Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Trade DVDs to Save Money

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Why buy anything if you can trade for it?  DVDs aren’t an exception.  I’ve been using a service called Swap-a-DVD to trade DVDs for a while now.  It’s actually a sister site of the site I use to trade books, paperbackswap.  (If I really wanted to, the credits are exchangeable between the two sites.)

The premise is pretty simple.  You list the DVDs that you’re willing to trade away, and create a wish list of the DVDs that you would like to see.  Other users request the ones you want to trade off, you ship them to the user, and then receive a credit for the DVD once it’s marked as received.  Once you have credits, you can then order DVDs for yourself, either off of your wish list when they become available, or by finding DVDs that are already available.  Watch that one a few times, then list it to trade away, and you can cycle through them that way.

The only cost is the shipping to send the DVD off for credit.  Usually, it figures out to be about $2.50 a DVD.  Less than you can rent the DVD for from most places.  Most older titles are really easy to come by, with most of the new releases having some pretty long wait lists, but if you’re willing to wait to see the newer movies, you just add them to the wish list, and you’re added to the queue.  As soon as you reach the top of the queue, the next one added is yours!

We’ve used it pretty extensively to get movies for the kids.  Ones we either can’t find to purchase or rent, or ones we’d like to hold onto for a while so the kids can watch them repeatedly as they usually do.  (We’ve seen Cars about 400 times…  I wish I was kidding. It was the only movie our son would watch for close to two years)  The downside, for us, is that the kids can be somewhat rough on DVDs and they get pretty scratched and we’ve had quite a few of them that were untradeable, if not unusable entirely, by the time they got tired of the movie.

But, if you’ve got slightly older kids that are a little easier on DVDs, it could work out really well.  And it works out really well for the movies that us adults like to watch too.

What other ways do you save on watching movies?

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So, Your Child Wants to Be an Olympic Athlete

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Years ago, I worked with a woman I’ll call Janet who had sat down to watch the Olympics with her then 6 year old daughter.  Her daughter was glued to the television watching the women gymnasts, and when the Olympics were over, she declared she, too, wanted to be an Olympic gymnast.  Like any good mother, Janet enrolled her daughter in gymnastics, not expecting much but a way for her daughter to pass the time and learn a new skill.

When I knew Janet six years after that, her daughter was taking gymnastic classes several hours a day, in the early morning and after school, and Janet, who had been a homemaker, took on two part-time jobs to help support her child’s dream.

img credit: eviltomthai on Flickr

Every two years when the Olympics come around, children watch and decide that they, too, want to be Olympic athletes.  As you watch the Olympics, here are a few things to keep in mind if your child decides to start a new sport.

  1. Start slowly.  There is no need to run out and sign your child up with the best coach.  Start at the local level, which will be much cheaper.  Maybe your local community center offers classes.  Start your child there.   If she does end up loving her newfound sport, then consider moving her to more rigorous courses at a location specializing in her sport.
  2. Keep her well rounded.  Don’t let your child focus solely on one sport too early in her life.  Olympic medal winner Michael Phelps began swimming at age 7 as a way to deal with his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.  He was involved in many other sports until age 11 when his coach told him he had the potential to qualify for the next Olympic games.
  3. Don’t take on more than your family finances can handle.  While every parent wants to help their children pursue their dreams, don’t take on more than your family can handle.  If you focus on one child’s Olympic dreams, your time with your other children can suffer.  Also, keep in mind that very few athletes who train to be Olympians actually make it to the games, and even fewer win medals.  I often think of Janet and her family’s sacrifice and wonder about the pressure it must have put on her daughter to perform and excel.
  4. Make sure the dream is your child’s, not yours.  Television is permeated with parents who are pushing their children and trying to live vicariously through them.  Dance Moms and Toddlers & Tiaras come to mind.  Make sure that you are not one of those parents.  Your child should have the right to quit if she wants to as well as to pursue her dream, if it is her dream.

Many children love watching the Olympics, and often it sparks an interest in many young children to start a sport.  Encourage his need to explore extracurricular activities, but don’t feel the need to have him train several hours a day and begin to dream he is the next Michael Phelps.

Breaking Your Money Superstitions

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Did you know that when you were born, the only things you were afraid of were loud noises and falling?  It’s true.  Anything else is a learned fear.  Now, it may be true that you can learn a fear at a young enough age that you won’t actually remember where the fear originates, but it’s still a learned fear.

Stop and think about that for a minute.  What are some of your fears?  Each and every one of them is a learned fear.  And if something is learned, it can be unlearned.  Or, at least corrected with proper learned knowledge.  Take today for instance.  It’s Friday the 13th.  Well known as the day of bad luck.  Walking under a ladder today, or breaking a mirror today is double bad luck.  Isn’t it?  Well, it’s something like that, I’m sure.

Superstitions and fear have done their fair share of damage throughout the years.  The first good example that comes to mind would be the Salem witch trials.  All those innocent women burned at the stake.  It’s especially heinous when, after watching The Wizard of Oz, everyone knows that you pour water on a witch if you want to get rid of them.  Less mess too.

Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear by Robinsoncaruso, on Flickr

Seriously, though.  Your superstitions about money, and fears about money are learned.  Somewhere along the way, you decided that the superstition or fear was a valid one to have.  Money superstitions are just as much hocus pocus as crazy Quaker witches.  Today, Friday the 13th of July, 2012, take a few moments to really think about the superstitions and fears that you apply to your money.  Then, do something small that goes against those fears.

Have a fear of losing it all?  Take a handful of change down to the river or lake and toss it in.  It’s not everything.  Just some random bits of metal in a circular shape.  Not only can you make more, but you’ll likely get along just fine without it.

What are your money fears and money superstitions?  Share them below, and let’s all compare and see how common some of them are?

And remember, there are babies all around the world being born today that have none of them, until we teach them to them.