Cancel That Gym Membership

Did you know that there are companies whose whole foundation is based on taking your money while giving you nothing in return?  These companies exist, they are very real, and most people continue on paying them for nothing, you probably are right now.

The primary example of this that comes to mind is your Gym membership.  Some people are very good at going to their local gym daily to workout, but the fact of the matter is that big chain or “Globo” gyms earn their money on upfront fees and the premise that most of the people who pay are not going to go.  I know way too many people who pay for a gym membership that they don’t use.  What many people are paying for is the delusion that having a gym membership means that they do workout.

Think about how much you pay for your gym membership.  Now how much do you go to the gym?  Is it really worth it when there are literally HUNDREDS of things you can do for free to stay in shape?  Go run, do sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, run the local stadium steps, join an intramural sports league, all these things are more fun than staring at some meat head stare at himself in the mirror!

You could save hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year by going outside and using the world as your gym!  I’m not telling you to not workout, and some people use the “globo” gym everyday (good for you!), but most don’t.  If you are a “most” person, or even if you aren’t, breaking the gym rut would be good for your workout routine anyway!

Mary and I do Crossfit workouts on our own, and the money we don’t spend on a gym membership we are using to buy different pieces to build our own gym of homemade (medicine ball, parallettes, pull up bar) or used equipment found on craigslist.  Crossfit is a high intensity combination of Gymnastics, Aerobics, and Olympic Weight Lifting where all the workouts can be scaled to your own level of fitness.  Doing this we are in the best shapes of our lives, and we aren’t paying a dime for it in membership dues!

As a side note I have a recommendation to gym big wigs.  Why don’t you offer a punch card for workouts? Say $20 for 12 workouts.  Like a buy 10 get 2 free visits or something.  That provides more value to many of your customers, I can guarantee that it would be a huge hit (I’d probably buy one for a rainy day), however I do understand that it undermines your whole profit base.

Get Cheap Costco Gas Without the Membership

Everyone loves cheap gas, but not everyone loves to pay for a club membership to get one, so have the best of both worlds!  According to Bargaineering (new window), it is possible to get Costco gas without having a Costco membership as long as you have an American Express card.

All you have to do is swipe your regular American Express card when it asks for you to swipe your Costco card, then swipe the credit card you want to pay with.  I have not tried this, but I have read numerous accounts of it working.

Apparently it works because Costco has a Costco Amex card, and that card can be used as proof of membership, however the machine is trained to only read the line of code that says it’s an Amex card and nothing else.  Therefore when you swipe a regular Amex card the machine thinks that it’s a Costco member Amex card.

Locate a Costco nearby, try it out and let me know how you enjoy your (roughly) 10 cent discount on gas!

Searching

As many of you know, I started this blog to hold myself accountable for budgeting as my wife and I planned and budgeted to move into our new house.  Over that time, I successfully wrote and grew this blog to over 100 subscribers.

Now that we have moved into our house, I’ve found myself at a loss of ideas and motivation to post.  As I’ve been trying to analyze why I feel this way, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because I’m beginning to feel like a hypocrite.  We live in a very nice new house, that we have worked very hard for, however we have had a great deal of help getting here.

First, we got a huge leg up from my wife’s brother and his wife.  They currently own two houses in the Dallas area and offered to let us live in one of them, rent free, as long as we maintained it and paid the utilities.  So far we have not been able to thank them enough for the head start they gave us on saving for a house.  We lived there for about a year, and by living frugally we were able to live on my wife’s salary while saving all of mine.  This enabled us to have a good sized down payment on our house and to fully fund an emergency fund.

Next, my in-laws gave my wife her mom’s old car for her graduation.  Which is a very generous gift by any standards, but when her mom’s old car was a mint condition Lexus SC 430 with low miles, it’s above and beyond.  We were able to sell the car for a large sum, which enabled us to put a very large down payment on our Volvo, and put the rest into the down payment on our house.

Finally, something that I have written about previously, but a check that my grandmother gave me when I was young.  I was able to invest and exponentially grow it.  This money paid for Mary’s engagement ring and our wedding rings.  It also paid off all of our debt after college, and for some of our furniture.

Living in our nice new house I have to say it is hard to feel like we are living frugally, in the truest since of the word we definitely are not.  We have a new 2500 sqft house (for 2 people), and we drive a new car that we make payments on (when we could have paid cash), but what I have really come to realize in the last few months writing this is that being frugal isn’t about being stingy, cheap, or not wanting to spend money.  What being frugal is really about is choices.

Mary and I choose to live in a nice new house, we choose to drive a nice new car, and we choose to make sacrifices to afford both of them.  We take our lunch to work.  We don’t eat out much.  We carpool.  We don’t have cable.  We use coupons. We don’t belong to a gym, instead we workout on our own…which will hopefully be a future post.  Mary made the drapes in our bedroom from nice fabric she found deeply discounted.

As you can see, although we may not be the true poster couple for being “young and frugal,” we like to think that we are wise with our money, and we are able to enjoy the choices that we make, while still saving for retirement.

Why You Need To Know Math

This week I overheard a conversation that made me ashamed of my generation.  I felt like I aged 20 years and was looking at two young people (roughly my age) in disbelief.

I was in a retail store with my wife, and I had a cashier call other stores to check stock on an item.  As I was waiting for my answer, a woman (around 25) walked up to the register with an item.  It rang up as $8.50.

She turned to the cashier, “This was marked as 50% off.”

“Oh,” replied the cashier who was in his early 20s, “ok, I’ll just make an adjustment,”  He the proceeded to ring up the item again.

“That’s not right” said the woman.  “50% of $8.50…$4.50.”

At this point I would have been alright, people make mistakes, but I was still biting my tongue.

The cashier thinks about it, and then REACHES FOR A CALCULATOR!  At this point I couldn’t take it any more, and proceeded to make an ass out of myself.

“Uhhh…$4.25,” I interjected.

Both parties, thought about it for what seemed like at least a minute, and I got a combined “Oh yeah.”

I should have stopped at that, but for some reason, unknown to me, I had to continue with the smartass comment of “yep, gotta love that elementary math!”  

I immediately felt like a huge ass, I apologized, and left the store.

Now, I know I was an asshole and I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but really?  Needing a calculator for something like that?  Are we really a generation that can’t do remedial math in their heads?  Are we that reliant on technology that we can’t think for ourselves?

How can you expect to budget while you shop if you can’t do things like that?  I love sale racks (who doesn’t?) but I always have an understanding of what I will be charged before I pay.  That way I know if the cashier makes a mistake in ringing me up, it’s a basic way to save money, and a skill that everyone should have, if you don’t watch out for your own wallet no one will!  Yes, this issue was over a quarter, but imagine if it was a higher ticket item?

Falling Off The Wagon

Hi, my name is Daniel, and I… lost track of my finances. 

I write (what is for the most part) a personal finance blog, so you’d think that I would track every penney, but I don’t.  We budget to pay ourselves first (savings/retirement), pay all of our bills, and then everything else is give and take.  One month we might go over on eating out, but we won’t touch our clothing budget, so we call it even; but over the last month as we have moved I have learned a very valuable lesson.

Once you start spending, it’s hard to stop.  It’s like the floodgates of your bank account open, and the next thing you know, you’re asking how your credit card bill got that high!?

We realized this week that we have run our credit card bills up much more than we realized.  It’s not like we have purchased large items, it’s a great number of little things that we did not appropriately budget for.  For instance, the last two weekends we have been out of town, and we did not adequately budget for food for either weekend.  Plus being gone on the weekend messed up our schedule, so we didn’t go to the grocery store to stock up for the week as we usually do, so we ended up eating out.  Then we moved, there was no point in us buying tons of food when we would have to move it, so we ate out more.  

Our move was a beast by itself.  Thank goodness I have friends and family who were willing to come help when I offered free beer (which no one ended up drinking!).  I rented the largest Budget truck available, for 24 hours, found a coupon code online to nock off 10%, and then surprised myself when I was able to negotiate another 15% off at the truck rental place.

Somehow a great number of little things added up.  The only major things I can remember buying are drapes and blinds for the house (which we came in way under our budget for!…to bad we went over everything else!)

This will serve to be a very interesting month.  We will soon make our first mortgage payment (yikes!), and we’ll get to see how close we were in our estimates for our new utility bills!  Plus, we’ll map out a plan to pay off our credit card bills.  Which right now I’m thinking will involve pulling some funds out of savings and tightening the budget to replace the money over the next few months (and hoping for a decent raise soon!)

Also, allow me to apologize for this seeming rant.  As you know it’s been over two weeks since I’ve really posted anything of substance, so A. I’m a little rusty, and B. it helps to just start writing to get the wheels moving sometimes!