Be Smart With Your Money And Change Your Life
Want to spend money without worrying about your savings? How about earning without spending instead of spending without saving?
Watching your money grow is basically more important than watching it squander off the palm of your hands. Nowadays, various channels provide useful tips on how to save money but people are wary on how to implement it. The first stage of saving up is usually the hardest part of the implementation process. Adjustments are necessary but make it a challenge and a commitment as you start. Planning ahead of time, starting up from a small amount, and setting up a specific goal could help you attain your main purpose. Whether you are saving up for the future or to pay off a debt, this is the best deal to shove off your financial issues.
Try considering these smart ways of saving money, they might may be helpful!
Smart Spending: Save more than you spend
Credit card usages must be limited or restrained. It is important to know that the more money you earn will be more beneficial to you. Create a bank account where you can save up and earn bonus perks, interests and credit scores. Instead of paying monthly fees for your cards, you can enjoy the bonus points some bank companies offer. Avoid spending more than what you earn and avoid accumulating more debts.
- Learn about the automatic deposit and set up a direct deposit plan or you can make a budget for your manual monthly deposit if you can’t access an automatic deposit plan.
- Check for bonus perks from your cards and learn the best deals on cutting your costs.
- Try avoiding insurance or loans but if this is unlikely, try to cover up the down payment more than as it’s required.
Smart Planning: Create a monthly budget
Make a monthly record of your expenses and budget it out from how much you compensate. Keeping a good track of what you buy and pay your money with is an effective tool to manage your monthly expenditures. That way, you can monitor the flow of your budget and allocations. The records may also allow you to restrict over-spending and may limit your monthly costs.
- Create a data and organize by categories according to your monthly expenses such as groceries, bills, mortgage, etc.
- Also record other expenses that are beyond your control including car maintenance, home repairs, and so on.
Smart Reasoning: Take advantage of free money
Free money may mean anything but more importantly, gift cash or offers and coupons. In replacement of spending your own money, gift cards can be more useful. Keep any discounts or incentive programs from your employer and make it to good use. You can use these incentives accordingly.
- Gift cards are good as cash which you can use to buy as actual money for appliances and groceries.
- Bonuses and incentives are offered depending on your employer and/or company. Check out what it has to offer and talk to your human resources representatives.
Smart Thinking: Make money by being smart
Purchasing unnecessary items may make you regret it later. Oftentimes, you may end up selling those items when you are broke or in dire need of money. In order to avoid this dilemma, you can stop collecting unwanted products and start selling your stuff.
- Determine what you are good at and hone your skills. You can sell your products on various online selling sites.
- Instead of buying expensive items for gifts or decorations, you can actually do it yourself.
Smart Saving: Set saving goals
Start setting up your saving goals whether it’s for a long-time or a short-time goal. This will make you start thinking about your priorities as you begin deciding on how to maintain the goals set. Short-term goals are savings that may take you shorter years to save while long-term goals may take long years.
- Short term goals include saving for emergency funds, vacation, new car, and taxes.
- Long term goals include saving for retirement, college education, and house down payment or remodeling.
With the uprising issues on various things, people are caught up making more money and spending it on paying bills. Thus the saying ‘money revolves around everything.’ The advent of advanced technologies makes it even more difficult for them to think about saving up a penny for the future. But no matter what your financial status is, saving money could possibly turn the tables around.
Smart Legal: Get a good lawyer
This is one of those things that I actually had to learn the hard way. I was driving home one night, listening to some tunes and thinking about what I was going to do when I got home and then all of a sudden, WHAM! Some jerk thought it would be a good idea to check her Instagram while she was driving her vehicle at 50mph and blew through a red light, never even slowed down and t-boned me right in the middle of an intersection.
Long story short, I spent 11 days in the hospital, 4 of them in the ICU and I had to have an emergency surgery that night to stop some internal bleeding. I had to have 2 more follow-up surgeries to put a rod in my shattered arm and fix some complications from a broken pelvis. I ended up with over $125,000 in medical bills, plus rehabilitative therapy, plus meds, plus then I was out of work for the over 4 months that it took me to recover.
I have always talked about how important it is to have an emergency fund. Nowadays I teach that you should have at least 6 month’s living expenses saved up (12 months is better) “for a rainy day”. I decided on that number due to this accident. Prior to this accident, the “rainiest day” I could imagine was needing 3 month’s living expenses saved in case I had an extended period of unemployment. I blew through that in record time because of all the added medical bills, doctor visits, therapy visits, chiropractor visits and all those awesome co-pays that I’d never anticipated.
Bottom line; I went completely broke through no fault of my own because of an accident that was caused by another person’s stupidity. I couldn’t buy food, couldn’t pay my bills and I was less than 48 hours from getting evicted out of my apartment and being homeless. The only reason the finance company didn’t repossess my car is because they couldn’t find it. A friend of mine had hidden it for me in an underground bunker that his parents have on their farm (Love you Ian!). In short, those were some dark days.
Takeaway #1: Get a good attorney
Of course I had an attorney that I had contacted while I was in the hospital. He found out that the kid who crashed into me was actually driving a car that was owned by her parents and not only was she insured on an auto policy, it turns out they had a large umbrella policy also. That was the silver lining around all the clouds. It took some digging to find out all the details and financial coverage limits, and I just can’t help but think that a lesser attorney might not have thought to check beyond the auto policy. Thank goodness mine did.
Takeaway #2: Ask for help when you need it
While I was financially destitute, I learned that there are lots and lots of people who share similar circumstances to mine. That’s when my attorney told me about a company he’d worked with in the past that gives loans on lawsuits.
And no, this isn’t a paid endorsement; it’s an enthusiastic referral from a raving fan and extremely satisfied client. (Plus I promised them if they helped me, I would talk about them on my blog. Well here you go guys; I am a woman of my word!). These guys were awesome.
It turns out that there is an entire industry called “legal funding” and all they do is give people loans on a lawsuit. They exist to help people just like me who have been injured in all different kinds of accidents and have an attorney and a lawsuit but need money immediately. It’s the coolest thing. They’re not like a bank because they don’t care about your credit score, or real estate collateral or whether you have a job or not. You don’t even need to be able to make monthly payments.
All they care about is how strong your case is, if there is sufficient insurance coverage on the person who caused the accident, the likely award amount that you’ll get when your lawsuit settles and stuff like that. And here’s the kicker; they wait to get paid back until after your lawsuit settles and if it doesn’t settle, or you lose, you get to keep the money they advanced you and you owe nothing. And no hard feelings!
These guys were the proverbial white knights galloping in and saving my day. They got me all the money I needed to get my bills caught up, my rent and car paid, groceries, co-pays, etc., and they did it all in less than 48 hours after I contacted them.
This whole episode taught me some important lessons; be insured, have a good attorney that you can call when you’re hurt or in trouble, and remember this legal funding industry. I mean, who knew that it was possible to leverage something as intangible and speculative as a future lawsuit settlement when you really need money?
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