Make Your Own Greeting Cards

Valentine's Day has passed for this year and many people doled out big bucks for cards for their special someone. Paying 3 to 6 dollars for a folded piece of cardboard with some witty picture on it seems like a big waste to me. The better way to go is to make your own cards.

All you have to do is buy a pack of colorful construction paper and some glue. Now add in some scissors, markers, and creativity and you can make several years worth of cards for under 5 bucks! Typically you will give at least 2 cards to everyone close to you throughout the year and up to 4 or 5 for certain people in your life. Let's say an average card price turns out to be $5. With the number of people you know well enough to give cards to, one could easily spend anywhere from $25 to $200 on greeting cards throughout a year's time.

Not only is making your own cards a lot cheaper, it is can also be more heartfelt and personable. You can say what you really feel inside the card, make up your own witty picture or tag-line, or use an inside joke to make it really hit home. The possibilities are endless and you'll never have trouble finding a card that says "the right thing". If you're feeling really adventurous you could try to make a pop-up card for a challenge. Whatever you try to do, just make sure you use your creativity and keep your recipient in mind.

If you think you lack the creativity and can't pull off this method, then I'll tell you not to give up yet because you can do it with a little creative corner cutting. Let's say you're not up on your cutting or drawing skills and wouldn't dare try to make a picture for the card cover. Instead, you can try to craft a picture with a computer image editor or just search for some applicable image from a simple Google image search and print it out. Glue the printed picture to a construction paper card, throw on an applicable line of text, and voila! You have a card. You can also just try to think simple with your card cover. Shapes like hearts and stars are easy to cut out and can easily be put to use on a card for a special occasion. If you can't think up any good ideas, then you can cheat and look through the card aisle at the grocery store or look online. Find something you like and replicate it by hand with your own special spin. A last pathetic effort that I can't really endorse is to find free cards online and just print them out. It won't really have the same effect as a handmade card though. In fact, it will probably come across as lazy.

I would still purchase a tasteful sympathy card if needed, but for any other occasion I think that handmade cards are open season. I really do think that they end up being better cards overall since they are special made for a specific person and the effort can be seen and appreciated. The potential savings for hundreds of dollars over the course of several years doesn't hurt either.

Pay Bills Online

Everyone has their monthly bills that keep on coming. The commonly ignored extra expense to paying your bills is the postage you pay if you still mail your payment in. Stamp prices seem to be on the rise at a quicker pace than ever in the past few years and the price to send a single envelope currently stands at 44 cents. It doesn't sound like much, so many don't really consider it when thinking of expenses, but those cents can add up.

One monthly bill payment that is mailed in throughout the year at the current rate is going to run you $5.28. Now think of how many bills you have coming every month and how that can turn into 30 to 40 dollars fairly easily. These are dollars that can easily be saved by simply paying your bills online. Online payment is free for virtually all companies with an online presence so you should take advantage. You also don't have to worry about the random times when your payment gets lost in the mail (This has happened to me) or shows up late for no reason. These problems can result in large penalty fees and can hurt your credit score. Online payment is easily traceable and you will know that your payment has posted. All of my online payments will email me confirmation of payment and then email me again when the payment has posted. It's free and worry free!

There's a little benefit for planet Earth with online bill paying as well. Many companies will allow you to enroll in paperless billing. This way they don't have to mail you the billing statement and payment envelope every month. You instead will receive your monthly billing statement in your email and have to pay it online. As a result, plenty of paper can be saved. Score one for the green movement!

These savings may not sound like a lot over the course of a year, but you have to figure that every extra dollar that you save can help you. It's the type of mindset you need to really build wealth later in life.

The Best Savings Account

For any money you may be putting into a savings account, there is only one great bank for this in my mind. That bank is an online bank called SmartyPig. SmartyPig has boasted the highest savings rates for a long time now. During the peak of savings rates it was above 6 percent. These days, with the horrible economy and near zero government interest rates, there isn't too much interest out there anywhere, but SmartyPig still leads the way with 2.01 percent interest compounded quarterly. Even most CD's have trouble matching SmartyPig rates. You may find slightly higher rates advertised at a few random banks, but those rates always come with catches. They may just be introductory rates, have high minimum balance requirements, or require direct deposits and frequent debit card use. SmartyPig doesn't have any catches and only needs a minimum balance of $25 to open. There used to be a required monthly deposit, but that is now even optional. Now there is no reason not to use SmartyPig as your savings account.

The only difference between a savings account at a physical bank and one on the Internet is that you will still need a checking account at a regular bank anyway. You will need to deposit your money into the checking account and transfer it to the Internet account. Transfers take just two business days. Since this is the Internet age and it is quite easy to link the accounts together, I don't even really see this as a barrier.

There are other SmartyPig perks to go with the high interest rates as well. There are cash savings boosts with numerous retailers that can get you up to 12% back with purchases. So if you want to spend $100 at Macy's, then you can buy a gift card for $100 through SmartyPig and automatically get $12 put back into your account. If you don't want to do that you can always just put your balance on a debit card or transfer it back to your checking account. There is also a way to use your account on social networking sites. You can use pre-made widgets on Facebook, Myspace, or your own website that show your saving progress and can accept donations from friends and family. This is optional, but can add a whole new dimension to your savings potential. SmartyPig doesn't slack on the extra features either. You can find plenty of ways to view your savings data through text and graphs to see how much you have really saved over time and where every penny came from.

If you are saving money, make sure you are saving the smart way with SmartyPig.com.

A Frugal Way of Thinking

Here's is a money saving trick that I use myself, though it may start to drive you to complete frugality when you use it. It's a mental trick where you just convert the price of the item you are buying into the number of hours you worked to make that much money. The more you hate your job, the more effective this mental trick will be.

So let's say you take home $10 per hour after taxes. You are considering buying a new pair of shoes that cost $120. So that means you worked a day and a half that week just to be able to afford to buy these new shoes. You worked and slaved for 12 hours so that you could wrap your feet in some new leather. Now weigh that in your mind. You may second guess this purchase and really need to analyze whether you need these shoes. Shoes at least will last you for a long time and you may need new ones, so you might be able to rationalize this. Or maybe you'll realize that 12 hours of your time and effort is worth more than a pair of shoes and not get them at all or settle for a much cheaper pair.

Let's look at another example that many can relate to. Are you a coffee drinker who shells out $6 at their local Starbucks every morning before work? Well think of it this way. Every morning you are already in the hole for 40 minutes of your time. You will need to spend the first 40 minutes of your day working just to pay for that coffee purchase in the morning. Multiply that by all 5 days and you have spent 3 hours and 20 minutes working just to pay for your coffee habit.

Try using this thinking on your big ticket item purchases and your head will explode at the thought of buying a new vehicle. A $30,000 new car would take you 3,000 hours of work to pay for. That's 75 weeks of full-time work. That's almost 19 months of your entire salary! Of course this isn't even taking into account the interest you will pay if you took out a loan to get it. Once you look at this figure, you might wise up to the idea of buying a nice used car at a third of the price and with cash if possible.

So take into account every minute you count as it ticks by slowly on the clock at work. Remember every horrible meeting you sat through listening to people rambling on. Think of all the bull you had to listen to your boss spout out. Think of all the work you put in every day at your job. Then think, "Is this item worth that much to me?" before you buy it. Try this out and you might be surprised at the purchases you just don't find to be worth it anymore.

Buy Clothes For Less

Designer names cost more and everyone knows that. The easy thing to do is to just not buy designer clothes. If you are truly a money-saver at heart, you'll be able to do that. I'm not just talking about the super high fashion names that only the rich indulge in like Gucci, Prada, and Louis Vuitton. I'm talking about avoiding all brand names like Nike, Adidas, Gap, A&F, etc. Any name with a significant brand recognition will have a boost in their price to feature their logo on it. So when you buy new, buy store brand or no-name brands without their logos plastered everywhere to save money. Another way to think when buying new clothes is to consider anything that's on-sale as a regular price item. Stores have sales so frequently that if you aren't getting some sort of sale discount, then you are just getting ripped off.

A better idea to follow is to buy used clothes. This way you can get those no-name clothes dirt cheap or even snag any of those high price brand name clothes for a fraction of the price. There are plenty of great thrift shops and consignment shops out there that offer great clothes. The shops that pay for used clothes are very picky with what they'll accept checking for both style and quality. They won't put anything not in fashion or anything damaged on their racks. I know a consignment shop called Plato's Closet that will have special sales from time to time where you can buy a shopping bag for $10 and whatever you can fit in the bag is yours. Nothing sounds like a better deal to me than buying clothes by volume.

There are also ways to find knock-offs and "mistake" items for less either online or at flea markets. Knock-off items like purses are fairly prevalent so get those instead of the real thing. I mean they look the same so what does it matter to you who stitched it together. The "mistake" items are clothes with problems that are usually unnoticeable. It might be a crooked stitch or a misplaced label. No big deal.

So there are plenty of ways to get clothes very cheaply out there and, if you need to, you can still be fashionable too.

Profit From Your Credit Card

The majority of us have credit cards. Unfortunately the majority of that majority are losing lots of money on high interest because they don't pay off their full balance at the end of the month. There is a way though to actually profit from your credit card.

The first step to profiting from your credit card is to get the right kind of card. After making sure there is no annual fee you just need to focus on the rewards that you can get for spending. Many card rewards come in different forms. There is straight cash, point systems, and specific rewards like airline miles. I don't trust the point systems as much as straight cash rewards because they are counting on you to not figure out their value. You may get 1000 points for spending 10 dollars so it feels like you got a lot, but when you take a look at what you can buy with that it will be nothing. You'd probably need 100,000 points to get a $10 gift card. So that's about 1% reward. You may need even more points to trade in for straight cash of the same value. You can do better than this most likely. The gift specific rewards like airline miles may be worth it if you use that reward often. For example, a frequent flier may benefit from tons of free miles. But you also have to figure that you are also must stick to that reward. I recommend going for cash rewards. Also when choosing a card, you won't need to put too much emphasis on the interest rate since you will be paying it off in full every month. Of course a lower interest rate doesn't hurt and could come in to play if you have a freak emergency, so don't ignore it completely.

Personally, I use a Discover More card. This card gives cash back bonuses of 1% to 5% based on the type of purchase. You can also sign up every year to get 5% back on certain types of throughout the year. My favorite is 5% back on gas purchases during the summer months. So when gas prices are highest, you are getting the most money back. There are also 5% back promotional periods for hotels, groceries, travel, movie theaters, and much more. There are deals with leading brands to get more deals from 5% to 20% cash back at any time. The only drawback from the Discover card is that it is not as readily accepted as Visa and Mastercard are. So be sure to carry a backup card with another rewards system. My backup is a Visa that is on the points system.

Now that you know how to get a good credit card, the second step is to use your credit card for all of your purchases and use all the reward maximizing offers that you can. Grocery shopping, clothes shopping, gas purchases, and everything else should be charged as long as it fits on your card. If the option is available, set up automatic payments using your credit card for all of your recurring monthly bills. Things like your cell phone bill, mortgage, car loan, and utility bills could all be automatically paid by credit card. This will certainly raise your credit card bill, but will also raise your rewards. Another perk is that you won't have to keep track of so many bills to pay every month. You just need to make sure you keep track of how much you charged on the card and how much money you have so you don't fall behind and leave any balance carrying over. If you have trouble handling credit card spending I would refer you to my blog entry on the benefits of cash spending.

The only other warning I have about this strategy is that your card might get canceled eventually because the credit card company will realize that you are losing them money. It's no big deal though. There will always be another credit card company that will give you a card and you can take joy in the fact that you beat the credit card company at their own game. I've been going strong for three years with no account closures so far. Give it a try and get some cash back.

Use An Online Financial Management Tool

There are a few great free financial management tools out there on the internet that you should take advantage of. They have several uses for someone trying to save the most they can.

1. All accounts in one place - Seeing all of your financial data summed up in one place can give you a great overall picture of of how much money you have and how much is saved up on one screen. You won't need to enter log in credentials on countless other sites to get your complete financial profile anymore. That's convenient.

2. Data, data, and more data - With all of your finances in one place, these online applications are able to generate some very useful data. You can easily pop up a pie chart that lists all your expenses and allow you to see where most of your money is going. You'll be able to see totals. Say you are one of those coffee fiends who doles out $6 every morning for coffee. With a little data analysis you'll see that those coffees have cost you over $1,500 over the course of the year. Those sneaky expenses really add up and this will help you see that. You'll also be able to compare your spending habits to others around the country.

Chart from Mint.com

3. Reminders - You can get email reminders for bills that are due soon. This way you can have a little help to make sure you never pay another dreaded late fee again.

4. Recommendations - This software can also look at the accounts you currently have and offer money-making or money saving recommendations. It could be a different credit card with lower rates, a savings account or CD with higher rates, or IRA suggestions

There are a bunch of these free financial management tools out there like Mint, Yodlee, Thrive, and Wesabe. I personally use Mint and love it for it's speed, interface, and ability. Of the other listed tools Yodlee is the only other one that I can tell has a significant different feature of note. Yodlee allows you to pay bills online from within the application itself. I find it to be a little slower in general, but this feature might make it worth it for some. None are yet flawless since there are certain credit cards and loans that they might not be able to link to, but they do have the majority. Some recommendations are lacking too sometimes, but you can use your common sense to figure out if the suggested idea is better than what you have now.

So whatever financial management tool you may choose, use it to your advantage. It can be a great tool for finding more money and more savings. It certainly can't hurt to try. It's free.

Try Being Freegan

There's tons of food thrown out every day that is still perfectly edible. The reasons for this waste vary from people not finishing their meals, to expiration dates being passed, to something as stupid as damaged packaging.

Well there are people out there who take advantage of these wasteful habits and they call themselves freegans. It may be considered taboo in most societies, but these people are getting their food completely free from the garbage. As they say though, one man's trash is another man's treasure. In this case, the trash is usually food. The menu for a freegan completely depends on what they can find that day. Don't bother making a shopping list because one day you might find some trash eggplant and the next you might find some trash hot dogs.

Now what many people are thinking is "Ewww! That's disgusting! Won't it make you sick?" Well I'll say that you certainly do have higher odds of getting sick off of food from the trash just because you don't know what it was shacked up against in the dumpster, but you can fix that with the proper precautions. With packaged items you don't have to worry about contamination, but you will still need to handle them with care as any contamination can still rub off on your hands. For any found produce proper cleaning is needed. I've seen some freegans soak certain items in a diluted bleach solution then wash again with soap and water before preparing them to eat. Thorough cooking is also highly recommended. So with any dumpster food I'd certainly just make sure to err on the side of caution. Another thing that needs to be straightened out is that freegans don't eat your half chewed food or leftovers. They only prey on the business dumpsters where they know that there will be food and know that it won't be half eaten.

There are also the questions of legality of dumpster diving. Don't quote me on any of this, but as far as I can tell dumpster diving in America isn't illegal. Now there are exceptions to this like if the dumpster is on private property or if there is a sign specifically prohibiting it. I'd check with your local state law if you are interested. If is is illegal, well then I find that stupid. If someone doesn't want something and is going to throw it away than someone else should be allowed to put it to good use.

Freegans aren't limited to just food products. Any useful little item that they find in a dumpster is fair game. Sidewalk shopping for furniture left for the dump on trash day is a nice way to find free furniture. Of course you should still be wary. Watch for pee smells, mold, nasty stains, and other such problems that sometimes are the reason it was thrown away in the first place.

So whether you want to try it or not, you can't deny that freeganism would certainly save you money.

Here's a video of a slightly satirical look at the freegan life:

Live With Your Parents

Here's a tip for those in their young 20's who want to save a bundle of money.

Live with your parents!

Fresh out of college or fresh out of high school, living with your parents can save you incredible amounts of money. Living expenses and food expenses are two of the major living expenses that a person has to deal with throughout their life. Living with your parents takes care of those two expenses for you. You've got a roof over your head and food on your plate thanks to your loving parents, so why not take advantage of it for as long as you can?

The average rent for a single person just starting out might cost around $6,000 per year and food could cost another $1,000-$2,000. Considering the gigantic bills that you might have coming out of college, you'll need all the money you can get to pay down those student loans and get out of debt as soon as possible. You may also have racked up some nasty credit card debt buying books and such as well. Step one to getting rich off of your savings is to get rid of debt. Time is of the essence.

Let's weigh the pros and cons of it all:
Pros:
- free food
- free housing (better than what you would probably be renting too)
- free utilities (power, water, heating, electric)
- home cooking (assuming your mother is a good cook)
- might be able to borrow the family car and save that way too
- pay off credit card bills and student loans rapidly

Cons:
- limited privacy
- not good for the social life
- their house, their rules

So other than a possible damper on your social life, living at home offers truly amazing fiscal benefits. The most important aspect here is the opportunity to clear your debts. Imagine having $25,000 in student loans. Over the course of the 20 years you will have to pay it off, you will end up paying $40,000+ thanks to interest. That's $15,000 extra dollars you spent unnecessarily. Using the money saved from living with your folks to pay down this debt will probably save you about $12,000 dollars of your future money. So if you want, you can think of living with your parents as a part time job to pay your dues.

Now that you know the advantages of staying with your parents, you should also realize that there is such a thing as overstaying your welcome. If you are hitting 30, you should not still be living with your parents. 30 might even still be pushing it. You should have been able to do plenty of saving by this point and it's time to move on and leave your parents safety net. They want you out too whether they try to tell you or not. A dead giveaway that your parents want you out of the house is the sudden decision to start making you pay rent. The longer you try to stay, the more the rent will go up. Take the hint and hit the road. Plus, the older you are, the more pathetic it looks when you bring home a date to your parent's house.

***Bonus Hint for parents trying to save money***: If your college graduate child is still living at home, start charging rent! You'll either have extra income every month, or your kid will move out and stop leeching off your generosity!

I guess saving money goes both ways and either way someone is paying.

Buy Generic

Buying generic is any easy way to save money. Generics in grocery and drug stores are comparable, if not identical products and they cost less. Look at medicines for instance. A bottle of Advil will cost you $3 more than it's generic counterpart and yet they have the same exact ingredients. You are strictly paying extra for a name and that is just stupid and unnecessary. Recognizing a label on the outside of a bottle does not automatically make the inside contents superior. You may not need medicines too often and they may last long, but that does not mean you should succumb to losing three dollars of your money that you could put to good use elsewhere.

Many generic brands out there provide products that are virtually identical like medicines and canned vegetables for instance. Some generics may have noticeable differences, but you should be able to get over the difference in order to make your saving business thrive. There are plenty of breakfast cereals that come in generic brands that are always a little "off", but it's worth the savings. Other things, like sauces, breads, cheeses, juices, etc. will have subtle differences but are still completely delicious. So buy generic.

Purchasing food is one of the major necessary expenses that you will incur every year, so it is a main area that you can target to cut costs and really do some great saving. Those dollars and cents saved on every product throughout the year can really add up to big bucks.

Buckle down, buy cheap, save big.

Control Yourself

Let's face it, many of us can fall victim to impulse shopping purchases. You walk through the store and even though you already got all the items on your list you still decide to spring for something else that caught your eye. This is what stores want you to do. Supermarkets are strategically organized to force you to walk farthest to get the staple items like milk and bread just so you will walk by other food products that will grab your eye and your stomach. They know people are subject to impulse buying and try to exploit it. Stores with a lot of foot traffic such as ones in malls will put items in their windows to lure you in and extract some of your cash. Businesses care enough about that extra money you might spend to go through a lot of trouble when setting up. The question is why don't you care enough about that money to save it?

What needs to be done here is to control yourself. Self control can go a long way when saving money. A good rule of thumb when going out shopping is to make a shopping list and stick with it.

If it's not important enough to remember to put on your shopping list, then it probably isn't important enough to buy.

You'll remember the essentials and that's all you should need. You shouldn't think you need something just because you saw it advertised. Advertisements are made to increase brand recognition and make you think you need the product. Well, you don't. People have lived many years without most of what we have today. Wanting is a cause of suffering. Let's all be happy and just get what we really need.

Impulse buying can take on different forms too though. You don't even have to go to a store. Companies can sneak right into your home through catalogs, the Home Shopping Network, infomercials, and internet advertising to try to get you to buy products. So stay strong willed and resist those temptations. Consider every resistance to your inner impulses to buy as a victory for your own personal saving business. Every penny not going to another business is a penny for your business and it's a competitive world out there.

Get a Refund

Here's a concept for you. If you hated the experience you just paid for, then ask for a refund. Why should this business have made money when it wasn't creating a beneficial or enjoyable experience for you? Why should you lose money for suffering through a bad experience as well? Well you shouldn't. So ask for a refund and be ready with a list of your complaints. For one, this will let the business know where some improvements could be made and can benefit customers in the long run. It can also benefit the company because once they realize where improvements could be made they could put out a better product and increase new and return customers.

You don't see it so often these days because many people don't ask anymore, but there are "no refund" signs posted sometimes. This is a bad sign in itself because to me it's saying, "we know your probably not going to like what your paying for, but don't bother asking for your money back or we'd go out of business." One establishment that I know gives refunds is Regal Cinemas, a wonderful national movie theater chain. If you just paid 9 dollars for a movie and found it to be a wretched piece of garbage, then go to the front desk and ask for a refund. They have a corporate policy that enables just this practice.

So when I go and see a movie like, hmmm, let's say "The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard" and I don't crack so much as a smile at the pathetic attempts at humor during this supposed comedy movie, I feel like I was ripped off and wasted my time. So I head off to the front office, ask for a refund and state my case. The understanding movie theater manager acknowledges my sorrows and hands me back my hard earned money. Now, I leave the theater in good spirits again knowing that I wasted my time, but did not waste my money and will return to that theater later knowing that they back their products.

So just try it. If you really hated what you got in return for your cash, whether it's food, services, or some other product, then ask for a refund. State your case and hope that they are an understanding business that treats their customers fairly. If they won't give it to you, boycott them and spread the word. Teach them a lesson in their bank account by spreading the tales of their evilness. If they do give it to you, you owe it to them to try them out again later, and hope they will have fixed the problem by your next visit.

Pack Your Lunch

One of the biggest unnecessary wastes of money in today's age is the purchasing of lunch. People head off to work empty-handed and turn to their wallets when lunch time rolls around. An average lunch at any chain will probably run you about $6. Now add that up through the whole year: $30 per week. $120 per month. $1,560 per year! Now that's a hefty chunk of money. There's also that hidden cost for the gas that you are using to drive to pick up this food, or the tip you are paying for delivery.

So the easy way to cut this cost down significantly is to bring your own lunch in from home. If you had leftovers from dinner, stick them in a tupperware container and eat them for lunch. Boom! Lunch at no extra cost. Otherwise you can whip up a sandwich and some snacks on the side for at least half of the cost of a purchased meal. A loaf of bread, some lunch meat or PB&J, a bag of chips or pretzels, maybe some fruit or granola bars, and you'll be set for the whole week. These will easily cost less than $30 dollars, especially if you buy generic, discounted, or bulk foods. Peanut butter and jelly can even last you the entire month if you decide to use them. You can get water to drink from work for free, and sometimes tea or coffee too. Packing your own lunch can be healthier too as many opt for the unhealthy fast food chains for their lunch breaks.

This tip can probably save you about $800 per year if you can just muster up enough energy to make your own sandwich. That's not asking much, is it?

Get Out of Debt

The really get rich by saving, you will first need to get out of debt if you have any. So before you start putting any of your extra income into CD's or savings accounts, you must put all of it towards paying off any loans and bills.

The priority of payment is definitely on your credit card. Credit cards always have extremely high interest rates compared to any type of loan you may have. If you have multiple credit cards always pay off as much as you can on the credit card with the highest interest rate. Some may say that you should pay off the credit card with the lowest debt left on it so that when you are done you will have one less bill left. Don't do that (unless it has the highest interest rate). That is a debtors' mentality. It will give you a boost mentally when you see that your minimum owed on credit is less each month, but it is a false celebration. You are still losing more money in future interest on the card with the higher rate. If you are struggling to even pay the monthly payments as it is, you've got bigger problems and you better start looking at the other money saving tips I have written about.

So the plan remains:

1. Pay minimum payments on the debts with the lowest interest rates.

2. Pay as much as you can on the debt with the highest interest rate until it is paid off.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 with the remaining debts until all debts are paid off.

4. Start your saving.

If you are in a credit card mess, for goodness sakes, forget about minimum payments. Those are the devices for credit card companies to cash in. Minimum payments will stretch your debt and cost to ridiculous lengths. I don't care if those shoes were on sale, they will end up costing you 3 times that much by leaving the charge on your credit card and sneaking by on minimum payments! What you need to do is control yourself and always pay off your card in full. The best way to do that is to not impulse buy, track your spending , and live within your means. You could always try paying in cash too for a mental boost.

If you do have control of your credit card use, then by all means use them to your advantage and focus on paying off any loans you might have. Again follow the steps outlined above.

A school loan of $25,000, may have been essential to paying for college and I won't scold you for that. Minimum payments on your loan though can send that cost skyrocketing until you realize that you actually ended up paying $40,000+ for that loan. If you really try, you can easily knock off $10,000 from that total. Now who couldn't use an extra 10 G's down the road?

Minimum payments are a curse. They may look good in the short term and delay your problems, but in the long term they will really cost you. So before you can get rich, let's get out of debt.

Buy It Online

The internet has provided everyone these days with an incredibly valuable resource for saving. One of the aspects, which I will talk about today, is buying used products online. The most popular sites are hotbeds for great deals on items you need. Sites likes Craigslist, Ebay, and Amazon can offer avenues to easily find new or gently used products at a giant discount or even FREE in some instances.

Amazon offers products that are greatly discounted to start and then also offer the same product on the same page from individual retailers that are usually cheaper than the other listed price. Buy from the individual retailers! That's where the real deals are found on Amazon. There are plenty of ways to get free shipping on here too, so if spending and extra 2 dollars will get you free shipping, then do it!

Everyone knows about Ebay. It's an auction site where you are bidding competitively on products as time winds down. There are reserve prices that can prevent super deals sometimes and some items are listed as buy-it-now where you can pay a certain price and automatically win an item, but there are certainly internet steals that can be found. This is a good place to find those rejected products that stores couldn't sell because the box was dented or something was sewed slightly incorrectly. People out there buy these defects in bulk and resell them on Ebay for great discounts. You can also find movies dirt cheap on here. You'll have to watch out for giant shipping charges because the book for 5 cents isn't much of a deal anymore if it has 10 dollar shipping. Also, don't forget to check out the seller and make sure they have an established selling history with great feedback or you could be getting ripped off before you know it. If you play your cards right though, you will find some great deals on Ebay.

Craigslist is the mecca of cheap and also home to some real scam artists if you don't use your common sense. Otherwise it is a heavily trafficked site full of awesome goodies. Go to your area and there is a section full of free stuff. Because it is heavily trafficked though, those free items will be gone in an absurdly short amount of time so you've got to be on the ball. There are also products for sale that go for cheap. These items can stick around for a bit longer since all the vultures are busy scavenging the free stuff area. True Story: A friend of mine needed a new television since his old one was having picture problems. He found a tv for sale about 15 minutes away for $35. It ended up being a really awesome tv for a person on a tight budget. The seller had it all set up to show that it worked and it was in great working condition. Did I mention that it was a 36 inch tv. It's the biggest tv he's ever had and it worked great for a nice low price. A word of caution for any buyers picking products up though is to never go alone. There are crazy people out there so you have to be careful.

So when you need a new appliance, piece of furniture, book, or anything else. You might as well do your research online and find a great deal before you go paying retail prices at a physical store. Who knows, you might even get it for free!

Cash over Credit

Far too much spending goes on in America with borrowed money. I'm not saying that loans and credit are evil, for they can certainly be used to ones benefit. I'm just saying that credit is far overused and it gives people a distorted view of money when they are able to whip out a tiny plastic credit card when they are purchasing. So instead of using your credit card for your purchases, try paying with cash. This achieves several things:

- Mental Recognition: You will notice the money disappearing from your pocket and you will see your stack dwindling. With a credit card, you will always seemingly leave the store with the same buying power you entered with. Seeing your wealth go down with cash purchases will cause you to second guess buying too much.

- Pre-set Limits: You won't be able to spend more cash than you brought to the store, so you can set your own limit before going out shopping. A credit card on the other hand offers buying power at any time up to your credit limit. A cash limit can remove that "in the moment" temptation.

- No Future Debt: If everything gets paid for when you buy it, you won't have to worry about that credit card bill at the end of the month. There's no surprises, no scrambling to pay it off, no interest payments to worry about, no late fee worries. It's just a fool-proof way to avoid those possible charges that can kill your wealth if you let them.

This is especially useful for those who can't control their spending and impulse buyers. Try it out for a few months and see if it can make a difference for you. Cutting up all your credit cards would certainly help if you are that problematic. Bottom line though, is that if you can't control your spending, you are not going to be rich. That is unless of course you make absurd amounts of money, but I can tell you that isn't the case because you are reading this right now.