Save Money

Dumb Ways to Spend Money on Your Kids

We love our kids. We love them above all. We spend our hard-earned money on them so they get equal opportunity like other kids do. But we don’t have spend our bling bling money over them, like there’s no tomorrow.

Some of us may disagree with me. “Yeah, why not. If we love them, we should give everything they want. If they want expensive toys, let them have it. We spend on our kids anyway, not on our next door kids.”

What if our spending habit takes its toll on our financial stability? 

Spending on expensive, branded items is against my policy. I, as a dad of two kids, didn’t argue that we should give them all especially toys. But so far, I manage to divert from buying expensive toys from Toy R’ S.

Well, not all toys. Sometimes, I feel a sympathy over them when they make cute little frown lips and watery-eye-is-about-to-spill tears.

 It’s a battle I should say. If I lose, I buy item expensive thing at branded outlets like Mickey or Toy R us. If I win, we travel 20 kilometers from our home to shopping second hand toys at Amcorp Mall.

As our kids grow older, they may get influenced by yummy advertising shown all over the internet, TV, or radio. They started to choose brand over quality. So they can show off to their group of friends. And we, parent — as always — go for the cheap ones.

But when two interests collide with each other. There will be one side that’s always lose. In order, to save our money from getting drained, and to teach them how to separate them from becoming brand/fashion victim, we must find solution.

Teach them how to choose. The notion of “going for alternative, cheaper brand” must always in their mind.

GoBankingRate suggested that:

How to say ‘no’: For young kids, a fun way to demonstrate that cheaper brands and name brands are often similar is a blind taste test. Ask kids to identify which is the brand name and which is the generic. Even if they’re correct in identifying the products, they’ll notice how similar they are.

There’s another way how to teach them: To be a role model to them. We should not buy our item base on fashion, but base on quality. I know it’s hard to let go of an LV handbag and buy Bonia handbag instead. But for our children sake. We should do that.

5 Dumb Ways to Spend Money on Your Kids [Bankrate via GoBankingRates]

photo by: Digital Sextant

Dad’s Power And How He Can Beat The Price Of A Chicken

Photo: The Star

1. First of all, the price of a chicken isn’t going to decrease at all. In fact, . The Star Newspaper reported that May inflation rate is up to 1.7% compared to last year. This is a bad news for dad, especially a young dad like me, who struggles with limited money against his kids expense, loans, utilities, and all. Another percent of inflation is another headache to bear. The good news is, the inflation rate over the last five years is in consistent move but we don’t how long it will last.

We should be worried because average salary increase has shown the downward trend from 94 – 2007. There’s no way we can beat the economy with the salary. What we can do is, we can beat them with our expenses and demands. When both of them — especially our demands — are decreasing in the market. The market will go down its price.

2. Understand the basic micro economy. Micro economy is a study of how to we manage our unlimited want with limited resources. Also, micro economy studies demands and supplies curves in a market. You see, if there’s a demand in a market, there will be a supply. If the demand is increasing, the line will be shifting, forcing the price to go upward along the line of supply. There’s a video to make you understand.

Same as if happened the demand becomes decreasing, the price will follow downward, produce the surplus in the market. Let’s take an example of selling price of chicken. Hypothetically, 1 kilogram of a chicken is RM6.50. If no one demand a chicken in a certain period of time, the seller will surely lower the price as they afraid their chickens will be rotted. Surplus.

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Save a little in a day, Save a lot in a year

I sit on my sofa in my living hall, thinking back; what else can I do cut down my expenses. If I cut down too much, I’m afraid that I’m not living in a standard that can benefit myself and my family. After I realized the coins rattling around in your pocket can add up to big savings over time, I write all the activities which occur money. When I cut down a little things of what not necessary, I may save a little in a month, developing into a snowflake and gradually save big in a year, or two.

  • Cut down ASTRO. How many hours did your family spend time in front of TV? Make your time to analyze back whether is it worth to watch HBO or buy DVD, watch football at home or Kedai Mamak, let your kids watch Playhouse Disney Channel or buy a copy kids educational DVD from a store. I spend the most of my time reading novels, browsing stuffs on internet, and writing blog. Cutting Astro is no big deal for me.
  • Bald is the new style. Since I don’t know what to do with my hair as it doesn’t fit in any hairstyle trends, I cut it short. Really short that you can see my head skin from 200 meters. I bought automatic machine and cut my hair by myself (with a little help from my wife).
  • Turn the lights off or change the lamp. A lot of people argues that at least one lamp remains active during the nights to scare away a house burglar. Fair enough, I found out that regular fluorescent light consumes 50 wattage. While CFL only uses 14 wattage where the output is as good as regular fluorescent light. So I changed the lamps, from regular to CFL one. That might save electricity a bit.
  • Accelerates and Brake slowly. Pushing the pedal slowly and wait the momentum to build up patiently might cut down the petrol consumption when driving. If your car has an extra feature such as cruise mode, you should use it as to get better fuel-efficient benefit from constant speed
  • Avoid stuck in a heavy traffic might saves you a lot. RM50 worth of petrol can advance my car from Kuala Lumpur to Gua Musang. But if I’m stuck in a traffic doing back and forth to work and home, the petrol consumption jumps, and I can only get 250 km for RM50 petrol.
  • Only buy things when on sale. Here is my wife’s favorite point. I always tell her to buy things when they are on sale only. If she has a patience to wait until the end of the year, she would enjoy further price cut because that is when ‘the sales war’ begins.
  • Change to wireless broadband. Try to analyze the usage of internet your houselhold. If you are the only person who actively using internet for browsing purpose, you should commit your loyalty to wireless broandband because they are far more cheaper than bloodsucking TMnet Streamyx. But if you are a download junkie and watch youtube all the time, like me, you shall not leave the Streamyx.
  • Read online instead of newspaper. Some people says that reading newspaper is a bad and unproductive activities. For reading newspaper is a waste of money. Why pursue newspaper at the stand or Kedai Runcit since we have free and online newspaper. It’s about time we change.

There are lot of things around your room and your environment that can contribute to your determination of saving money. I rethink and rethink all activities that can be cut down its expense to help me to save one sen everyday. List down the activities that occur money help me to draw the first step of saving money.

Subsidies Removed, And How You Should React

Sooner or later, the government will eventually remove the subsidies that we have enjoyed for all these years. For the next several years or several decades, we have to face our own battle of surviving without much helps from them.

I was so full of rage when I heard the report presented by Idris Jala, that Malaysia will be a BANKRUPT COUNTRY in 2019, if the government didn’t take prudent actions about the expenses leaking such as subsidies.

I still believe that the government of Malaysia works in mysterious and secretive ways, which they didn’t 100% transparently announced what they are doing.

And when they mismanaged the country and have no money, they listed out all the things they have done to Rakyat. They said that they gave too much to their citizens. They blamed us, that we didn’t appreciate the subsidies.

When the debts outpaced the income by a lighting year, they looked back the deficit and reorganized the public spending.

So tell me, how they sniff the government goes bankrupt at the first place. Is it because of subsidies alone? Or is it government has spent too much on bad investments?

Thinking in macro makes you angrier with your own regulator of the country, so I proceed to look into my own household economy.
Now lets think if the government take away our subsidies (and they will), we should be prepared for the high rises in the consumer items price. Like a smack landed on your left ear, how you should react?:

  • Take charge on your money and start saving. I suggest this is the easiest way to contain your valuable money. Stay with the maximum amount that you can save from your salary. Say at least 10% if you can. As for me, I can only save RM100 per month.
  • Eat Less Food, Malaysian!!. When all the consumable items is increased, all we have to do is eat less. Tell your partner to cook not too delicious to prevent temptation of eating 2 plates of rice for dinner. Four of every 10 Malaysian are overweight. Hope that the high price will result lower our food consumption. As for me, I ask my wife to limit our food consumption.
  • Cut Your Credit Card in two pieces. Since the government introduced tax imposement on credit card, we should be aware that using credit card debt can make you go bankrupt. Stop swiping your card before you are being declared legally insolvent.
  • Lower Your Standard of Living. This is the hardest part. Even I refuse let go of my lifestyle. But this suggestion is at least not impossible to do. Changing the lifestyle can’t be done within overnight. It can eat years to cope with the new lower one.
  • Reformat Your Mind. Let’s reset our mind for not to fall for buying temptation. Avoid looking at juicy advertisement and cool fashion. Here’s how to do it.

If you feel the government play unfair game with us, you are not alone. We all felt the same. There’s no time to question back “Why BN Goverment? Why?”, just do preparation for the worst to come. This time, go put your power of vote to other party for the next Malaysia General Election.

Stopping The Money From Flowing Out Like Endless Rain

Bringing a new member into the family doubles everything, especially the space and the family expenses. We need a new larger house and the food expense is likely to go up, as well as the diapers expense. But our salary stays the same.

Inflation has slightly increased  this year. The groceries like chicken, fish, and prawn appeared to have a new higher price even though the government has put the ceiling price for each item. If then, I should expect to see a slight increase in our household expenses.

I saw the interest rate crawled up by decimal points. But I’m not in the middle of gaining anything big that I have to make a personal loan, and I’m not planning to take it just to cover our day-to-day expenses. That’s a suicide pill. All we have to do is to reduce our expenses. And here are the seven ways how to reduce my expenses for this year:

1. Cloth Diapers. Investing in cloth diapers will give a break to your expense. But you have bear the big cost initially, then you will see the return in the future. It becomes a new way to show to the people that your baby is fashionable too. More and more mothers accept the cloth diapers over disposable diapers. You can compare to how much cloth diaper and disposable diaper really cost.

2. Breastfeeding. My wife have set a new motivating goal; she wants to breastfeeding our baby until she’s 4 years old. I think it is a good idea and I encourage her intention. She started doing search for the best breastfeeding machine, shoveling the best offer in eBay, and give good opinion about it.

The breastfeeding machine, same as the cloth diapers, is expensive for the first time. But it extends as a valuable asset to you. I find an interesting article about breastfeeding milk versus animal milk.

3. Higher standard of hygiene. Keeping hygiene on a higher standard leads you to a healthier life where your family is far away from disease and infection. From washing your hands clean regularly to keeping your house clean, you can rest assured that your children are harmless from bacteria and germs. This also prevent the cost of seeing doctor every year, which we can see it rising higher than our inflation.

4. Hit the Playground or Park.I always choose shopping mall over playground. It have air-conditioner and I don’t get sweat as much as I do in the park. But the problem is once you enter through the arch of a shopping mall, your money gone in 60 seconds. Instead, I bring my children to the playground or park for playing. the temperature is naturally hotter, but I will get used to it.

5. Playing Wii with family. In 2009, Wii console costs you about RM999 in Malaysia. My main reason for buying Wii console was a gift for my wife. She wanted to do exercise to stay fit but she didn’t want to leave her babies. Going to gym only made her felt lonely and miserable. So I bought her a birthday present so that she could do the exercise inside the house.

On weekends, we rarely do our outing like we used to do. It saves us petrol and the other expense such as highway toll and parking fee, and indirectly we reduce car service expenses. Shopping expense is also reduced since we having a great time playing Wii together.

6. Cook your own food and Bring lunch to office. I’ve been bringing my lunch to office since 2007, and it practically saves you a lot of money. When I got married, my wife also doing the same as I am. On weekend, instead of going out and eat at McDonalds which we were usually did, we cook our own lunch and dinner to save money.

7. Buy your office shirt twice a year.I have counted all my expenses for clothing & accessories, and I found out that I have remarkably bought only two shirts for the last year. One was on the day of my birthday. And one was at Jusco sale. Actually I just have no temptation in buying new office wear regularly. I feel so great when I bought one shirt and used it until it faded out.

Conclusion.

Sometimes I couldn’t watch myself get sunk with the temptation. I bought things that I don’t need and I get disappointed after that. Thank god that I have my partner to remind me to keep our expenses on track. I will keep on stopping the money from flowing out like endless rain.

So people, what are your steps to save money for this year?

Photo Credit:nikepresto7

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