11 Eleven.docx

Eleven Most hard-working people don’t have the knowledge or discretionary income to purchase stocks or make other financial investments. Let’s face it; they just don’t have the additional income for savings and investments for their futures. They are too busy trying to manage their limited income an...

Eleven Most hard-working people don’t have the knowledge or discretionary income to purchase stocks or make other financial investments. Let’s face it; they just don’t have the additional income for savings and investments for their futures. They are too busy trying to manage their limited income and paying their monthly expenses to survive today. Their primary focus is to make ends meet and how they are going to pay for many upcoming needed expenses like rising prices, appliance purchase replacements, auto repairs, and emergencies. Right now, they feel there are zero opportunities for them to save and create future financial security and wealth. The Stock Market is the furthest thing from their minds. In fact, the way you currently make investments to generate additional income is by investing your labor trying to get more overtime work hours. They might find a second job and/or a side hustle, such as an interior painter, seamstress, handyman, landscaper, barber, or beautician, etc. They are willing to do just about anything legal that will help generate additional income to help make ends meet. Therefore, they’re spending much of their free time off from their primary job working part-time jobs. This seldom allows them to have any time for relaxation or spending quality time with family and friends. Their need to work several jobs eliminates them having any chance for a good work-life balance to reduce stress. We’re going to talk about investing in a ‘stock market’ where you are guaranteed to receive huge returns on your investments (ROI). These investments won’t cost you any additional money, there is only an upside and there is no risk of losing any of your money, you receive a positive ROI 100% of the time. You’re going to use the funds you will be saving from implementing the suggested solutions to invest in your purchases at the local supermarkets. You will be your own stock trader, wheeling and dealing on the floors of the supermarkets where you shop. Using supermarkets as an investment tool allows you to generate an ROI or additional income, increasing your purchasing power and stretching your income. You can also use this easy-to-earn additional money for a plethora of things such as a child’s birthday party, an emergency plumbing need, vehicle maintenance or repairs, buy a freezer, washer, dryer, and savings. The list is endless of what you can do with these funds, use them to get a washer and dryer, so you don’t have to spend four hours every weekend at the laundromat. That’s a good investment. Here's where your patience and flexibility come into play. It is a well-known fact to you that almost every item in the supermarket goes on sale eventually. It’s a very predictable cycle where many items tend to go on sale on a regular rotating cycle, about every four to six weeks. This gives you the opportunity to plan when to purchase all items you need only when they are on sale. Here's how it works, whether you realize it or not many people use supermarkets as the ‘Poor Man’s Stock Market’. It is a place you are comfortable going to, pretty much know the ins and outs and the lay of the land of your local supermarkets. Let’s think of the supermarket as a place where you can go and increase the purchasing power of your money without taking any risks. All you need is to be patient, flexible, and willing to use your mind and math to find the opportunities that are always available to smart shoppers. The best part of the ‘Supermarket Stock Market’ is you can never lose any of your money on a bad investment. Correction, the only way you lose money in the ‘Supermarket Stock Market’ is by not being aware or too lazy to take advantage of the plethora of many saving opportunities that are available to you to save these large amounts of money. You have to go to the supermarket, so you are there, the money is there, the saving opportunities are there, and all you have to do is plan to pick them up and collect your portion of these ‘jackpots’ available to you. It’s money just waiting for you to ‘pick it up’ and we aren’t talking about small change. Most of you are too ‘proud’ to bend down to pick up a penny, nickel, or dime, or maybe even a quarter. Hopefully, you are not one of those folks! However, you probably will stop to pick up a quarter and definitely dollar bills. You must think of this in these terms of that for every nickel, dime, quarter, or dollar I can save on the reduced-price items I purchase, this is like my opportunity to pick up those ‘coins’. These ‘coins’ sales prices are yours for the taking, just bend down and pick them up. You would be pleasantly surprised as to how quickly the dollars add up. If you are not willing to pick up your portion of this windfall, then you will always lose in the ‘Supermarket Stock Market’ to increase the spending power of your money. It’s an extremely unique opportunity to make investments that requires absolutely no money at all, making you a savings winner every time. One strategy you may want to consider implementing is to develop weekly menus for the next two weeks. You would select your one or two favorite supermarket circulars that are usually delivered to your home in the mail to shop. If the items on your menus aren’t on sale this week, you should have the flexibility to change your menu choices based on the items on sale items in the current circulars. This will allow you to purchase and prepare your daily meals for the week at the best possible prices available for the groceries you need. The simple fact that you need to be flexible enough to change your menu to the sale items in the circular is the key to maximizing your Return On Investment (ROI). It’s one week or only 21 meals out of the 84,000 meals you will eat in your lifetime, get over it. You will realize that the advertised sales prices with coupons can represent an average of 25% to 40% off the regular retail prices. You can easily become a coupon clipper; you can also use the supermarkets’ coupons & digital Apps and other available coupon Apps to increase your savings. Many supermarkets will double all manufacturers’ coupons up to a $0.99 face value. So, for example, if you have $7.50 worth of coupons for this week’s shopping trip your coupon savings will be a total of $15. When using an average savings of 25% on sale items, plus a 10% savings in coupons for a total of 35% or $35 off your $100 weekly grocery bill. This will represent your ROI, for this week’s grocery shopping experience. If you continue this process for a year and remain flexible in changing your menus to correspond with the circulars’ sales, you have the potential to realize a savings of $1,768 per year on $5,200 worth of groceries purchases or a 34% ROI. If your grocery bill is $200 per week your annual savings could be $3,536 You can take this $1,768 to $3,536 which is your return on investment to purchase a freezer to generate double or triple the savings. Many of you may be thinking all this is way too much work and “ain’t nobody got time for that!” So, you so easily forget, if this type of investment allows you to save enough money to purchase a washer and dryer, that alone will save you four hours a week going to the laundromat. Not to mention all the extra money you would have spent at the laundromat. The four hours per week times 52 weeks per year is 4 x 52 equals 208 hours per year, if you are paid $20 per hour that equals $4,160 worth of your time. Perhaps these 208 hours is time you could work overtime at time and a half or $30 per hour, 30 x 208 equals $6,240 extra for having a washer and dryer at home. All these solutions are just suggestions as to ways you might consider doing some things in your life a little differently to collect the money that already has your name on it, it’s just waiting for you to figure out how to collect it. I’ll show you later in this chapter how to parlay a freezer investment purchase into a windfall of savings. You can also put the money into a retirement or savings account or pay down your debt. When paying off your debt, always pay down the debt with the highest interest rate APR credit card or loan accounts first. One spin on coupons is to view them like they are ‘free’ money. If you printed your own money you would go to jail. But it’s perfectly legal to use these coupons as free money to reduce your grocery bills. For instance, remember you learned to prepare your twelve favorite meals in your cooking classes. You may choose to have spaghetti and meatballs on Wednesdays, fish with rice on Fridays, and chicken with potatoes on Sundays, etc. You can now rotate a different selection of meals for the following week. For those of you who don’t mind eating leftovers, you should prepare enough food to have leftovers for another day. You should also purchase enough additional food products with coupons on sale to keep your pantry stocked until those items go on sale again maximizing your ROI. This way you always get the items on sale. While at the supermarket, if the items you intend to purchase are on sale and the store is out of stock on those items then, request ‘Rain Checks’ from the customer service center. This will ensure that you are able to purchase those items at a later date for the sale prices. This can be another great tool for reducing your future shopping expenses. Just beware that these Rain Checks usually come with an expiration date you need to use them by. It’s like buying items ‘commodities futures’ at a lower price today, knowing you’ll be using them at a future date when they are not on sale and the price for them is higher saving that difference. If you are not a coupon clipper then you are not maximizing your savings, but you also have the option to purchase the store brand items. They are typically priced about 30% less than name-brand items. These are just a few strategies anyone can use to increase their purchasing power and increase overall savings on supermarket expenses. Let’s get one thing straight, it’s important to understand that nothing is ‘free’ in life. Everything you purchase from orange juice, milk, eggs, and ice cream has a cost per ounce or cost per unit. This can provide you with a better picture and guide for evaluating the true cost of an item. For example, if you prefer the brand name salad dressing that is $3.99 for a 16-ounce bottle, that will cost $0.249 per ounce. Does it really taste that much better than the same flavor and size of the store-brand salad dressing for $1.99 per bottle, $2 less, or a cost of only $0.125 per ounce? Other ways to boost your savings are to be flexible with the brands you purchase for just about everything. Many shoppers like to stick with the product brands they see the most in TV commercials. If you’re open-minded enough to realize all manufacturers’ products, even the store label brand all have similar quality and taste, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the ‘supermarkets’ at all. Please don’t focus on just one manufacturer’s product, purchase what’s on sale, the least expensive. The store brand can be 30% up to 50% less expensive than the name brand items, which immediately creates savings putting money right back into your pockets. Next time you are in the supermarket take a moment to check the prices on a few store brand products versus the name brand product. You can start with salad dressing, condensed evaporated milk, orange juice, and dry cereals. Plus, the supermarket chains’ executive management teams also love it when you save with store brand products because it increases their gross revenues and gross profits as well. Everyone wins when you purchase their store brand products. View this as another huge opportunity to make executive decisions as the VP of finance for your home business. Let’s assume you regularly purchase a specific brand name of the following six condiments like salad dressing, ketchup, mustard, cooking oil, mayonnaise, and barbeque sauce. Assuming you are purchasing all the listed products and the less expensive brands cost $0.50 less than the items you wanted to purchase, you can save $3 buying these brands six items. Now, if you apply this same principle to your next group of six items such as peanut butter, jelly, soups, pasta, spaghetti sauce, and grated cheese, here’s another $3 you could save. Now, you saved $6 on twelve items purchased. If you duplicate this again such as iced tea, orange juice, butter, sliced cheese, cream cheese, and yogurt. Yet another $3 saved for a total of $9, so far, and so on. Then there are those snack items like peanuts, pretzels, potato chips, popcorn, corn chips, and cheese snacks for another $3, which make $12 in savings. Then choose the last set of six for another $3 savings. That makes it five sets of six products for a total of $15 saved on this shopping trip alone. Most consumers buy these groups of items twice a month, which equates to a saving of $15 twice for a total of $30 per month. You know what’s coming next, how much would these value purchase savings add up to in a year? That’s $30 per month times 12 months equaling $360 in annual savings. Over five years that would be $1,800 and over ten years your savings would be about $3,600 and over thirty years your savings would be over $10,800. If each product’s savings are more than $0.50, perhaps $1.00, that would double your annual savings. How many other items could you have purchased to save money on, a bunch? These savings are generated simply because you are flexible enough to purchase items that are of the best value, regardless of the brand’s name. Remember to stock the newly purchased food items in the back of your cabinets to make sure rotate and you use the oldest products first. To help better understand why the quality and taste will be acceptable to you, how many of you actually know the brands of the foods you are served when you eat out? Or when you eat at a friend’s or relative’s house? This confirms that it really doesn’t matter what the product brands are, the qualities are consistent with most people’s tastes, and it really comes down to how the foods are prepared and seasoned. Therefore, you should always shop by price versus brand-name products. Many people believe that brown eggs are nutritionally better for them than white eggs and will pay at least 15% more for them. Research states that brown eggs are laid by brown hens and have the exact same nutritional values as white eggs. This is the justification for doing your research, to make sure there is a valid reason for price differences so you can make educated purchases. These are just more ‘Food for Thought’ ways to save while collecting all the money that’s hiding from you in plain sight. Just another thing to think about and to consider! If your plan are creative your options to maximize your saving are endless. Here's a way to maximize your dollars when buying produce, particularly celery. Today’s price of celery is outrageous at $1.79 to $2.29 per stalk. Most people never use the entire stalk of celery, and they end up throwing a good amount away when it becomes soft and flaccid. Before purchasing celery, you may want to plan to prepare several meals to use the entire stalk within 10 days. For instance, you might plan to make tuna, chicken or egg salad and potato salad with the outer bright green stalks, and you can just eat it sliced into small sticks. Lastly, you can make a chicken or vegetable soup inside lighter green stalks. When you make soup, it allows you to use the entire stalk without any waste. This way you get your money’s worth when you purchase celery, and nothing goes to waste. Here’s another strategy you may find beneficial if you own a home or have ample room in your apartment; you may want to plan the purchase of a freezer. An investment in a 14 cubic-foot upright or chest freezer would cost you around $500; a larger unit could cost $800. An upright freezer model requires less floor space than a freezer chest model and may have easier product access. As a reference, a 14 cubic foot freezer is about the size of half a double-door side-by-side refrigerator-freezer or about the size of a large top freezer and bottom refrigerator. It should be ample space for your frozen food needs. Remember that $1,160 was saved by the individual or the $2,320 saved by the couple who are no longer eating out back in Chapter 6? Here’s an excellent use or investment option for some of those funds or any others money you have been able to save. Now you have an ample amount of freezer space to start stocking up on those frozen food sales items that need to be kept frozen. If you are a consumer who eats bacon, ground beef, shrimp, crab legs, turkey, chicken, fish, pizzas, frozen vegetables, frozen treats, ice cream novelties, juices, or anything else you would usually purchase that you can stock up on in your freezer. If you are a vegetarian there are options that will allow you to stock up on these foods as well. All food items eventually go on sale for 30% to 40% off regular prices and with coupons you may be getting these items for 40% to 50% off. Owning a freezer will allow you to really maximize your savings by purchasing as many of these frozen items as you have freezer room for, at these incredibly low prices. You will be able to enjoy all your favorite frozen foods at the best prices until they go on sale again. A good investment strategy is to always buy everything for the least amount. Please get paper and a pencil to follow the series of calculations. Owning a freezer requires some basic management skills. Just remember to write a date on and rotate the items in the freezer to ensure you use the oldest items first. This eliminates the possibility of food wastage from food left in the freezer for too long, subjected to what is known as ‘freezer burned’. That would make it necessary to throw the ‘freezer burned’ foods away and a waste of money. It’s called FIFO, an accounting method term that means, the First In, is the First Out. Now let’s do the math, if you read your bank checking account statements you will notice you received a 0.04% APY (Annual Percentage Yield) or about $0.01 per month interest on your balances. That’s a whopping $0.12 per year. So, using the money you have in the bank and investing in a freezer allows you to buy the freezer and foods at the supermarket to now purchase additional frozen foods. These frozen products are averaging 40% off regular prices. At an average food cost of $5 per item, with 40% off you save $2 per item. Therefore, you end up paying only $3 for the product. At an average food cost of $10 per item with 40% off you save $4 per item and end up paying only $6 for the product. Let’s keep the math simple if your freezer holds at least 100 items, fifty items are at a $2 savings and fifty items are at a $4 savings. The fifty items at a $2 savings have a total of $100 in savings and the fifty items at a $4 savings have a total of $200 in savings. Therefore, the freezer fill up with 100 items would represent a total saving of $300 to you, correct? It cost $450 to fill the freezer with food. If you could repeat or duplicate these same savings at least three times a year, that would generate a total savings of $900 for you. You were able to purchase the freezer with the money you saved, which was $1,160 a month, when you stopped eating all meals outside the house. You made the freezer purchase with an investment of only $800 from your bank account, paying you only $0.12 a year in interest. In addition, you are able to invest all the food to fill the freezer. Let’s assume you spent $800 for the freezer and spent $400 (instead of $450 for easier math) for the food to fill it up, that’s a total investment of $1,200. From the previous calculations, the savings from the purchase of sale-priced frozen foods for three cycles are $900 per year. After two years your savings are $1,800, if you subtract the cost for the freezer at $800, your net saving over the first two years would be $1,000. Now the freezer has been paid for from the food purchased on sale savings, so you can return the $800 you took out of the bank to buy the freezer back into the bank. Being able to repeat the annual savings of $900 for the next 20 years equals a possible total savings of $18,000. Plus, the $1,000 savings for the first two years equals $19,000 in savings over 22 years. That’s a whopping ROI, return on investment, of $19,000 just on the foods you normally would consume on a regular basis. Taking this example to the extreme, if you eventually have a family these savings could be doubled or tripled these numbers to $38,000 to $57,000 respectively over 22 years on your frozen food savings alone. This is another win-win situation for you, without requiring any use of your out-of-pocket money! Just for your information, (FYI), the interest you would have earned on that $1,200 you invested in the freezer and food if it left in the bank was $0.12 per year or in 22 years will total $2.64 in interest. Over a 30-year period, your choice to invest in a freezer’s return on investment would be about $27,000 ($900 x 30) versus the $3.60 ($0.12 x 30) in the interest your bank would have paid you. Which would you rather have as a return on your money? Your choice to invest in a freezer and food on sale worked out to an ROI of $27,000 versus the mere $3.60 in the interest the bank would have paid you for the use of your money over the same 30 years. That is a whopping 7,500 more by investing. This shows how you can easily win by dabbling in the ‘Supermarket Stock Market’. The takeaway here is to put your money to work for your every chance you get even as you sleep. If you do nothing you will earn nothing, missing out on many opportunities to grow your money without any use of your out-of-pocket dollars. You had originally taken the $800 out of the bank saved by not eating out to invest in the freezer. Now that you have earned about $27,000 over time you have been able to gradually put quite a bit of money back into your bank in higher interest-bearing financial instruments. The bank now benefits from all your additional bank deposits because you had the foresight to use your local supermarkets as an investment tool, a.k.a. ‘The Poor Man’s Stock Market’. You shouldn’t have any credit card balances that are not paid in full every month. There are other means for you to save on your monthly food, health, and beauty expenses to save money. You could consider joining one of those Warehouse Membership Clubs where bulk-size items seem to be the norm. If you have a family, buying in bulk quantities can be more beneficial and these clubs can offer huge savings. The prices can be as much as 30% less than the supermarket and some take manufacturers’ coupons and offer savings on many other consumer products and services through their vendor partner relationships. This offers you an excellent opportunity to fill up that new freezer with quality products at very aggressive prices. Many sell gasoline with fuel prices that can be up to 10% less than most gas stations. They also have awesome prices on vehicle-installed tires with road hazard warranties, lifetime tire rotation, and balancing. Even a single person can benefit from having a membership with savings on; electronics, gas, toiletries, etc., and through the use of their vendor partners’ services such as travel, vehicle purchases, and home improvement services. There are many items you can cut back once you have the knowledge of how they are costing you. They are the daily, weekly, and monthly use of disposable products such as paper towels, paper plates, cups, utensils and plastic storage bags. This is an everyday household item most people use that makes it very easy to lose track of how many you are actually indiscriminately using. There are some of you out there who have no problem using one to three rolls of paper towels a month without a second thought. Let’s just talk about paper towels for now. Many of you will use paper towels for any and everything that appears to be a mess. You use them wiping up minor to large spills, drying dishes, drying your hands, napkins, and everything else. Also, they are used to clean the microwave oven, refrigerator, stove, countertops surfaces, and windows. Folks have no problem rolling off four to six sheets around their hand to wipe up larger spills and may need to repeat this over again. Then other folks only use paper towels to absorb food’s oil and pat moisture from foods, keeping their cost to a minimum. The average cost of a quality roll of paper towel can be about $3.48 for 74 sheets or a four-roll pack of 64 sheets per roll for about $11.68. If you do the math the cost is about $0.047 per sheet for a single roll and $0.045 per sheet for the four-pack. Here’s the truth, every time you discard a paper towel, it’s like throwing away five cents. If you buy 12 roll packs, it may cost you about $0.03 a sheet. Or, if every time you needed to use two paper towels someone was there selling a sheet of paper towel for $0.05 each, you probably wouldn’t want to spend the dime or $0.10 for two of them. If you don’t have any problem buying paper towels for five cents per sheet whenever you need them, then keep on doing what you are doing. Otherwise, what’s the difference if buy paper towels by the roll or by the sheets, they still cost you about a nickel for each sheet. It may help if you envision the paper towel as a roll of nickel, you’re throwing away. Those of you using three rolls of paper towels a week, you folks are using close to $12 a week in paper towels, that’s about $48 per month or over $576 per year (52 times $48). Imagine if you had a household of four other people indiscriminately using and throwing away paper towels at nickels a pop. Even without the additional people in your home, if you have a pet, your paper towel usage is probably quite high. It could make these usage numbers three to four times higher, about $1,200 to $1,500 a year. This daily habit of excessive convenience use of paper towels has only been in effect for the past 50 years, before that people used reusable washable dish towels. Why not consider investing in or purchasing two dozen cloth and dish towels at a cost of about $40 - $50? That would be enough dish towels to use three daily and wash and dry weekly with your regular laundry. This type of investment will probably cut down your paper towel usage by 75% - 80%. This would reduce your paper towel cost by a minimum of $435 per year. Over five years your saving could be as much as $2,175, over ten years your saving could be $4,350. Even at half these savings your saving would be huge. It’s just another great opportunity for long-term additional savings with just a very small behavior modification which puts real money back into ‘your’ pockets for savings. To make this behavior adjustment easier, you could play a game called ‘how long can I make a roll of paper towels last’? Yes, you would need to jot down on a calendar the date opened the roll of paper towels and keep track of how long they actually lasted. Each time you open a new roll of paper towels try to beat your previous record. You will be surprised how long you can make a roll of paper towels last if you have dish towels to use. All those hundreds of nickels you’re throwing away annually will go right back into your pockets. FYI, for those of you who like a challenge, my record of a roll of paper towels last over six months. Are you game? How long can you make a roll of paper towel last? Make a fun game out of it, challenge your family members and friends to do the same. The winner get a free roll of paper towels or whatever the group decides as a prize. Paper towels are convenient, quick, and easy to grab, and yes, unknown to most folks, they are very costly to use. As long as you know exactly how much money you’re spending on them and have no problem with the amount of money you’re throwing away, go for it and continue doing what you are doing. It’s your money to do as you, please. These examples and exercises are given just to make you aware of the many missed chances you have to cut back and save money. How many other items are you wastefully using in a similar manner which may easily lose track of what they are costing you monthly, or annually? These are just some of those things you can control in your life. The question always is, do you have the self-discipline to choose to do what’s necessary to take control of them? There are other ways you may be wasting food and money. In a previous chapter, there was a brief touch on the unit cost of items by fluid and weight ounces. Just keep in mind everything you purchase has a dollar value associated with it. Now it’s time to look at food serving sizes and food wastage. When you serve a helping of plate food are you overfilling the plate? Are the other people in your household eating all the food they take or are served? If not, the amount of food you throw away or discard is like throwing away money. “Waste not, want not”. Article: The Shocking Amount Of Food U.S. Households Waste Every Year - A new study from Penn State revealed that U.S. households waste about a third of the food they purchased every year. The results were similar to previous studies that showed Americans wasted an estimated 30% to 40% of their food. Forbes L. Bandoim Many times, our eyes are bigger than our appetites and stomachs. A wise man once said, “take all the food you want, however, you must eat all the food you take”. This is an extremely important invaluable statement that should be expressed and abided by you and everyone in your household. If you want others to do something different, then you need to lead by example. It encourages them to be more thoughtful when selecting how much food they put on their plates. Using this example here are the facts, the cost of a home dinner for a family of four is $25. If one person eats 100% of their food, one person eats 80% and two people eat only 75% of their food, the total of all the food eaten is only about 82%. Therefore, you will end up discarding about 18% of the food at a cost of $4.50. If this occurs only once a week for a year, it will represent $234 of wasted food. Over five and ten years it’s $1,170 and $2,340 respectively. How does this minimal wastage compare to the wastage in your household? Is your wastage doubled or tripled of these numbers? You have never given it much thought, have you? How can you stop the waste, the loss of your money and savings? If you feel the above example is too much like micromanagement, then don’t do it. As long as you know what the potential loss of money and savings that are associated with your food waste behavior amounts to and you are okay with the dollar amounts, keep doing it. No worries if this suggestion doesn’t work for you, there are plenty of other recommendations and examples which are suggested throughout the book for you to better manage your limited finances. They are just ‘Food for Thought’, not Waste’ ideas to keep more of your money in your pockets. FYI, in larger city markets there are several new European supermarkets offering great food values at discounted prices, another opportunity to save money. You should use coupons at drug stores and all stores that except them to maximize your savings. It’s free month that goes direct into your pocket. Another savings strategy would be to consider purchasing most of your clothing which doesn’t require dry cleaning, a little touching up with the warm iron never hurt anyone. There are many people who spend $40 - $70 per month on dry cleaning alone. That’s the equivalent of spending between $500 - $840 per year on dry cleaning. There is no shame in doing a little ironing now and then. This could be another venue for savings. Remember, that $800 will buy the freezer! There are always opportunities to save for everyone if we were to revisit our personal care expenses, such as clothing, hair, and beard styling, coloring, fingernails, pedicures, and massage services. Then there are those women who once they have gotten their nails done, become so concerned with breaking, ruining their nails, or bending them back that they create a whole slew of additional expenses. These new expenses occur because they become reluctant to prepare meals, do dishes, and do most general house cleaning. They also create additional unnecessary expenses by eating out more often and hiring a maid service to clean. These self-pampering, house cleaning services, and eating out more can often cost over $500 per month with tips, at an annual cost of well over $6,000. This is enough money to purchase a nice vehicle, vacation, or establish a large savings fund. Perhaps you could cut back on this expense and invest in a good pair of silicone gloves under $50 that will allow you to still do your own cooking and cleaning. These are additional personal maintenance costs that should be included in the cost of their nail monthly expenses. It’s important to know what these personal pampering services are truly costing you monthly. Some extravagant hairstyles can cost in excess of $300, which is a vehicle payment. If you’re okay with these expenditures and it doesn’t prohibit you from meeting your monthly overhead expenses, then go for it. It's your choice how you spend the money you have after paying overhead bills. As always, these exercises are to inform you of their cost. Never begrudge yourself something you can afford if that’s what you want, just understand what it’s costing you and is there a better need and use for this money. These should be expenses you incur after all your overhead expenses are handled and you have accumulated adequate savings. Otherwise, you are spending what money you should be saving for those rainy days ahead or when things and money get a little tight such as in times of inflation. To achieve financial security, you must make the best financial choices with the money you have and control every financial opportunity to save money. Could you make as much money with a part-time job, with good financial investments and better money management choices? Remember, this money has already been taxed so it’s ‘tax-free’? I didn’t think so. You won’t get many chances to save a large portion of your income, so take advantage of them when you can. Many purchases can be negotiated for a better price, you should get into the ‘mindset’ that everything is negotiable. You should get into the habit when making large purchases of asking, “are there any other discounts available that I’m not aware of? Or what is the best price of this item when it is on sale? I can wait a few months until it is on sale again or continue my shopping at other stores.” The retailer now may be willing to offer you any and all additional discounts now to keep you from purchasing from someone else. This way you won’t have to continue shopping at other stores or wait several months for the items to go on sale. All that money you are able to save from investing in your ‘Local Supermarket Stock Market’ will come in very handy during those times when the prices for everything seem to be going up. Whether it’s due to war across the world, a computer chip shortage, delays in the shipping supply chain, natural disasters, the price of food and gasoline, or inflation, you’ll be in a much better financial position to handle it. It won’t cause you the same amount of stress and hardships that it would for those who didn’t use their ‘Supermarket as their Local Stock Market’ as a platform to increase their purchasing power and build bridges to future financial security.