CK Blog

Saving money is an essential aspect of personal finance, and it’s never too early to start. As a beginner, it can be overwhelming to know where to start, but don’t worry! Here are some tips to help you get started on your saving journey.

Set a goal: The first step to saving money is to have a clear goal in mind. This can be anything from a down payment on a house to a new car or a vacation. Having a specific goal will help you stay motivated and focused on your saving efforts.
Make a budget: A budget is a plan for how you will spend your money. By creating a budget, you can identify areas where you can cut back on expenses and redirect that money towards your savings goal.
Automate your savings: One of the easiest ways to save money is to set up automatic transfers from your checking account to a savings account. This way, you can set it and forget it, and your savings will grow without you having to think about it.
Take advantage of employer matching: Many employers offer 401(k) plans or other retirement savings plans that match a certain percentage of your contributions. If your employer offers this benefit, make sure you’re taking advantage of it.
Look for discounts: Always be on the lookout for discounts and sales when making purchases. You can also use apps like Honey or Rakuten to get cash back on your online purchases.
Avoid impulse buying: Impulse buying is one of the biggest enemies of saving money. Before making a purchase, ask yourself if you really need it and if it fits into your budget.
Start small: Saving money doesn’t have to mean making big sacrifices. Start small by cutting back on small expenses, like your morning coffee or eating out less often. Every little bit counts!
Saving money is not always easy, but it is worth it in the long run. By setting a goal, creating a budget, automating your savings, taking advantage of employer matching, looking for discounts, avoiding impulse buying, and starting small, you can set yourself up for success. Keep in mind, it is a process and it takes time, but with discipline and consistency, you will reach your saving goal.

If you’re like most people, budgeting probably isn’t your favorite thing to do. But if you want to get your finances under control, it’s a necessary evil. The good news is that creating a budget doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, you can do it in just a few simple steps.

1. Determine your income. This is the easy part. Just take a look at your pay stubs or bank statements to find out how much money you bring in each month.

2. Track your spending. For a month or two, write down everything you spend money on. This will help you get a better idea of where your money goes and where you can cut back. This will seem tedious, but if you do not know where your money is going, how are you going to know how much to put in your budget categories/

3. Set up a budget. Once you know your income and spending, you can start to put together a budget. Decide how much you need to spend on essentials like housing, food, and transportation. Then, factor in other expenses like debt payments, savings, and entertainment. This can be as simple as getting a notepad and writing your expenses down in order of priority and going from there.

4. Stick to your budget. The hardest part of budgeting is actually following through with it. But if you’re determined to get your finances under control, you can do it! Track your spending and make adjustments to your budget as needed. You will probably get your numbers wrong the first few months. You might underestimate how much you really spend on food or have an unexpected expense, but you can just adjust as you need to. The important part is to keep up your tracking and be honest with yourself.

There are a lot of apps out there that can help you with budgeting, but do not over complicate it. You just need to make sure you are doing with your money what you said you were going to do.

1. Drafting smart

The first step to winning at fantasy football is drafting smart. You need to draft players who have a high chance of scoring points each week. There are many different types of players to choose from, including running backs, wide receivers, quarterbacks, tight ends, and defense. When you draft these positions, make sure they are good matchups for your team. Watch out for Bye Weeks when drafting, you do not want both your quartersbacks off the same week!

2. Playing smart

After you’ve drafted your best players, you need to play smart. Make sure you know how to use them correctly. If you don’t know what position they play, then you should probably stick with their primary position. For example, if you drafted a quarterback, he may not be able to run the ball effectively. So, you shouldn’t put him at running back unless you plan on using him as a receiver. Check who they are playing against, is weather going to be a factor?

3. Managing injuries

Injuries are inevitable in any sport. In fantasy football, you want to avoid getting injured yourself. But, sometimes you just have to deal with it. Try to get injured players off your roster until they recover. Also, try to keep track of your players’ injury history. That way, you won’t end up with a player who gets hurt every game.

4. Using your bench wisely

You should always have a backup plan for your starting lineup. If your starter gets injured, you should replace him with someone else. Don’t wait until the last minute to do this though. You should already have a backup ready before the season starts. Make sure you are checking your lineup every week, it is easy to get on autopilot until you forget to switch out a a player on a bye week.

5. Keeping score

When you start playing fantasy football, you should keep track of everything. Keep track of your wins and losses, the number of points you scored, and the amount of money you earned. You can even keep track of your weekly rankings. This will help you stay motivated throughout the season. Just remember its for fun though, do not get too obsessed!

1. Grow your own food

Growing your own food can be expensive if you are not careful but it’s well worth it if you are going to eat what you’ve grown. You’ll have fresh produce that isn’t sprayed with pesticides and you won’t be paying for fuel costs to run a garden tractor or other equipment. If you live in a city, you might even get free seeds from your local community garden.

2. Make your own soap

You don’t need much to make your own natural bar of soap. Use things like olive oil, coconut oil, castile soap, lye, and essential oils. You can use these items at home or find them online. There are many different recipes out there that will help you create your own unique product.

3. Start a compost pile

Composting not only helps keep your yard looking good and smelling great, but it also helps improve the overall health of your lawn. Composting is a simple way to turn kitchen scraps into rich fertilizer for your garden.

Quick thoughts on decluttering your life!

– Get rid of things that are taking up space in your home, but not adding value.

– Don’t keep extra items around just because they might be useful….someday.

– Be honest with yourself about what really adds value to your life.

– Start small and build from there. Your clutter did not pile up all in one day, give yourself grace.

– If something doesn’t add any real value, then let go!

I have previously touched upon my attempts at decluttering and have run into the number one fear of those against getting rid of stuff, “what if I need something that I got rid of?” In a bit of irony, it is in the midst of trying to thin the large pile of books that has caused the issue to arise. A long time ago, there was a little barcode scanner called the Cue Cat, which was going to revolutionize the marketing industry but it never took off yet the Cue Cat could be modified to work as a regular scanner. I brought one on eBay, used it a few times but did not have too much of a use for it.

The Cue Cat spent the majority of its time in the box with a variety of other miscellaneous technology items gathering dust and mostly forgotten about. Now that I am going through my books, it would be nice to use the scanner to get the UPC codes from the back of the books so I can convert them to ISBN and make a database of my books. It would allow me to have a better idea of what I have and make it easier to list items on Amazon or Half.com. I have searched all around looking for where I could have put the Cue Cat but have had no luck finding it. But the more I think about it, I seem to recall going through some boxes before I last moved and I think I probably found the Cue Cat and thought I have not really used this much and not sure I would even need it again and promptly threw it away. Now I would like to use it and at this point, it is nowhere to be found.

I could always buy another Cue Cat or other barcode scanner from eBay, or even just tough it out and manually type this ISBNs into a database. So far, I have not been excited about either idea. I have entered two boxes of books into a database so far by hand and might just keep that up doing a few of them every so often, but still it would have been nice to have that scanner. Oh well!

I happened to catch a commerical for Robert Kiyosaki’s workshop where he so nicely informs people that saving money is for “losers” complete with the L shaped on his forehead. Instead of getting into all the issues and criticisms about the Rich Dad, I wanted to mention one thing I noticed. In the fine print, it says that *Robert Kiyosaki does not participate in these events”, so you sign up expecting to learn something from him and instead get an employee (sorry, they like the term “partner” better)pushing you to sign up for other more expensive seminars. At least you’re supposed to get a free gift for staying till the end. That’s something right?

Okay seriously! I have an account with some job boards even though I know the statistics of actually finding a job on one of them. It never hurts to look at least right? I did take my info off one of the better-known sites after a well-publicized case of fraud awhile back, but kept the rest around.

Most of the time, I just get the occasional email from places like Careerbuilder with a list of new job listings, but every so often I’ll get an email from some company who “found” my resume on the site and is offering me the best job ever! I would love for just one time to get one of those emails that is not a outright scam or just a bad deal like some the “financial services” jobs. Those jobs should really be called “harass your friends and family to buy bad insurance and mutual fund products, but you won’t make a living expect if you can sucker other people into it” jobs. Guess that title would not fit on the business card though. I know some people do fine with those jobs, but have seen many people taken in with promises of large incomes and freedom, spent a bunch of money and times on classes and licensing tests and then nothing.

Right now in my email from Careerbuilder is a “great opportunity” from a company that says they sell site layouts, but poor them, they are in Russia and cannot get a merchants account here in the US. Do not worry though, if I help them out, they will pay me 10% of their earnings that they estimate will be $2,000. Wow! I just need to send them my full name, age, contact phone number and for the purpose of authentication, I should attach a copy of a passport or a driving license. How could I ever turn that down? Darn guess I accidentally deleted the message, my loss. Maybe some Nigerian prince will be able to help them out instead.

Sitting at home in your pajamas with a nice cup of coffee at your side typing away at your keyboard sounds like a pretty good living for a lot of people. There is no boss staring at you, no traffic to fight in the morning, just you and a broadband connection as a way to make a living. While this is a goal for many people, achieving that goal can be harder in reality than the theory suggests.

I came across Associated Content recently as one way of making a few extra bucks online. The basic idea is that you write an article, submit it to them and they make a payment offer to you for the rights to publish that article. If you choose to offer to them as an exclusive, there is a higher potential payment, but you also cannot republish the article anywhere else nor remove it from their site in the future. If your article gets popular, you can also make money from Performance Payments, where they pay you based on the number of views that your article gets.

How much can you make from Associated Content though? Chris Bibey shared his results from publishing articles on Associated Content and showed an average payment of $6.46 per article during a month of writing. Depending on how fast you can write a quality article, that may be worthwhile or not. If you can write 5 articles an hour like Chris, it can add up to a decent hourly wage, but if its taking you a long time to finish even one or two articles, you average wage starts making working at McDonald’s look better in comparison.

What if you wanted to make writing your full time income source though? Let us say you had a goal of making $2100 a month, which would equate to $25,200 a year. That is not a huge number by most standards in the United States, but some places that would sound good.

Therefore, $2100 goal / $6.46 per article equal 325 articles in a month. Yikes, that is a lot of writing!
Assuming 30 days in a month on average, 325 articles divided by 30 days is roughly 11 articles per day with no days off. If you wanted weekends off, such as July, you would have 24 days or 13.5 articles per day. If you wanted to work a 8 hour day, you would need to average 1.35 articles in the 30 day example or 1.7 articles per hour in the 24 day month example. Going back to Chris’s example, if you could write 5 articles an hour you could easily surpass these goals in less time than the examples.

The trouble with this idea though would be burnout. Could you really develop ideas for 325 articles that Associated Content is willing to pay for? Could you make yourself sit down and write all that material? Then the question would become what about next month? Could you do it all over again? This example would equate to around 3900 article per year, which is a lot of writing for $25,200 per year if you followed the example rates here. This example also did not take into account any taxes, which could easily take 25 to 30% of your pay since would be self-employed, so you would have to earn that much more to cover your taxes if the $25,200 were your income goal. Of course, if you were good enough to write that many articles, chances are you would have found better paying sources or alternative income methods along the way. If nothing else, you might have developed a blog instead where you can fully benefit from the advertising revenue that the traffic for your articles would generate along with other monetizing possibilities such as affiliate marketing.

Consequently, this idea might not work as a full time income source, but it could help lead you to other clients in the future. It could also serve as a nice way of making a few extra bucks to add to your income. If you wrote for 1 hour, a week even or 20 articles a month, which could be an extra $130 in your pocket. I did sign up for Associated Content to check them out and will give it a shot to see what happens. I’ll be the first to admit that seeing the latest income reportfrom Chris made me a little wishful for that type of success that he has reached, but I know it is a matter of doing the hard work and marketing that can eventually lead to those types of numbers.

Sometimes with technology, things can get wrapped in the details and jargon of pixels, resolutions, device drivers, etc. It can be easy to forget the “why” part of technology, why is it important that we are building something, who are we building it for?

Take Youtube for instance, you can talk all day about streaming vs. downloading, resolution size and quality impact, copyright issues until you turn blue in the face. But when I sat down and showed my Dad how to use it the other day and then he spent the rest of the afternoon finding old performances of singers long set aside by today’s audience. The whole getting to relive memories of yesterday and getting to see his reactions meant more than worrying if 320×240 is good enough or whatever technical issue that could be debated.