We’ve talked about the importance of creating a budget in articles and posts on this blog. For some of us, the act of creating a budget can be daunting. We might not be familiar enough with Excel to create formulas and make it look nice. Others may not have the energy to sit down on a weekly basis and enter numbers. Many software solutions provide easy to use budgeting features to make our life just that much simpler. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

1. Microsoft Money - The Money program from Microsoft makes budgeting a breeze. You can have the program link directly to your bank account and credit cards online. This makes it simple to update with new purchases, income, and other expenditures from your accounts. The program has a built in budget feature, where you can review reports, set a budget for certain categories of purchases, and track your success from month to month. It’s a really useful tool that has made creating a budget that much simpler for me.
   [Find Out More: http://www.microsoft.com/money/default.mspx]
2. Quicken - Another maintstay in the personal finance world, Quicken opens the door for advanced reports, updates with your credit cards and banks, and so much more. Quicken is a household name in personal finance, so many flock to this solution. It’s robust enough for small business operations and intuitive enough for personal use as well. A good solution for sure.
   [Find Out More: www.quicken.com]
3. Mvelopes - A relatively new player, but quite successful for actual budgeting. The site helps you identify areas where you overspend and gives good feedback on ways to decrease spending in those areas. It’s more budgeting software than personal finance manager, like Quicken or MS Money. It also connects to your financial institutions to keep up to date on your spending habits. Of course, this one is a web app, with a fee, but still a good product.
   [Find Out More: www.mvelopes.com]

These are all good solutions for starting a budget. Do you use budgeting software? What have been the benefits for you?

For most people, saving money seems like a chore. We can clip coupons, cut back on expenses, pack lunches, and even change our own oil. The things we do to save money make us step outside our comfort zone for a moment and really get perspective on where we are financially. Since we need to save money for a number of reasons, I’ve created a new goal oriented method based on that need — the financial number.

Now a financial number can be seen like a goal. Throughout our lives we have sought out numbers as goals. We may have wanted to obtain a 90% or better in a math class or scored a number of points in a sports game. The purpose of a financial number stays true to this. We need to find the number for each of our material goals.

Pen and paper or an Excel spreadsheet can work wonders for this. To begin, we sit down and write out any material things we might want to purchase. We may want to save for a house, car, or other financed good. We may want to save for a vacation to the Caribbean, piano lessons, or a ski trip in the Alps. Whatever our goal, we need to find the financial number that makes it possible.

To calculate your financial number, you need to consider several things.

1. How much do you spend in a month?
2. How much can you save towards your intended purchase in one month?
3. How much will you need to enact a purchase?

Some may be saving simply for a downpayment on a home, while others save for buying the whole thing. Your approach to the goal should dictate the financial number. We all have a base financial number — our monthly expenditures. We know our rent, food, gas, payments cost such and such amount. The leftover money can be saved towards any number of purchases.

Once we have the financial numbers in mind, we can alter our spending habits to reach our goals faster. With a number in mind, we have a set goal, a finish line, to gauge our saving success.

When it comes to saving money for our future, we often times think we can do it tomorrow, next month, or next year. The future seems far away, right? It was just yesterday that we graduated college — we don’t need to save for retirement now. We need to buy a house, start a family, purchase a car, and enjoy life, right? At times, saving money for the future can seem more like the chores we had to do as a child, not painful if we did it, but just not appealing from afar. As we’ve mentioned before, saving is more a matter of perspective. Let’s take a look at one powerful way to save money for ourselves and our family’s future.

The five dollar out of a hundred rule might possibly be the answer. It’s important to note this method of saving should be used in conjunction, not instead of, a 401K or other employer operated retirement fund. Basically, for every 100 dollars you earn, you automatically save 5 dollars. The point is you’re saving 5% of your income for your future. When you couple the saving with a nice return on interest, you’ll have a decent nest egg for the golden years. Still not convinced?

Consider this: if you were to make $40,000 a year, then you would be a saving $2,000 using the five out of a hundred rule. In two year’s time you would have more than $4,000 with compounded interest. In 10 years, you would surpass the $20,000 mark. After 35 years, you would have closer to half a million in savings simply due to compounded interest on your ever-increasing fund.

This saving technique definitely challenges many people to think differently about the money they earn. To ramp up the challenge, consider finding ways to save money on every hundred dollars you spend. You can save money using coupons, redeeming rebates, and being conservative with your cash.

As we make our way through life, it’s easy to forget money may not always be there. We have to care for our future self and also have a true and honest perspective on money. When we save, we change our perspective and ultimately our lifestyle. It’s a win-win.

Many families wait until August to buy school supplies for their children. The ads come through in newspapers, commercials start showing up on TV, and ultimately we’re all reminded that the new school year has arrived. This year may be different than years past. The cost of imported goods has gone up month after month this year. Of course, the added cost on shoes manufactured abroad gets passed on to the consumer, as does increases in other articles of clothing and accessories parents buy for their children.

According to a Bloomberg.com article, the cost of imported goods rose more than 17% over the same month last year and 2.3% increase from the previous month this year.

Compared with a year earlier, prices of imported goods jumped 17.8 percent, the largest year-over-year increase since records on the index began in September 1982. That followed a 16.3 percent year-over-year gain in the prior month. Excluding all fuels, prices rose 6.1 percent for the year ended in May. [Source: Bloomberg.com]

So excluding fuel prices, the cost rose 6.1 percent from a year earlier. This means the clothes that cost $150.00 last year will run closer to $160.00 dollars this year. You can however save money on these items by finding the best deals through circulated flyers, newspapers, and online shopping. But the increase for certain items has yet to hit.

For instance, shoes may begin to see at least a 3-5% increase over the next few months. Many manufacturers have not transferred the cost to consumers yet, but they will be soon. We may also see an increase in belts, purses, and other leather goods over the next few months.  It may be the perfect time to buy the kids their school clothes and supplies.

There’s very little we can do to combat inflation. We can however be mindful of current trends and find ways to save money now. We can use our financial wit and saving prowess to combat this flustering economy.

Comment Questions

How do you save money on clothes?
Do you purchase goods ahead of time to save money?
Do you have tips on how to save money on school supplies?

Since our first Gas Card Giveaway Contest was such a success, we decided to host another contest that will run through July. If you blog about the contest, we would like you to link to a blog post or article on our site in addition to a link to the contest entry. All existing email subscribers will be eligible to win, so don’t unsubscribe. For those just signing up to our feed, only verified emails count, so be sure to verify your email after you sign up. Good luck to everyone!

Contest Rules:

The rules are simple. Each visitor has two ways of entering the contest.

1. 2 Entry Tickets: Link from your blog or website to any page on the Save Money.com site, return to this post, and leave a comment with a link to your entry. We have articles you can link to or you can use any post from our blog.
2. 1 Entry Ticket: Subscribe to the Save Money Blog’s RSS feed via email. The signup box on the right column makes this process very simple. Only verified emails count - so be sure to respond to the initial email.

Each person can gain up to 3 entry tickets!

On August 1st we will tabulate the contest entries, assign a number to each one, and visit the random.org number generator to select the winner. The winner will be mailed a gas card for $25 or given an equal amount via Paypal. Anyone in the world can win, just follow our easy steps to enter today!

The holidays usually find us toiling around a grill firing up some scrumptious Independence Day burgers and dogs. Since this year’s Fourth of July falls on a Friday, many will be taking the opportunity to travel. With gas prices the way they are, road travel can become expensive. We’ve put together a quick list of ways to save money on your fourth of July road.

1. Pack a lunch for the family in a cooler and utilize a rest stop to have a nice picnic.
2. Use the cooler to pack drinks for the road.
3. Research your destination, whether its a theme park or a national park, many sites will have destination coupons.
4. Map your route before leaving via Google Maps. There’s no better way to save gas than finding the most direct route to your destination.
5. Many theme parks will let you get your hand stamped so you can visit your car. Use the same cooler to stock another lunch, so you won’t have to pay for over-priced food and drinks in the park.

A roadtrip on the Fourth of July weekend can be exciting and memorable. If you have young children, they’ll likely remember this trip for the rest of their life. To keep them occupied in the car, try thinking up inexpensive games to play in-route. Some of our fondest memories come during the trip. It can truly be a bonding family experience. We don’t have to buy our children video games or new DVDs to make the trip bearable. We can encourage them to look for unique things in traffic, landmarks, and other fun games. The site, Road Trip Planning, offers some unique, and inexpensive, road trip games to play with your children.

If you’re planning to travel this Fourth, be safe and let us know how you saved money on your trip. Happy Independence Day, everyone!

The time has come and gone for our June $25 Gas Card Giveaway. Thanks to everyone who subscribed and blogged about the Save Money.com site.

There were a total of 133 entries. We gave each person one line in an excel document, in the order they came to us. To obtain the winner we went to Random.org and ran the random integer generator on a set between 1 and 133. The lucky winner?

35 - The winner has an email in the following pattern:

j_ _ybr_ _ _le@a_ _.com

An email has been sent, so check your inbox!

To all of you who didn’t win, you can enter our July Gas Card Giveaway Contest! Every email subscriber automatically receives an entry, so don’t unsubscribe. We’ll explain the details for the new contest in a post real soon.

Again, thanks to all who entered and we hope you liked the opportunity to save money on gas!

A recent article found through Yahoo, entitled Five Strategies for Surviving Tough Times, details a no-nonsense approach to getting finances under control. Why can’t we buy with money we don’t have? The money we spend, and don’t have, makes someone else rich off our interest. Why not save until we can afford whatever it is we need? At what point do we turn away from credit card debt and stake out our own future paved upon our savings?

The article describes the current credit perception as such:

In our credit crazy world, amassing debt no longer carries a social stigma. Everybody has a car payment, a house payment and credit card payments. Well, remember what your mother said about everybody jumping off of a bridge? Just because everybody is doing it, doesn’t make it a good idea. Buying something you can’t afford now, especially when the economy is unsettled, can double the pain of paying later. For example, if you purchase a $450,000 home today and the market goes into a slump and devalues your home by $200,000, you will be paying the bank twice what the home has come to be worth. Just because it was easy to get the credit to buy that home, doesn’t mean it was the right time for you to buy in. [Source: Investopedia.com]

At some point in our culture, we took common savings know-how and replaced it with the credit card. The predatory lending processes that occur have come back to haunt both consumers and the creditors. So what can we do to stymie the flow of money out our door? The obvious answer — cut up the credit cards. This doesn’t mean we close the accounts. That could be bad for our credit score. What we want to do is pay with cash, not with an interest bearing credit card, so remove the impulse by destroying the card.

There are exceptions. Many people can save enough money to pay down credit cards in a month or two. For those, I applaud you. For the others, like me, we need to learn to use a budget and save towards goals.

Let’s face it — we live in a instant gratification society. We need the newest, latest, greatest the moment it comes on the market. However, with everything the price will drop while we save the money we need to buy the item. For instance, a car loses 15 - 20% of its value each year. So if you must have the newest Ford Mustang Convertible and you paid $28,000 for it brand new, then the same car would be worth $23,800 if it lost 15% of its value and $22,200 if it lost 20%. You can actually buy a car a year or two old and save that amount of money too!

Traditionally houses tend to appreciate in value. The housing market in most of the US have cooled. So would now be a good time to buy? It depends. You might find a great deal from someone looking to get out from underneath a mortgage, or you might wait and find the prices have dropped even further in another year.

So the right move on big purchases might be to wait a while or to save enough to make a great downpayment. When we steer clear of credit cards and huge debts, we can save more money towards what we need. It’s a challenge, and requires a new way of seeing our finances.

Comment Discussion Questions

1. How do you use credit cards? Do you put everything on them or only big purchases?
2. How many cards do you own?

A budget just sounds bad. The word itself doesn’t bring about images of marital bliss. It more than likely brings up images of dusty sandwiches pulled from brown bags and boring nights at home counting lightning bugs in the back yard. If you’re married, you may not feel this way about your budget, but your significant other may. What can you do to align your household on a single budget everyone can stomach?

Creating a budget should be a family affair. It doesn’t have to be a whiteboard session with folding chairs, but should be a sit down serious time to discuss the needs of the family, between the adults. Let’s be clear — a nine year old should play a part in the budget too, but should not hear talks about mortgage, credit card debt, and sinking stock market. We need to think about their innocence afterall.

When getting serious with a budget, it pays to outline where the money goes in your family. You can purchase an inexpensive program like Microsoft Money to document your current spending habits, estimate monthly utility expenses, and regulate when bills get paid.

Open communication about spending can help you secure a sound budget. The best budgets come from discussions that start with necessities. Find the financial number your family needs to survive on a monthly basis. This would entail, mortgage/rent, utilities, car expenses, food, and credit card minimum payments. The surplus money can then be saved in a separate savings account or put towards paying down credit cards.

The discussion that follows your monthly necessity line should involve what things you feel you need. You may have expenses related to entertainment, dining out, etc. that should be agreed upon. Once both of you agree, you need to be accountable to each other. You should not just criticize but also encourage each other during lean months. The will to stay on track with a budget often times comes from our spouse.

The budget doesn’t have to be a dirty word. It can be a simple routine for where to put your paychecks. It will also alleviate some financial stress, as you’ll have a realistic idea of when you’ll be able to pay off credit card debt, take a vacation or slap siding on the house. Give it a try, and let us know how it worked out.

Comment Questions:

• Do you use a budget?
• What things did you consider when creating your budget?

Many of you may be saying, of course open source can save you money. Others may be asking what exactly open source means. The term open source refers to the code behind software being visible. Notice how you can’t look under the hood with Microsoft Word? Open source gives anyone access to the code that propels the machine. Often times this means more people can get their hands dirty and work on improving the software solution. To us, open source software can translate to dollars saved on a software license.

The big financial hurt comes from software solutions like Microsoft Word, Excel, and the operating system itself. Forget about Macs for a moment. Let’s focus our attention on the vast Windows software market. To buy a license for Microsoft Office Professional, which includes Word, Excel, Publisher, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Access, you would have to pay roughly $375. That’s a lot of dough!

Most people would not be comfortable buying a computer without some programs that essentially do what the Microsoft Office programs do for them. What if you put your credit card back in your pocket and took the open source plunge? There’s not a lot of software solutions that can do what Microsoft Office does without a price tag. In order to really benefit from open source, your operating system would also have to be open source. We’re refering to Linux here.

Open source operating systems like Ubuntu have taken the world by storm in the last few years. The Ubuntu distribution (distro, for you Linux enthusiasts) has been the top viewed Linux distribution on www.distrowatch.com since 2005 (one year after its inception). The operating system merges the ease of use of Windows with open source expandable solutions. It also helps that the www.ubuntu.org forums have a wealth of information. It seems this Linux build has started to convert PC users over to its free platform. New Dell computers are also being sold with Ubuntu pre-installed. Wow!

You can save money with open source softare. The problem is removing ourselves from the Windows environment and moving towards a free solution. If you own Ubuntu, then you can install Open Office, which does most of the things Microsoft Office does. Open Office comes free as a download or preinstalled on select distributions.

Of course, open source solutions can have their downside too. Aside from being free, there’s largely little support for the beginner. The operating systems sometimes have problems with simple things like recording through a microphone. But open source solutions definitely have something to offer each of us in our quest to save money. Think about it the next time you’re buying a computer. And, if Apple ever releases a Linux iTunes, expect the number of Linux computers to skyrocket. We all have something holding us back.