Your Dishwasher Is Running-Stop It!

How much is your dishwasher costing you?

After doing some research, I realized that my dishwasher constitutes over 10% of my monthly electricity bill.

I do about 3 loads of dishes per week. At 7 gallons for a normal cycle, that's 21 gallons of heated water. Considering that I have low flow aerators installed on all my faucets, I can get by with less than 3 gallons by handwashing.

I checked this website to get some idea of the cost of electricity and, after finding some basic data on my washer's specs, determined that it cost $3.41 per month.

Switch to Fluorescent

I recently completed the switch to all-fluorescent light bulbs. They use significantly less electricity and each bulb saves you something like $20 over its lifetime. The only problem is that they are relatively expensive when compared to cheap incandescents. So I compromised: rather than plunking down $70 on light bulbs, I've been buying one or two at a time over a year's time. My electricity costs have been gradually falling and I didn't have to devote a significant amount of cash toward bulbs.

As a side benefit, I have only changed one bulb in the last six months! Since they last a lot longer than traditional bulbs, I hope to be able to go a year at a time without having to futz with swapping bulbs from now on.

Ways to Make Money Online: If MTurk is the Paymaster, Does that Make Me a Janissary?

Once upon a time, a web browser stumbled on mturk.com. It promised a slightly different way to make money. Run by those nice folks at Amazon, mturk is a sophisticated way to loosely organize a large number of people to do many different kinds of tasks and get paid for it.

It's simple:  businesses post rewards for the completion of tasks.  Perform the task to the bidder's satisfaction and you get paid.  Amazon handles the details.

Does it work? More important for our purposes: is there money in it?

The answer is, maybe. There are opportunities to earn real money. For example, amazon has partnered with cellular companies (somehow). A subscriber will type into his or her phone a question; say, 'good pizza in raleigh NC'. That request will go out to the mturk website where folks have a chance to accept the challange and find an answer. While those types of questions are worth, literally, pennies, by answering enough questions correctly, turkers can earn anywhere between a $5 and $50 payout each week.

Other business work through mturk also. For example, www.castingwords.com is a podcast transcription company that posts transcription tasks. Successfully complete the transcription and you'll earn a payout. Jobs work out to be about $10 - $12 per hour.

Oh, if you're wondering about quality assurance, mturk uses a simple feedback tool - post a good answer, transcript, etc and your score goes up. Higher-level tasks require higher ratings; conversely, provide too much junk and soon you won't be able to bid on projects anymore.

The First Rule of Personal Finance

It's easier to save $100 ten times than $1,000 once.

I first tried to save money by started with the biggest expenses.  And I did save money, actually, but that well quickly ran out. For most people, the biggest monthly expenses like rent/mortgage, taxes, car payments are hard to control without draconian measures.

But all hope is not lost!  In my case, I discovered that 30% of my income was spent on "small ticket" items of less than $100 per month. Yet these expenses added up to more than $15,000 per year.

This leads me to my first rule of personal finance: it's easier to save $100 ten times than $1,000 once. 

Becoming wealthy, or even free of debt, isn't a matter of winning the lottery or picking the right stock. It's the result of the hundreds or thousands of small decisions that we make day by day, every month. Unfortunately, this probably sounds a lot like work; then again nothing worth doing was ever achieved without effort.

The Easiest Way to Clip Coupons - Ever!

Check out www.coupons.com.  Sign-up or browse as a guest, you can enjoy the hassle free benefits of saving money without flipping through a million ad inserts every day.  

Not only can you browse different categories of offers, but you can enter your own zip code for customized savings available only in your area!

Grab the coupons you want, print them out and use them in any store that accepts manufacturer's coupons.

As an added bonus, if you can't find the offer you're looking for at coupons.com, check out the manufacturer's website. A lot of times they will have additional special offers and promotions.

As a final note - you'll need Internet Explorer if you'd like to use these websites. I have tried other popular browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome) and have had some problems.  IE, on the other hand, has worked every time.

Life is good!

How To Lower Your Bills - For Free!

A great article from the New York Times:

IF someone said that you could reduce your bills by a significant amount by taking one simple step — and this step would be neither time-consuming nor embarrassing — wouldn’t you want to know what it was? It’s as simple as this: Just call and ask.

I'm a militant believer in this. Over the past four years, I've switched car insurance 6 times (saving $1,500 per year), phone service 3 times ($80 per year) and cut back on cable ($100 per year). I've also switched credit cards twice (better rates and bonus plans) and set up four or five different bank accounts for better rates.

It's been some work but I've saved literally thousands of dollars per year.

Cheap Movies at Kerasotes or AMC Theaters!

Interested in cheap movies?

If you live near a Kerasotes movie theater, sign up for their "Five Buck Club".  Every Thursday you'll get a emailed list of their movies that you can go see for only $5. Generally you'll have to wait a week or three after premiere, so if that's not a big deal check it out.  Best of all, it's free!

AMC Theaters have a similar program called The Moviewatcher Club.  Watch movies, get stuff.  Again, there's no cost to join.

Don't live near an AMC or Kerasotes theater?  Check out your local chain - they may offer similar programs, if you ask.