Facebook is certainly a time suck, but it can also be a fun way to catch up with old friends and even high school acquaintances. Just yesterday, I followed a rabbit hole of people I had known in high school, which ultimately led to Kimmie’s page.
Where Beauty and Fashion Meet
I’m sure you had a Kimmie in your high school. She is pretty–perhaps beautiful. She wears stylish clothes and is one of the most popular girls in high school. Her parents have a lot of money and are happy to spend that money on their kids.
The Kimmie I went to school with married her high school sweetheart, who was a popular prep himself. Thanks to their Facebook pages, I see that they now have three equally beautiful children.
What struck me most, though, was how pretty Kimmie still is. Some popular, pretty high school girls don’t age well, but at 42, Kimmie is just as pretty, if not prettier, than she was in high school. She looks like she could be a model for a fashionable clothing line. Not just because of her face, but because of the stylish, chic way she dressed.
For a moment, a part of me was a bit envious of her put together, stylish look. But that thought quickly disappeared because I have neither the time nor the inclination to be a fashion plate like Kimmie. (Besides, there’s no way I could pull that look off as well as she does!)
How Not Being Vain Has Saved Me Thousands of Dollars
Women like Kimmie make looking beautiful easy, but I know a lot of time goes into picking just the right clothes, make up, and hair styles. I also know it can be very expensive.
Thanks to my lack of vanity and acceptance that I will never be one of the Kimmie’s of the world, I estimate I’ve saved thousands of dollars.
Here are some of the ways:
Embrace the Features I Have
I would love, love, love to have naturally straight hair, but I was born with naturally curly hair that has become curlier after each pregnancy. Rather than spending time and money straightening my hair regularly, I instead bought a bottle of hair gel to tame the curls and make them more manageable. This one bottle lasts forever!
Take Advantage of DIY
My hair began to go grey when I was 23, long before I had children. By 25, I had to have it dyed for the first time to cover up the grey. I had my hair dyed professionally for about six years. However, for the last ten years, my husband has dyed it for me at home. Every time he does so, we easily save $40 to $60.
Avoid Being a Trend Follower
I tend to rely on the same classic clothes and colors. I don’t follow trends. This allows me to wear the same clothes for years without looking particularly in or out of style at any moment. This also allows me to buy classic pieces at garage sales and second hand stores for a fraction of the retail price.
A Kimmie I will never be, nor do I want to. Instead, I rely on practicality, and doing so has saved me thousands of dollars.
How do you cut costs on personal appearance, care, and grooming? If you like to follow fashion trends, how do you keep it affordable?
Melissa is a writer and virtual assistant. She earned her Master’s from Southern Illinois University, and her Bachelor’s in English from the University of Michigan. When she’s not working, you can find her homeschooling her kids, reading a good book, or cooking. She resides in New York, where she loves the natural beauty of the area.
You’ve had your fun. You spent the holidays with your loved ones, did some frugal gift giving (right?), and probably ate way more than you should have. But, the new year is upon us, and it’s time to get back to business. It’s time for a January financial reset.
With tax season right around the corner, there’s no better time to get all your financial books from the last year in order, take a good look at the balance sheet, and decide on the directions you’re going to take your finances in the coming year. For some of you, that will mean finally getting a handle on your debt. For others, it will mean finally paying off your debt. And for more of you, it will mean finding the best ways to make your money work for you as you build your net worth and make strides towards financial independence.
For those in that last group of people, this post isn’t likely to help much, but you might want to take a peek at my Lending Club page for a great way to keep your money working for you. The rest of you, stick around.
Reformulate your debt
If you’ve still got debt hanging around, a new year financial reset is a great time to investigate reformulating it. What the heck does that mean? It means taking a good look at the debt that you’re carrying, and considering the options you may have to pay it off earlier.
Reduce the rates: The worst feature of credit card debt is the interest rate that they like to charge. 12%, 15%, 22%, or more. The interest payments eat into any payment you make on the debt quickly, and make it that much harder to make any meaningful progress. If’ you’ve got good credit, consider finding some good 0% balance transfer cards to transfer your existing balances to. You should be able to find something with a 12 to 15 month 0% rate. Be aware of the balance transfer fee when you do this, but otherwise it can be a good way to help you make some good progress on your credit card debt repayment.
Refinance: In some cases (mostly secured debt) you may want to look into a refinance of the loan. If you can reduce the rate on a loan and extend the length of it, it can free up some of your debt repayment money to go towards loans with higher rates and speed up your debt snowball.
Recalculate your debt snowball
Now is also a really good time to update all the numbers on your debt snowball plan. (or debt avalanche if you’re so inclined) Unless you’ve been keeping it updated throughout the year, the numbers are probably pretty out of date, and need to be freshened. Take the time, while you’re doing this, to determine if you need to move one debt ahead of another, or if you can afford to increase the snowball payment to speed it up.
Seed your budget
Your budget can be the lifeline for your financial life. It’s a blueprint for how you’re building your financial house. Even a simple budget can help tremendously, and the beginning of the year is a great time to give your budget a full inspection (or just to start one) and make sure that it’s got all the categories you need, that it’s still balancing, and for planning out where you’re going to focus your efforts in the new year.
Examine your bills
We all get bills throughout the month. In many cases, we throw them in a pile, then enter them into bill pay, (or, gasp, write checks) and then forget about them until they show up the next month. While you’re going through your finances from the previous year, pay attention to the bills that you’re paying. Are there bills that have increased? How about ones that you meant to cancel the service but didn’t? Or maybe there are some that you just haven’t called to try and get a better rate for? Know what time it is? You guessed it. It’s time to cancel that service. It’s time to call and see why the rate increased, and if there’s a change you can make to get a better rate. It’s time to compare your services with their competitors and see if there isn’t a better rate/service available out there. You may think it’s a waste, but you could end up saving hundreds a month. And that can quickly make your debt snowball grow!
Keep on your financial path
Here’s the most important thing you have to take away from this post. You’ve got to keep on that path. Once you’ve done the things above, you’ve taken some really solid steps on your path to being debt free, but they’ll only work if you keep working with them. Keep that budget going, keep a close eye on your bills, keep your snowball updated, and know how much debt (and at what rate) you have left. Whether your debt feels like a mountain, or just a molehill, knowing the what/when/where of it make the climb that much easier.
Will you take the time to do a January Financial Reset?
I started this blog to share what I know and what I was learning about personal finance. Along the way I’ve met and found many blogging friends. Please feel free to connect with me on the Beating Broke accounts: Twitter and Facebook.
Saving is a finite solution. You can only save so much, can only be so frugal. Your power for earning is unlimited with the right resource (you), the right tools (knowledge), and the right force (hard work). That isn’t to discount saving. Saving is an important part of the equation too. But, because of it’s limited ability, it can only be so much a part of your overall wealth and financial independence equation. Do you know what limits savings’ ability? Your earnings. You can only save so much as you earn. If you only earn $8 an hour, you can only save $8 an hour. Far less, really, because who can live on $0 an hour? Not many. So, the more you make, the more you can save.
There’s another side to that, even. The more you make, the more ability you have to make more. That’s the root of the old saying, “It takes money to make money”. While you can actually make money without having much money, the more money you have, the more opportunity you will find to earning more money.
Increasing your earnings isn’t always an easy equation to solve, though. Many people feel like they’re trapped in the job they have, the payscale they’re in, and the life path they’ve chosen. Not at all true! Your earning potential is unlimited if you combine the resources at hand and improve the ones that aren’t. You’ve already got you. Increasing you knowledge of the work you want to do is pretty easy as well. It just takes a bit of time, and some crafty searching online. Pretty much anything you want to learn about is available online. Heck, there are even entire sites dedicated to free college courses. All you need is to dedicate some time to learning whatever it is you want to learn. You can find that time by taking it from some of your TV watching time.
Follow all that learning up with some good old fashioned hard work. That’s it. Just hustle a little. Unfortunately, there isn’t any magic formula for that one. I don’t know how to motivate you to work. I don’t know the right things to say to you to make you want it. You’ve got to provide that part. If you can’t find the motivation to pull yourself away from American Idol for an hour to learn something, or work on making yourself a better earner, there’s just nothing that I can do for you. You’ve got to find that part for yourself.
But, listen. If you’re capable, like me, of getting your finances under control; of learning how to keep a budget, pay your bills on time, and learn from mistakes, there’s no reason you can’t learn how to earn more. You CAN learn how to do something you want to do. You CAN learn how to make yourself more marketable. And you CAN earn more. And, if you do, you WILL tip the scale in your direction. You’ll start to earn more. You’ll be able to save more. And you’ll find that opportunities will present themselves to you.
I started this blog to share what I know and what I was learning about personal finance. Along the way I’ve met and found many blogging friends. Please feel free to connect with me on the Beating Broke accounts: Twitter and Facebook.
