Beating Broke

Beating Broke Rules: Bonuses

December 8, 2010 By Shane Ede 11 Comments

Beating Broke Rule: Spend your Bonuses wisely.

Every year, many of us are lucky enough to receive some sort of bonus from our employer. (If you’re self employed, that’s bonus enough. 😉 ) And when we do, the inevitable question arises. What do I do with the money? And then, how to budget for it?

The simple answer is to spend it wisely. In a more complex answer, it depends on what your goals are for your financial life. Using your bonus to buy Christmas presents may make you feel good for a month or two, but will you feel guilty afterward? You’ll feel much better, in the long run, if you spend the money wisely towards your goals.

Here’s the downside to that, though. You’ll also feel guilty if you use it all for debt repayment. Each of you will have a different situation, but here’s how we usually use our bonus here in Beating Broke.

Consider taking 10% of the bonus and blowing it. Buy some presents. Take your family out to dinner and a movie. Whatever you want. Give yourself 10% in cash and free rein to do whatever you want with it. You’ll feel better when you do.

With the remaining, take a look at your situation. Do you have a purchase that you’ve been saving up for, or putting off until you could afford it? I’m not talking about those gifts, or the television upgrade, but things that you really need. Maybe some costco eyeglasses? For example, a portion of my bonus (if I get it) will go towards buying new tires for one of our cars and paying for a repair that one of them needs. It won’t take the whole bonus, but a good portion of it. And it will be extremely relieving to not have to come up with that money out of my normal paycheck. If the bonus doesn’t come, I’ll still have to pay for those things, but it might take a little longer to pay for them.

Maybe your situation doesn’t have a purchase like that that you need to pay for. But, maybe you’ve got some debt that it could help retire. What we don’t spend on tires and repairs, will likely go towards paying off a debt. It won’t pay off any of them all by itself, but it will cut the payoff by several months. And, while that doesn’t give me the same feeling that just blowing the money on stuff does, it will leave me feeling much better for a far longer time.

The bottom line is this. Think about how you spend your bonus and spend it wisely. You’ll feel much better for it.

photo credit: jypsygen

How Bad is Your Charity?

November 24, 2010 By Shane Ede 3 Comments

Often times, when a person is picking a charity to donate to or volunteer for, they look at only a few things. What the charity does, and where it does it. If they like pets, maybe they volunteer or donate to the ASPCA. Or, if they want to keep their efforts a little closer to home, they volunteer or donate to their local Humane Society or shelter. One of the things that they very infrequently look at is how much of the money they donate is really going to the cause.

Main Street had a nice list a few days back about the charities with the highest administrative costs. Top of the list is a charity by the name of the American Tract Society. 68% of the donations that they receive go towards paying administrative costs. Or, 32% goes towards the actual charitable work that they do. To create their list, they used a tool called the Charity Navigator. They compile the actual numbers via the IRS filings and put together a sort of watch dog group for charity costs.

One of the things that I noticed is that many of the charities on Main Streets list are smaller charities, which could account for some of the costs. A smaller charity doesn’t gather the bigger donations from as wide of a base as some of the larger charities and so has a higher administrative cost percentage. Even so, the next time you decide to give to a charity, it might bear taking a look at the tool at Charity Navigator and see if that charity is a “bad” charity.

photo credit: puritani35

The Skinny On Time Management

November 22, 2010 By Shane Ede 1 Comment

The Skinny On: Time Management

By: Jim Randel

I recently did a review of The Skinny On: Credit Cards, by Jim Randel. This book came along with that one and several others. Disclosure: The publisher sent them to me for review.

As any of the other Skinny On books, this one is short and to the point. Randel wastes none of your time filling you with fluff. Instead, he breaks down several much more complex time management systems, adds a few things of his own in, and then presents it in a stick-figure laden slide show of a book. Having read most of the books that he talks about previously, most of the information was merely a review. The few things that Randel added in of his own were minor. What I really liked about this book is that it can act as a quick and easy refresher of the principles that I’ve learned elsewhere. If it were my first book on time management, I might feel a bit differently, and it might have been much more educational.

I did like it, though. And it’s probably one that I’ll keep around to reread every once in a while for that reminder factor. And since it’s nice and short, I don’t have to worry about taking a whole lot of time out of my schedule to reread any of the longer time management books that I have read, just a quick read through this one.