Online shopping “deals” sites are becoming a dime a dozen. Those that boasts the best buys, along with coupon codes, are popping up with their own websites, blogs, forums, Facebook fan pages, and even iPhone apps. You shouldn’t confuse their willingness to share savings opportunities with a genuine desire to help you save money, however. These clues can help you pick out the sites that will be easier on your budget.
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We spend time and money to keep things from happening: We get our cars maintained to reduce the risk of an accident. We install smoke detectors so that we have enough warning to leave a building in the event of a fire. We encourage all sorts of people to learn CPR and first aid so that there’s always at least rudimentary medical care available.
But we rarely talk about what happens if all those precautions don’t help. We don’t talk about worst case situations, about what happens to our family when we’re gone or how to handle the details of our estates.
And while it’s no good to dwell on the worst case scenarios, it is a topic that you do need to talk about with your family while everyone is healthy and hearty.
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Are you having a hard time reaching your financial goals? It might be because you are making one of these five very common money mistakes.
1. Forgetting to account for predictable irregular expenses when making a budget.
A lot of the “unexpected expenses” that derail our budgets aren’t really all that unexpected when you think about them. While you can use your emergency fund to cover the costs, are things like annual vehicle registration fees and HVAC tune-ups really emergencies that just happened out of the blue?
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Sometimes, spending money to save money works. It worked for my husband, who recently became an AAA member and then proceeded to enjoy discounts when booking travel – discounts that have already paid back the membership and then some.
It can work when you’re serious about couponing and are buying the Sunday paper mostly for the coupons, or when you invest in energy or water saving tools such as a low-flow shower head.
I’m sure there are other cases where you can spend money in order to ultimately save more than you had spent, but this is not one of them:
Planning your next vacation should be all about the fun of selecting itineraries, mapping out bicycling routes, or deciding which tropical drink you’ll have the waiter bring you on the beach. Unfortunately, vacations, like most plans, don’t always go as expected. Do you need to worry about stolen luggage, missed flights or illness before you even start on your trip? Here’s a breakdown of insurance options available for your next trip:
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