Friday Unwinds are back! This edition is themed around unscripted TV funnies. Relax and enjoy the weekend!
TechTV “One of a Kind” Accident
This is a great clip from TechTV. One of my all-time favorites too.
Streaker
Reporter Falls
It’s not the fall, it’s the sounds she makes afterwards…
Fox reporter gets hit on
These concert goers are a classy bunch.
Roughly 45 weeks ago I decided I would contribute $30 a week to an “emergency” fund. At a measly $30/week it’s grown to $1350+ today. I barely noticed the $30 automatically deducted from my checking account every week too. The trick is not occupy yourself with checking how much is in your emergency fund all the time and it’ll grow passively and you’ve got yourself a small nest egg. It’s also extremely nice to know you have a cushion of hard cash just in case a real emergency situation occurred.
If I aggressively estimate my expenses to be $150 a week, my funds would only last me 9 weeks. My ultimate goal is to get that to at least 6 months. Although right now I’m sure if a real emergency arose where I stopped receiving income I’d aggressively cut a lot of expenses.
As an emergency fund grows, they can evolve into other uses than just being a back up funding source for emergencies.
Bank bonuses – You can use your emergency funds to earn more money by taking advantage of bonuses offered by banks. Your money stays liquid and you still have access to it.
Retirement splurge – It won’t cover your entire retirement but if you’ve reached retirement age and haven’t ever had a need to dip into your emergency fund, chances are it’s probably grown to a sizable amount. Use it for that around the world trip you’ve always wanted to go on.
Opportunity fund – One of the best parts of having cash on hand is the ability to take advantage of opportunities that may arise. Let’s say a neighbor runs into some gambling problems with his local bookie and needs to unload his Maserati at a steep discount for cash or else he loses a finger for each day he’s late. Okay, that’s a bad/rare example, but I won’t be able to tell you what opportunities may or may not arise in your life but your emergency fund allows you the insurance of being able to take advantage of it.
…and ultimately it just feels good to have an emergency fund. You also get the comfort of knowing that if you lost your job or your business the creditors won’t knocking on your door right away. Your emergency fund technically contributes to your total net worth too.
I recently stumbled across the website DealExtreme. It’s a company that sells Chinese merchandise out of Hong Kong. The really killer part is they offer free shipping on practically everything they sell.
How do they sell you a screwdriver for $0.95 shipped from Hong Kong and still make a profit? I don’t know. They do deliver on their products, but beware of the slow shipping times.
Why cheap thrills? I enjoy browsing their $2 gadgets section from time to time and buying random stuff.
My last order was for a pair of ipod earbuds for $2. I’m not expecting the highest quality sound but I’m always losing my earbuds so I’m definitely not investing in high quality ones.
This is a follow-up to my other post of how I live frugally. These are some ways which I don’t live frugally.
Lunch. I’m always extremely lazy to bring my own lunch to work so I’m always buying lunch, which gets expensive over time. Add to the fact that I don’t eat breakfast at home and end up eating two meals at work. This isn’t a bad deal in that I am actually working and getting paid so putting food in my stomach so I can be disgusting intelligent and nice to guests at the museum isn’t a bad idea.
Car maintenance. I generally get all my maintenance done at the dealership because I don’t want them to ever bitch about anything if something in my car fails while it’s still under warranty. I recently just paid about $400 + tax for a scheduled (and overdue) 2 year maintenance on my car.
As for gas I don’t buy into the BS that one brand is superior to another. Generally I go with whoever has the cheapest gas (which is usually Lukoil or Citgo near my house).
Not much else do I really “waste” money on. Bowling, movies, occasional dining out are things that I consider to be justified expenditures.
I’ve decided to detail my frugal ways after reading similar posts by Cap, Mapgirl and Jonathan.
Clothing. I can look sharp without the designer jeans. I wear what’s sensible and I generally only buy clothes when I really need them.
I don’t have to “have it first”. This applies to the latest and greatest of any hyped up product out there. You’ll never see me lining up for an iPhone, PS3, etc. etc. Luxuries like the $600 iPhone will probably never be
Entertainment on the cheap. You gotta live life, but that doesn’t always mean you have to pay a lot for all your entertainment. I bought 12 months of Netflix for $150 from on ebay. I eat out at Applebees after 10pm with the 1/2 off specials.
Why cut costs here and there? My reasoning is every dollar I save is another dollar of principal that can work for me and earn me more money. Every dollar I save is another dollar that adds to my net worth and earns more passive income to make life easier for me in the future.
Woot is a ecommerce site that has 1 deal a day. They’ve also branched out Woot! Wine and I didn’t realize there were some many similar sites that sprung up recently.
Here’s a few of the deal sites I found in alphabetical order:
1 Sale a Day
Fruper
MidnightBox
Schnoop
ThingFling
Yugster
With all these one deal a day sites, there are the sites that pop up to track the deals on all of them:
BargainJack
Deal A Day Tracker
DODTracker
ZeroDayDeals
…I still like Woot! the best though. Though I rarely visit the site as I don’t need any more useless crap.
Just working… a lot.
My hours were cut as I guess management doesn’t like the 20 hours overtime I was getting paid so there will more posts coming.
I don’t get paid much ($10.25/hour), but I like what I do and where I work. When parents give me handshakes and the kids learn a thing or two I generally feel good about myself. I’d rather be doing what I do now than some retail gig.
When it’s slow at work I actually calculate how much I make per minute. $10.25 / 60 minutes = $0.17 / minute. So if you want 5 minutes of my time, it’ll cost ya 85 cents.
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