Beating Broke

Is Personal Finance Really Important?

November 19, 2010 By Shane Ede 2 Comments

In case you haven’t noticed, this site is all about personal finance. Well, mostly. We certainly talk a lot about personal finance. But, is personal finance really all that important?

How much time do you devote to your personal finances? To your budget? To coupon clipping? In the end, does any of it make a difference? Or are we merely just going through the motions because of some larger issue? Ever since my Junior year in high school when my english class went through a whole section on propaganda, I’ve (rightly so) questioned anything and everything. We don’t deal with propaganda on the level of that they did in war times, but we still deal with it on a regular basis. And at it’s root is the necessity by those companies who are spreading the propaganda to further the consumerism society that we’ve become.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading a lot of books on the subject of breaking free of what you are, and becoming what you should be. Books like “No More Mondays” and especially “Early Retirement Extreme” have brought me to take an even closer look at the consumerist lives that we live. Jacob (the author of Early Retirement Extreme) lives on somewhere around $10,000 a year. A Year! Could you even make it 3 months on that? I know that I would have an incredibly tough time even trying to come close to living on 10k a year. It would take some very radical changes for me, but I might try working towards that by reducing my consumerist habits.

And, when you reduce your consumerist habits, a funny thing will likely happen. Your expenses will go down. And you’ll be able to “live” on less and less. And another thing that will happen, is that personal finance will become less important. We worry about the most frugal way to do this or that, or the proper way to save for retirement or buy a house or pay off debt, or even the best way to negotiate a better deal on your next car when what we really should be worrying about is why we are living the lives we are. How many of you are working jobs you don’t want to because you have all this debt from your house and your car or from all the fun “stuff” you bought on credit? I know my hand is raised. How LIBERATING would it be to walk out of your office today and not look back. And not have to worry that someone was going to come and take your house away.

Do me a favor. Take 15 minutes and watch this movie that Adam included in his post on focusing on what truly matters.

*direct link to youtube video if my embed doesn’t work for some reason: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cakm2nIQWo

Now, tell me. Could you stop and not keep going if you had to? Or are you so tied to your “career” and “job” that you have to “keep going”? Take the steps today to free yourself of the consumerist lifestyles that we live. Free yourself from the eternal “going” that we experience every day. You likely won’t accomplish it in a day, or even a month or year, but if you take a little step every day, you can get there. I’m taking that journey, step by step, and it’s difficult. It’s difficult to give up some things that we don’t really think about. But, if we want to be able to stop whenever we want to, we need to be able to do that.

Saving Money by Cooking at Home

November 17, 2010 By Shane Ede 4 Comments

On the long list of things that you can do while saving money, one thing that invariably makes it’s way to the top 10 is to brown bag lunches and to cook at home. If you’ve ever sat down and figured out how much you spend eating out each month (we have, it’s in the budget), you know that food, and dining out in particular, can be a real drain on the budget.

One thing that really holds many people back from cooking at home and even from taking bag lunches to work is that they never really learned how to cook. Either their parents never brought them into the kitchen to help, or their parents just never cooked at home either. Either way, many of the simple skills that those who do cook take for granted are a complete mystery to others. Some of those skills are being replaced with machines and such that can do the task, but those are usually expensive and if you’re trying to save money, aren’t really an option.

But, it’s not an excuse! You can learn those skills rather easily. Need to know how to boil an egg? Search for “boil an egg” on the internet. Anyone who can read, can make their own food. With the internet at our fingers, you can easily search for recipes. Stuffing? How about Pineapple Stuffing. Chicken? Here’s a whole list of chicken breast recipes! Here’s instructions on how to make beef jerky! Most have pretty detailed instructions. And, besides, what’s the worst that could happen? You ruin some food? I’d bet you could try at least once or twice more and still not equal what the same meal would cost at a restaurant!

The bottom line is this. Not knowing something isn’t an excuse. Some things will take time to learn, but you can learn many of these basic skills, with repeated practice, in less than a month. Challenge yourself! Take a month off of eating out. Only eat in for those 30 days. And, no, I don’t mean delivery. Or Digiornos. Start with raw ingredients and go from there, using a recipe. After a while, you get to know how certain things taste and how they go together and you can even forget the recipe.

Photo Credit: thatedeguy, on Flickr

Early Retirement Extreme

November 15, 2010 By Shane Ede 13 Comments

Early Retirement Extreme

By: Jacob Lund Fisker

When many of us think of retirement, we think of some far off time in our future when we’ve saved enough money and reached an age where the government will allow us to withdraw our money without significant penalties. When Jacob Lund Fisker thinks about retirement, he’s thinking about the here and now. You see, Jacob retired when he was 33. How? By following the principles that he outlines in the book.

What this book has done for me is to turn much of what I thought about personal finance on it’s head. At this point, I can’t say whether I will attempt to try and join the ERE army or not, but I can guarantee you that I will be looking at things from a different point of view from here on out.

The book itself is dense. Dense in that it’s packed full of information. There’s no way that one read through will be enough. You’ve either got to read it several times, or supplement that first reading with plenty of reading of Jacob’s blog. It reads (the book, not the blog) much like a textbook does. It’s even segmented into sections the way a textbook would be. Luckily, it’s not all facts and figures and there’s a bit of discernible humanity in there as well. Jacob lays out how he managed to retire at 33 by some extreme saving. Then he goes into how he lives off of less than $10,000 a year that he draws from his investments and a few odd jobs (that he enjoys) during the year.

By no means is the Early Retirement Extreme going to be for everyone. It’s a hard read. But, it is well worth the read. It’s the “thinking man”s personal finance book. It’s not chock full of anecdotal evidence, but raw hard facts and numbers. It will change the way you think about personal finance, and life in general.

You can buy it directly from the Printer or from Amazon(click the picture)