 x 3) in excessive expenses, but you’re on your way to making a life-long change in your behavior. Just remember, ”every dollar you spent today on something you ‘want’, is a dollar you will not have in the future to spend on something you may need”. Your rewards for this sacrifice and behavior modification are the $636 a month and $7,632 annual savings which can be used for paying down debt, for investment instruments, and starts on your way to creating a financial wealth portfolio. During the research for this book, there was an individual, let’s refer to as Debbie, who had a good job. She was willing to disclose her personal challenges to pay all of her monthly overhead expenses and she also the need to replace her old car. After further discussions into what she was spending her monthly income on she couldn’t recall where her money was spent. After asking more probing questions she finally admitted she didn’t really cook many meals at home. She spent a lot of money eating out daily, usually breakfast lunch, and dinner. She also has a child to feed as well. She also spent a lot of money on personal appearance maintenance. When the numbers were crunched and totaled, she was spending an average of $45 per day eating out. That’s $45 times 30 days equals $1,350 per month or close to $16,200 annually just on eating out. Even at 60% of $1,350 per month was still had $800 per month, she’s easily able to finance a new vehicle and have money left over for other expenses. Sometimes you just need to sit down, revisit and record what you are spending your income on. This didn’t include any reduction in personal care expenses. You’ll be surprised at what you may find. This book offers you tremendous opportunities to build bridges and clear paths to save, improve and ensure your financial health is in order now and in the future. You should periodically reevaluate your life insurance needs, you may want to invest in stocks, save for a down payment on a house or invest in stock and save for retirement. Your uses for this new-found income stream are limitless in helping you achieve your ‘American Dreams’ and build wealth as long as you keep focused on your plans. These are your ‘hidden treasures’ to capture and save to ensure you have a stress-free journey through life and retirement. We didn’t include those impulsive treats such as ice cream, sundaes, and water ice purchases. People feel their top four impulsive spending habits occur only at the grocery store, in fast foods, in clothing, and in shoes. You could easily spend over $200 per month or $2,400 annually on impulse purchases. This example was to show that impulse purchases can still be difficult even with and on a budget to encourage you to keep track of your impulsive spending habits in the event you need to make any budget reduction adjustments to save more for the future. Then there are those other big-ticket budget-busting entertainment expenditures like the theater, professional sporting events, and concerts. The costs of these events can be enormous for a night out for two; the cost of a sporting event or a concert can exceed $400 per person or $800 for two per event. Then there are those situations where the tickets are being sold by scalpers for four to ten times their face value. If you indulged in these big-ticket expenditures six times a year, you’ll spend $2,400 to $4,800. Just make sure you are not running up huge credit card debt to attend these events and make sure you can pay them off at the end of the month or stay home. Sometimes we must admit the costs are just too. Then there is the ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity times when your professional sports team makes it to the ‘Big Dance’. It could be the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Championship, USL Championship, Pro Tennis and major PGA Golf championships, or female professional sports championship where ticket prices are astronomically inflated up to $10,000 plus. This also occurs when there a ‘Super Star’ world tour concert is announced where the demand for tickets creates a huge demand for secondary market tickets. If you add in your air travel, hotel, and dining expenses these events could set you back $8,000 to $20,000. Some people question if the cost of attending this event is really worth it. These are emotional expenditures that many people may regret after attending and they receive the bills on their credit card statements. Many of them may end up with buyer’s remorse once they realized they have spent up to fifty percent of their net income on a weekend fling which could take two years to pay off. These are decisions that you should have used a lot more planning and budgeting to determine if you could afford to go. Had you taken the time to plan and think it through, a better choice may have been to consider investing in a 75” OLED or QLED TV and a great sound surround system for about $3,000. The benefit of this decision is that you could have mimicked the environment and feeling of being at the game at home for 80% - 85% less than a $15,000 to $20000 trip. You would also have a grandiose theater system to view all sports, movies, and concerts for many years to come. Please use the same planning and budgeting tools when it comes to trying to purchase tickets to ‘Super Star’ concerts. Now that you have the high-quality theater system to watch a DVD of the concert for less than fifty dollars in the comfort of your home. These are just some of the benefits of making a planned informed decision and still living within your means. This is how you get more bang for your buck. This can easily be overlooked because most of the ticket purchases are completed online with credit cards and debit cards for future events. The receipts are emailed to you, and you seldom print them out, so you don’t really have a physical receipt, out of sight out of mind. However, many money experts would recommend and prefer that you use a credit card in the event there’s an issue with the ticket purchase or concert venue and you need to get a refund. The credit card company will come to your defense if you have a problem. Then there are those recreational habits some of you have such as alcohol, cigarettes, recreational legalized marijuana, and gambling. These crutch addictive habits can require large amounts of your net income, most of the time without your knowledge of the total amounts you are spending on them. They tend to start out as recreational uses and can quickly grow into full-blown addictions. Remember, there are many professional services available to help you if you succumb to any of these additions. You just need to admit you have a problem and be willing to make the necessary sacrifices to get back and stay on track to make your plans happen. This can be the difficult part, to maintain your discipline, remain focused and stay on your course to sacrifice today’s pleasures for the larger financial gains in your future. It would be very difficult to plan to reduce your impulsive spending habits without first knowing the amount you are spending on those habits. This knowledge of your impulsive monthly spending will empower you to redirect and repurpose some of those recovered dollars to spend on something you need of more importance. Then there are the repairs your current vehicle will need in the future. Remember, the vehicle you have now will not be the last vehicle you will ever need to purchase, so start saving for its replacement now. Let’s look at what your budget might be like. Please create your own monthly budget using a ledger book. You might find that the Cash Book ledger book, 144 pages, approximately 8” x 5” will serve your purpose well for several years. It would probably be a good idea to keep track of your monthly overhead expenses every month. You will find that the repetitiveness of writing down and keeping track of your monthly overhead expenditures can be extremely helpful. To make things a little easier to manage, if you are paid twice a month, 15th and 30th, you can organize the overhead bills due at the beginning of the month to be paid with your paycheck from the 30th of the previous month’s paycheck. Other overhead bills due after the 15th of the month will be paid with your paycheck from the 15th of the month. This way you always have the money to cover your overhead expenses, and any leftover money should go into a savings account. Once you have planned and budgeted your monthly income to pay your monthly overhead expenses, take the next step found painfully affective. This system is called COCB (CO-CB), which means Cut Out and Cut Back on all your unnecessary expenses. Cut Out your ‘wants’, examples; I want a massage/pedicure, new shoes, go a concert, designer items or a luxury vehicle. Then Cut Back on your ‘I think I need, examples; go out to eat, go to the movies, get my nails done, go to Pro sports games or new tennis shoes. These items may be interchangeable to you. Make sure you live within your means, and you have budget for a savings fund before you splurge all of your discretionary income your ‘wants’ and ‘I think I needs’. The money to put into a savings fund will come in very handy when to want to purchase a house. Most people struggle coming up with the 20% down payment required to purchase the house they want. This 20% down payment of the purchase price will keep you from having to pay an additional 1%-2% of your mortgage in PMI insurance. This is just why you end up paying a higher interest rate, just because you didn’t have the discipline to plan, budget and save enough money for a don’t payment. This affects your mortgage interest rate payment the exact same manner as having to have a less than very good to excellent credit score. Every interest rate percentage you lower outs money directly back into your pockets and helps you build wealth faster. These are just some of the book course’s financial benefits and opportunities to save money presented and make you aware of before you come to these crossroads in life. Increasing your awareness is another significant part of the ’STFF HOPE PROCESS’. Plan to record all of your monthly expense payments for future reference. This way you will have a record of all your monthly expenditures so when it’s time to plan to make a purchase you’ll know where you have the flexibility to make changes or reduce expenses when needed. It also provides you with immediate information on how much money you can afford to finance a planned large purchase. By checking the amount in your monthly savings account you’ll have a starting dollar amount that tells what you can comfortably afford for financing your large purchases before you consider what to cut back on other expenses. If you are not willing to make certain sacrifices in your life today for a better financial and secure future, then you will not have to travel on the many bumpy roads through life. What is a sacrifice - an act of giving up something of value for the sake of something else regarded as more important or worthy now, for the ability to have something else at a later date. In order to better understand the meaning of sacrifice, we need to understand the difference between needs and ‘wants’. Definition: A need is – verb - require (something) because it is essential or very important, circumstances in which something is necessary. A need is – a noun - that requires some course of action; necessity – is "the basic human need for food". Examples are food, shelter, clothing, perhaps a car. Then there’s the wants - verb - have a desire to possess or do (something); wish for. Want is – noun - a lack or deficiency of something Examples: steak, vacation house and designer clothes, and a luxury car. In the example of ‘eating out’ your desire to purchase more expensive foods outside of your home that you are fully capable of preparing for yourself at home is a want. If you changed your ‘eating out’ behavior the huge positive financial benefits would be the reduction of those expenses associated with that behavior and therefore the savings of a large amount of money. The fact is you must eat food to survive, is a need. If, you didn’t perform the function of eating you will suffer devastating medical issues, starvation, and maybe even death. If you’re not a cook, consider taking a few basic cooking classes. It may require a small investment in purchasing a set of cookware, knives, cooking utensils, and spices. So, make it your goal to learn to prepare the foods you enjoy. Put a list together of the ten-twelve of your favorite dishes with sides, vegetables, and desserts you typically order when eating out. This way you’ll have a variety of foods you’ll learn to prepare that you eat regularly, it will be just like eating out. This list of choices will allow you to prepare two–three different meals per week. Please, prepare enough so you will have a few leftovers during the week. You also can use other available resources such as online Learn How to Cook courses, online cooking guides, recipes, and online cooking videos, etc. This would allow you to learn to cook and enjoy your favorite meals with the added benefit of saving tremendous amounts of money. You may find the ‘art of culinary science’ actually enjoyable and a lot of fun. If you typically order cocktails when you are out you would need to make sure you have your favorite spirits, mixes, and wines available at home as well. There are online resources, as well, that allow you to learn the ‘art of mixology’ which can be a priceless skill to have. There are countless ways to reduce the cost of some of your favorite expensive consumer habits. Let’s look at whether you want to buy a highly rated 65-inch, 4K HD Smart TV with at least four HDMI inputs priced at a minimum of $900. Let’s make a point here you don’t need a 65-inch TV, you only want it. However, there is a way to purchase this TV if you are willing to make sacrifices. Many of you may be ‘sticker shocked’ at the price of a $900 TV. However, when you look at what you are spending on cable TV services, an average of $165 per month that you pay every month without complaining. The cost of cable and Internet services can be $1,980 per year just to have service but, how much time do you really spend watching cable television? The Internet service portion of the cable bill may be about $60 per month, leaving $105 per month for cable TV services. If you were able to make a sacrifice to give up the extended cable TV services and substitute basic cable TV with Internet and use one of those ‘Streaming Sticks’ for free streaming services and add a few pay Streaming Plus services at the cost of $5 to $15 per month. You might end up with a net savings of about $60 plus per month or $720 a year, ($60 x 12). In as little as 18 months, you would have saved $1,080 which would be more than enough to purchase the 65-inch TV and a Blue Ray DVD player. The DVD player would allow you to rent movies and enjoy them in the comfort of a home theater system which may cost an additional $250. After ‘only’ one and half years of sacrificing without cable TV services, this example shows how it can be a hidden resource for financing some of the ’finer’ things in your life. If you are patient, you could stretch your dollars even further by waiting until ‘Black Friday’ to make your purchases, when almost every electronic entertainment device goes on sale for up 30% off MSRP. Another overlooked way to increase your savings is to have a life-long plan to manage your body weight, by trying to stay within 10% of your current weight, whether up or down. Once you reach your considered ideal weight, this should be the target weight you want to maintain. Yes, this is going to take you a lot of discipline and food-management skills. If you accomplish this along with a conscience effort to purchase more classic or conservative style clothes, you can wear them for years to come. We’re talking about dresses, women’s suits, sports jackets, two-piece suits, sweaters, slacks, dress coats, etc. For you men consider purchasing conservative suits, slacks, sports jackets, dress shirts, and topcoats, etc., take good care of them and they will serve you well. The fact these styles remain fashionable ‘forever’, therefore you can reduce you need to purchase new clothing by a minimum of $1,200 a year. These funds can go directly into your savings accounts. In five years, these will accumulate to over $6,000, over ten years $12,000, and thirty years over $18,000. These are just a source of additional potential savings available to you over your lifetime. Just think of all the clothes you have in your closets that you can no longer wear simply because they don’t fit. Why are you keeping them forever? Is it because you want to return to that size, and you haven’t had the discipline to maintain your ideal size? This book will teach you that when you plan, commit, have the discipline and hard work you can achieve anything you attempt. Many of these clothing items in your closet that you can no longer wear may still have their original sale tags on them. Perhaps you don’t want to get rid of the items because you have hopes of one day being able to wear these items again or do you feel that parting with these items would be a huge waste of money? The takeaway from this chapter is that with planning, budgeting, sacrificing, and ‘living within your means’ you have the ability to have the things you need. You can also end up with adequate savings to get some of the things you may ‘want’ without going into huge debt to acquire them. The keys to managing your finances effectively require you to have financial knowledge, patience, sacrifice, and the ability to be flexible to adjust your monthly expenses to increase your purchasing power. These are characteristics that will help you make the best decisions to pay all your monthly expenses with your income, reduce your debt, possibly save some money, and maintain a very good to excellent credit score.