The price of gas has been going crazy lately but even now gas is one of the cheaper liquids that we buy on a daily basis.  Sure we use more of it, but as a whole its still a lot cheaper in comparison.  If we were to take off the government’s piece of of the cost (up to a dollar in places) it would be even cheaper.  So I did a little research and few price comparisons to see just exactly what we pay per gallon for the rest of the things we buy in ascending order.

1 gallon of gas = $3.37 

Quart of Milk 16 oz for $1.59 = $6.32 per gallon (gallons can be found for cheaper - $4ish a gallon)

Gatorade 20 oz for $1.59 = $10.17 per gallon

Snapple 16 oz for $1.29 = $10.32 per gallon

Water 9 oz for $1.49 = $21.19 per gallon

Starbucks 8 ounce coconut almond mocha for $4.43(what I used to drink) = $70.88 per gallon

Good thing our cars don’t run on starbucks, eh?

Believe it or not, out in the business world you can save yourself a whole lot of moola. Heres five ways

1) Lay off the starbucks
Eating out is expensive but sometimes it cant be avoided. Drinking out is expensive but sometimes it can’t be avoided. Drinking starbucks is expensive and can ALWAYS be avoided. I used to drink starbucks a lot, and I mean a lot. Then I realized I was spending almost $200/month on freaking coffee. I learned to like regular coffee and diet dr pepper. Both much cheaper.

2) Split lunch with another person
Personally I eat about six times a day and I can’t handle huge huge dinner and lunches. If there is someone else that you go to lunch with that is the same way, there is no harm in splitting something. Some foods (Fajitas) lend themselves well to this. Other foods do not.

3) Bring your lunch
Ok ok this one is obvious but its more flexible than you might think. I have someone on my team at work that brings his food to work but will still “go out to lunch” to hang out and not miss out on a lot of the planning and work talk that goes on at lunch. If you have to buy something, buy something small and then gorge your huge appetite on your lunch you brought from home…or the other way around, take your pick.

4) Learn the lunch specials
Learn where there are lunch specials and then suggest those places to colleagues. I can think of one place I like to go that if I can hit the right special day I can eat and be full for 3 bucks while everyone else spends 15. Hell you can work this out with dates too.

5) Use coupons
There are entertainment books for almost every bigger city or town that have coupons for local restaurants. There are also websites that allow you to print coupons out for various restaurants.

Lets go through and see just how much that can save:
1) we’ll go easy and say $7/day on starbucks: $7 - $1 diet dp = 6$ a day Monthly savings: $180.00

2) Say 3 days of the work week you split a lunch: Instead of $15/meal, $7.50/meal. Monthly savings: $22.50

3) Say 1 day a week you just plain bring lunch. $60 - $10 in groceries for the month Monthly savings: $50.00

4) Say 1 day a week, $12 savings. Monthly savings: $48

5) Lets say for dinners you normally go out 3 times out of the week and spend $30/meal. If you used coupons and cut that down to $20/meal. Monthly savings: $120

Just doing a few little things can save you literally a hundred bucks a week. Lets put that in perspective…lets say you did that and put that extra $400+ a month in savings instead. In a year you’d have almost 5 grand…just by cutting back and eating smarter.

I know this is extreme case and if you are reading this, you probably don’t spend that much on food…then again many of you might. So go ahead, save yourself five grand.

The best time to pay for your kids college tuition is not when they are going to college. I know that seems kind of counter intuitive, sort of like how eating more times per day can help you lose weight. No joke, look it up.

So when is the best time to save for your kids college?

When they are born (or before). A small investment when they are born will do wonders for their college costs in the future. For example a $5000 investment at birth would pay for all of an average state school tuition when they are 18. Thats assuming an 11% return which is not too much to ask for, since the stock market has averaged that since the dinosaurs roamed the earth (or so they tell me).

But ahhh what if there is a recession when they get close to college age?
There is something that is excellent to use for this, and its called an age-based 529 plan. Its basically a plan that adjusts from being very aggressive in the beginning to conservative as the child becomes closer to their college years. You pick the year they should start college, and the plan does the rest. Its basically just like a retirement plan: you want to start aggressive and slowly move toward conservative.

Should I use an age-based 529?
I personally would say no since I hate paying mutual fund managers to do what I know I can do just as well as they can (oh boy here comes the hate mail, I can feel it). But if you want someone else to manage it for you, its worth considering.

I just got back from Portland last night on business and I learned several things about life and finances that you would not expect to learn from Portland.  Its a nice city, lots of trees, too many clouds.  Well ok so the lesson really didn’t come from Portland or the business part, but the traveling part.

Whatever you do, do not buy a car that has been used as a rental car.  I really don’t care what kind of deal you think you are getting, it is not a deal.  I read an article just now in between writing this sentence and the last sentence that said a good way to save money on buying a car is to buy a used rental car.  I am going to go ahead and say I disagree 100%.

This weekend my colleagues took our rental car jeeping (it was not a jeep, but rather a charger) and did some road testing.  It was all in good fun and didn’t harm the car, but we were mild compared to some of the stories I have heard.  Allow me to give some examples of things I have heard:

-car being thrown into park while on the highway going 60
-car being jumped (over a variety of things)
-blatant disregard for speed bumps, humps, traffic calming devices and sometimes curbs. Late braking, hard accelerating, off roading, overloading, and every form of general abuse you’d never inflict on your own vehicle
-driving with parking brake engaged
-use your imagination
Now, you might argue, only a minority of people play around with rentals and an even smaller minority severely abuse them and that may well be true but the truth is even just the normal wear and tear on those cars is unbelievable.  99% of all rental cars lives have been spent purely in stop and go traffic (the worst kind of miles for cars) and many of them at one point have had a user that severely abused them.

The car being under warranty is no promise that it wont be totally hosed 2k miles out of warranty.

And by hiding money I mean from yourself. I am great about paying bills, doing my investments, etc but one thing I am aboslutely terrible at is golf. No just kidding, Im getting a lot better at golf, what I am actually referring to is setting aside money into a saving account. This is why I absolutely LOVE having an ING account. If I keep it in my wells fargo account which I dilligently track I am often tempted to transfer it back from my savings into my checking and invest it, spend it, or otherwise not have it around anymore. This leaves me with an interesting problem. I want to save some cash but I do not want it readily available. Luckily for me and other savings avoiders I have come up with a solution. Actually its a pretty simple solution.

Open a savings account at a different bank.

Yeah I know, its not exactly Einstein solving mass to energy conversion but it works nonetheless. My personal suggestion is open an ING savings account. With ING I have it automatically withdraw money every paycheck so I never even see the money. If I wanted to transfer the money I would have to log in to ING, and manually transfer it back to wells fargo. This little thing alone is enough to kill the temptation.

Added bonus: You get WAY better interest at ING than you do with a standard bank checking account. So basically I get to kill three birds with one stone. Now open an account there right now. (see link in my sidecare).  If you open an account with $250 we both get a bonus too!

Saving money on gas, who doesn’t want to? For those of you who have a nice balanced budget, the rising gas costs mean more and more of your salary goes straight down into the gas tank. I’m going to put good odds on your HR department not giving you a raise just to cover the costs of your commuting, though that’d be nice and all. So what are the options you have?

1) Ride the bus
2) Bike to work
3) Carpool
4) Hybrid car

These are great options if they are available or feasible…the problem is these options are often unavailable. How many people have buses, subways, or carpools near them. These are also inflexible. Biking to work is great, if you live close enough and have the time…but many don’t. Hybrid car is a little better but they can be expensive, harder to maintain, and won’t necessarily promise great gas mileage.

I have another option, but its not for the timid. Buy a motorcycle. I know, the personal finance readers might not be the most likely to go running out and buy a motorcycle, but hear me out on this.

The average American will spend $1700 this year on gas to commute to work. At an average of 3.20/gallon that means the average American filling up an average of 531.25 gallons. With the average fuel economy being 17 miles/gallon that means we are commuting 9031.25 miles back and forth to work every year. So follow my logic here…the average motorcycle gets 35-60 miles per gallon. For this purpose lets use 49 mpg. So lets divide that those 9031 miles by 49. Instead of 531 gallons of gas, that is 184 gallons per year. Multiply that by $3.20 and that is $589. So total saved is $1111.

I have a ‘79 Honda 450CMT as shown to the right. It is a smaller half cruiser and I have neglected it for the past year or so, but with gas prices rising I figured I would do a price comparison for myself to see what I save riding it around instead of driving my Z. So first lets figure my miles. Actually I know my miles because I can calculate from my Z. My commute and daily driving comes out to about 14,000 miles a year. My motorcycle also happens to get great gas milage due to its smaller engine (450 cc). I get 63 miles to the gallon. My Z gets about 17 miles per gallon. Another factor is that my Z requires premium, and when I say requires, I mean requires…it starts knocking if I put in mid grade whereas my motorcycle runs on regular unleaded. Lets do the math.

Z: 14000 / 17 = about 823 gallons of gas. Now multiply that by the cost of gas at my local station, 823* 3.37 = $2773.51

Motorcycle: 14000 / 63 = about 222 gallons of gas. Now multiply that by cost of ga, 222* 3.16 = $702.22

So $2773.51 - $702.22 = $2071.29 Savings

Ok, so obviously I live in Colorado and its not feasible to ride my motorcycle more than 4-5 months a year and some daily driving requires use of a car but its possible to have substantial savings. If you took it even a step further if you could ride a scooter to work, you could get up to 85 mpg. Motorcycles have their disadvantages, and can be very dangerous if ridden improperly or without proper training but on the other hand if you are someone who can take advantage of owning a motorcycle, I highly recommend it.

So I admittedly have a lead foot sometimes. The funny thing is I had only one speeding ticket in my life for going 8 over in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. Who DOESNT speed in New Mexico? Anyway that was until recently. I got two tickets in ONE WEEK. Blehck. The truth is I didn’t deserve one of them, the cop pulled me over for speeding up to soon when the speed limit increased from 30 to 45 - I was literally 10 feet in front of the sign when I sped up. Im pretty sure it had more to do with my car than anything. In any case instead of just letting them take me for 200 bucks and 8 points on my driving record I decided to fight it.

Fighting a speeding ticket is actually much easier than you would think and can save you a ton of money. Never, ever, ever just send the ticket in if it includes points against your license and/or huge fines. There are all sorts of ebooks out there on “how to fight a speeding ticket” and sites with 100 step programs to do so. Well guess what, you don’t need it, its OVERKILL. I am going to tell you how in three simple steps:

1) Go to court at your appointed time

2) When the judge reads you your rights, say “I understand” and then instead of pleading say:

“I would like to speak to the prosecuting attorney.” Which you HAVE to be granted.

3) Tell the attorney you would like to make a deal.

4) Make a deal with him or her.

The truth is no one wants you to go to court. Not the prosecution, not the attorney, not the judge, and most of all not you. In fact, many times you might not even have to go before a judge, you might just strike a deal before you ever go into the court room, sign something and be done.

What kind of deal can you get?
Generally they have set deals they hand out that you plea down to. I had a couple of options that would have gotten rid of my ticket completely but since I had another ticket for the next week I asked to take care of them both at the same time, which they granted. I went down from 8 points and $400 to 1 point and $80. Thats right $320 and 7 points saved…and all it took me was 25 minutes at a municipal court.

I have already talked in the past about how easy it is to save yourself a ton of money by calling your credit card company, but the truth is it goes way further than that.  Today I was in hollywood video store because it is closing and there is a bunch of stuff on sale.  All of the new releases were on sale for 15.99, the TV DVDs and previously viewed movies  for $5.  I grabbed the first two disks of season one of Lost because Ive heard its good and they were only $5 each.  Well, I grabbed a movie as well and took them all to the counter.  I was chatting with the assistant store manager as he was ringing things up.  He told me things were pretty slow and they weren’t selling out very fast.  As he rang up the movie it turns out it was a new release so I told him nevermind because it definitely wasn’t worth $15 to me.  So he set it aside….except then I told him

“Hey, if you want to sell it to me for five bucks, Ill take it.”  …And he did.

If you walk into king soopers and demand they give you 50% off on peanut butter, they are going to look at you funny.  But under the right situations, you really can save money, just by asking.  What have you got to lose?

There are all sorts of articles everywhere that will tell you how to avoid blowing your budget…but what do you do if you DO blow your budget? Well that exact thing happened to me this weekend so now is a decent time to tackle it because lets be honest if you are part of the 99% of people that aren’t always perfect, it will happen to you at one point or another. Now Im not referring to “I got super sauced and bought a corvette from a used car dealer” kind of blown budget. More along the lines of “unplanned dinner and taxi trip” kind of thing. Anywhere from a few bucks to a few hundred.

So this weekend, I went over budget. We went down to Denver to visit some friends this weekend and I budgeted a certain amount of money for going out. One slight problem: we went out friday night with friends from work as well. This took out roughly 1/2 of the money I had planned for the weekend (I was expecting to spend only a few bucks friday night). Long story short I kept to budget until about 10 PM when we decided to take the light rail to a karaoke bar. If you haven’t ever been to a good karaoke bar with a huge group of fun people, I highly recommend it. So anyway four hours, one rendition of The Bad Touch (complete with dance), one rendition of Beat it (complete with attempt at dance) , taxi ride, and taco bell meal later I was roughly $125.00 over budget.

So what to do?
Well, the trick is that you should always put aside money each month for “unexpected expenses.” Aha, but I ALREADY used my set aside money.

So what now?
Its painfully obvious but should be pointed out anyway; cut back for this week, eat a few more meals at home, don’t go out next weekend.

For the sake of argument lets say you are already living perfectly frugally, what else can you do? Well there is a little trick called payment shifting. I don’t recommend it except as a last resort. Its this: you postpone when you pay a certain bill so that it coincides with the next paycheck. An example is, I get paid on the 1st and the 15th of every month. My mortgage is due on the 16th of the month. I pay my mortgage with money from my first paycheck of the month, if I had a situation where I was behind I could use my second paycheck of the money, effectively buying myself an extra 15 days worth of money if I needed until I had a chance to make back up the original money that was overspent.

By no means am I advocating blowing your budget but we are all human (even Michael Jackson, despite outward appearance) and mistakes happen. The real takeaway is that if you make one mistake do NOT get discouraged and just start putting things on credit card that you cannot pay off or give up on budgeting.

Well, they are exactly evil, I mean they are actually a modern marvel. Can you imagine telling someone a couple hundred years ago that you could someday go to one store and it would have every food from everywhere in the world? Unfortunately, this is also what makes them a trap. Heres a question to ask yourself: how do I shop?

Until recently I shopped by the “instinctive food gathering principle” which as it turns out, really means “spend tons of money on crap I probably dont need just because it sounds good.” It doesn’t help that they arrange things specifically to mess with you… in any case I would go to the store for toilet paper and come back with some drinks, chips, mens health, some fruit, a ribeye, cottage cheese (because I somehow always convince myself that I am out, even though I never am), ice cream or pizza, and who knows what else. Except toilet paper. I’d almost swear there are voices whispering in my ear to buy crap I don’t need. Anyway Ive come up with a list of things that has drastically reduced spending and the amount of time I spend in the store.

1) Make a dang grocery list. It takes two minutes, do it! I know you are saying “uh Jesse I can remember what I need” and you are probably right, but not only will it help you get what you do need but because it gives you direction you will be less inclined to pick up other random things.

2) Don’t wait until you are out of things to go to the store. A lot of times this creates a huge rush situations. A great example is needing milk in the morning to eat your cereal. When you start to get low on things, make your list and go…you’ll know exactly what you need and there won’t be any guessing involved.

3) Stick to one store if you can so that you can go directly to the aisles you need to go to. Wandering up and down the aisles is frustrating and leads to picking up more than you need.

4) Use coupons. I know, I get pictures in my head of my grandma cutting out coupons medituculously for 2 hours too…but really you can save a lot of money. And some places like King Soopers will give you coupons based on stuff you just bought with your receipt. nice-a!

5) Plan out some meals in advance. If you don’t feel like eating your planned meal you can always change it.

6) Eat healthy. As it turns out if you eat healthy stuff you can eat as cheaply as just getting junk. I eat kashi for breakfast with milk, then a mid morning protein shake, then a lean pocket for lunch, then some fruit and a pb&j sandwhich, some chicken for dinner and a post workout protein shake. All of that together can cost less than $5/day. Of course I dont always eat like that but its a good example.