Go to the Movies Instead?

The stock market can be really fun. Of course, I've also heard that Vegas can be really fun. The New York Times' Bucks Blog suggests that you should go see a movie instead - it's fun with a much lower probability of ruining your life:

http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/investing-is-not-entertainment/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Buying Store Brand, Love It

Buying store-brand when the price is right is one good way to free up money in your grocery budget. And you may be surprised how high the quality can be. Check out
Store-Brand Foods That Save You Money Without Sacrificing Taste

What Does It Mean to Be Self-Reliant?

This blog focuses most on managing your money wisely, but there is a lot more to being self-reliant than just spending less than you earn.

My friend Molly writes a great summary of self-reliance in the latest post to her blog Naturally Molly.

Read it.

Grocery Buying Thought # 4: Use the Step-Down Method

In the spirit of being overwhelmed...

Looking back over my posts about grocery buying, I realize some of it sounds a little extreme. Budgeting should not stress you out. If you hate cooking, it probably isn't worth it to make everything from scratch.

So, what can you do?


Use the step-down method! (See my original post about it. I love this.) You don't have to go from buying all the finest groceries to all the cheapest. You just have to take a few steps down, and keep doing it until you are within budget.

What do you really care about?

Prioritize. If you love gourmet butter, buy it. But that might mean you need to buy store-brand on a few other items. Keep the things you really want, and step down on the things that don't make as much difference. You'll hardly notice (but your budget will).

Improve your plan. Have to have deluxe frozen pizza? You could decide to buy only when it's half price. Or you could start buying it half as often. That counts as stepping down too.

See, we really don't have to do everything. Life is good.

Rebooting the Job Hunt

If you've been looking for a job for more than a month or two, check out this article in the New York Times:

Getting Back in Shape for the Job Chase

Adapting Slowly

One thing that I discovered the last time I was unemployed for a significant time (which was thankfully quite a while ago) was that I spent more money while unemployed then I had before! Looking back on it, it still doesn't make much sense to me.
Here's on article on Yahoo Finance that reminded me of that:

Life on Severance: Comfort, Then Crisis

This article details the experiences of various people who lost very well-paying jobs, but did not immediately adjust their standard of living to compensate. Losing a job should require serious "stepping down" in each area of your expenses.

There were a number of other points I noticed in the article:

1. One women was sending out ten resumes a day through Monster.com. Another fellow figured he'd sent out 3000 copies total. Though it is a useful website, it's possible to send out a lot of resumes with poor results. Without networking and a good resume, you can easily send out hundreds of ignored resumes.
2. If you've saved enough before losing a job, it can actually be a great time to work on your education, giving you a chance to get a better job than the one you lost.
3. Identify and track your expenses, so that you know what to cut to make the biggest difference.
4. Try not to worry about what neighbors or family will think when you are cutting back. Trying to "keep up with the Joneses" is foolish enough when you actually have a job.
   

Organizing the Job Search

Periodically, I take a few days off from my job to put some extra time into the part-time degree I'm working on. Sometimes though, those days aren't very productive - it usually depends on whether or not I have a plan of exactly what I want to accomplish, and how I'm going to do it. Otherwise, I just stare at the pages of equations blankly for a while before finding something else to do. It reminds me of the last couple of times I was unemployed or underemployed for a significant amount of time.

The first time, I didn't really have a job-finding plan, nor did I have any other concrete plans for the other things I wanted to accomplish in life (this was around my first year of college). I ended up getting very little done for a few months, besides burning through my savings.

The second time, I did a bit better. I scheduled a bit of time each day to study, and put together a good list of job opportunities and sought them actively. I actually found two jobs, both of which were really flexible around my school schedule, and I haven't been unemployed since. I realize now that a big part of why I've done well since is that I effectively used those couple of months where I was underemployed to make myself more employable.

A concrete schedule can definitely make time looking for a job more effective. There's a recent article about this in the New York Times: How to Turn Downtime Into Job Offers. The article focuses on smart planning of and scheduling of the various job search activities. Based on my experience, I think it's also important to schedule a couple of hours a day for concrete skills improvement, but overall it's definitely a useful article.