Getting More Than You Bargain For

We all like to get our money's worth. Sometimes we get even more and it's not always all good. One area that this idea stands out is with food.

Over the years, my wife and I became very accustomed to eating out and using convenience foods. "Time is more valuable than money", as I used to convince myself. We would pay "small" premiums so as to save time spent cooking and cleaning up after meals. "Who has time to make a sandwich when I'm working so many hours?" The excuses start to catch up to you.

As we are trying to make a dollar last longer, we have looked more critically at the choices we make. Now we are eating out very infrequently and coming up with cheaper, healthier, more enjoyable alternatives.

On one business trip, I was sitting in a chain restaurant deciding what to have for dinner. As I was watching what I eat, I was thrilled to see a heart icon next to several dishes. Wonderful! A "heart-healthy" meal! I narrow down my choices to one great sounding dish, then look at the dietary details. To my horror I read the following: "Sodium - 1200mg". Just great. So I won't have high cholesterol, but I will die the death of a slug on the sidewalk.

I once was prescribed a treatment by a doctor that had me taking in 900mg of sodium. At least that had a skull and crossbones and a very clear warning that if I didn't drink a whole bathtub of water I would surely perish.

I read the details of every dish. I'm convinced they were trying to shorten their waiting list by killing off their customers. They must have had a commission deal with the funeral home next door.

Since then, I have become fanatical on reading labels at restaurants, when available, and on processed food packaging. Read enough of this stuff and you find one common thread. The food service industry, generally does not care about your health, as long as they can produce a food product that has a look, feel, taste and smell that will sell more product than their competitors, at less of a cost.

Let's say it again - most food purveyors are not ultimately concerned about your health.

To add insult to injury, I'm paying a premium for all this convenience??

Let's end this with a couple of quick comparisons:

- A meal out for my family of four, will cost between $40 and $120. For $40, I could buy four 1-1/2" filet mignon steaks, salad, fresh vegetable and a decent bottle of wine. Hmmm - that sticky table at T.G.I. Fridays or home?

- Coldcuts/sandwich meats at every supermarket or deli by us are going for $9-$10 a pound. For around $2 a pound we can buy fresh turkey breast, or roast beef, cook it and slice it, then freeze small portions for sandwiches over the coming weeks. For years, we were paying 5 times the cost, so that we could get the extra benefits of convenience, extra sodium, preservatives, artificial flavorings, artificial colorings and texture enhancers??

Nobody is going to be your advocate except you. Take the time to realize what you are buying. Make healthier, more cost effective decisions. Your life, and how you live it, are riding on it. An additional benefit to all of this is that we are teaching our children to live better, healthier lives, with less.

Are You Paying for Your Neighbors Groceries?

We all have different tolerances to, or thresholds for, accepting pain. Financially, this presents itself in different ways. One way you might see evidence of this is in gas prices. Gas prices go up and one individual will drive across town to save a few cents per gallon, while another will decide it's time to buy a new Hummer. Marketers are well aware of this and design their pricing strategies towards getting the most from each type of customer.

A company will develop their product's marketing plan with the expectation that some people will buy the product at full price, while others will buy the product only once discounted or on sale. Marketers use incentives such as rebate programs and coupons to entice these prospective customers to buy. These incentives are an easy way for a product manufacturer to get the higher profit from full price sales without losing sales to those who feel the product is too expensive. This strategy is used with every product from Cheerios to Chevy's.

It's wonderful if you can afford the luxury of paying full price, but why would you? If I asked you to pay more for the groceries in your cart so that the person behind you could pay less for the same products, would you do it? If you are not using available coupons for any given product, that's exactly what you are doing. You are subsidizing someone else's weekly groceries. If that’s your intention, kudos to you – very noble.

By using coupons you will minimize this subsidy. Of course you are probably weighing the benefit of saving a few dollars with the time spent "couponing". We typically spend about 20 minutes a week collecting coupons and planning our purchases to take advantage of the available manufacturer and store coupons. That 20 minutes of effort produces a savings of around $20.

Let's do the math:

• $20 divided by 20 minutes equals $1 per minute. That would also equal $60 per hour.

• To have $60 per hour to spend, we would need to earn around $80 per hour, before taxes.

• This indicates that the benefit of couponing, by our estimates equals earning roughly $80 an hour.

So for those of you who are making more than $80 an hour, stop reading, throw out your coupon wallet and get back to work instead. For the rest of us, this could be pretty sweet. Watch your newspaper for your local supermarkets' circulars. Search coupon websites online. Once you get in the routine of couponing, you'll wonder why you had been paying full price all along.

Below is a list of resources for finding coupons online.

• Use the Coupon Search Engine, at left - Enter the name of a product you use to find online coupons for that product

Some of the sites below require free registration:

• CouponMom.com – Grocery and dining coupons, sample and free trial offers and e-mail alerts for products you use

• WowCoupons.com – Grocery, dining and travel coupons, as well as rebates

• CoolSavings.com – Grocery and retail coupons

• RetailMeNot.com – Retail store coupons and online discount codes

• Coupons.com – Grocery and retail coupons

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. There are thousands of sites available. Likewise, this is not an endorsement of any of these particular sites. Please use the above resources as a starting point to see which services are most beneficial to you.


Happy couponing!

The 80/20 Principle

The 80/20 Principle can give you a significant advantage in the decisions you make and by being super-effective with those decisions. The 80/20 Principle, also known as the Pareto Principle, looks at cause and effect relationships and finds a very common occurrence:

There is a natural lack of balance between inputs and outputs, causes and consequences, and efforts and results.

Simply stated, the 80/20 Principle holds that for most relationships. 80% of the results come from 20% of the efforts. Of course, the percentages may not be exact from situation to situation, but are found to be strikingly close. These are some examples of relationships that are found to fit the 80/20 Principle:

· 80% of profits coming from 20% of customers
· 20% of the world’s population control 80% of the wealth
· 20% of an office’s problems will come from 80% of the staff
· 20% of our clothes we wear 80% of the time

(OK Chris – where is this going?)

· 80% of our effort produces 20% of the value we receive

· 20% of our effort produces 80% of the value we receive

We spend the bulk of our time doing things that are not beneficial to us and do not help us reach our goals.

Let the last few lines sink in – reread them even.

We are wasting our efforts approximately 80% of the time. Wow! It’s time to rethink what we do.

What if we could take that 20% of the things we do that are really helpful and repeat that part, while avoiding wasting our time, energy and efforts doing what we do 80% of time with little or no results? This implies that we can create more success in our lives, by being very aware of how we spend our time and focusing on the things that really make a difference in our success.

As a few examples:
· In business, we should consider which group of customers is really providing our revenues and consider how to create more of those customers. Likewise, if some small group of our customers is creating most of our problems, maybe it’s time to “fire” those customers?
· On a personal level, are we wasting large portions of our time at home doing things that aren’t helpful and are actually distracting us from doing the few things that will really make a difference in our lives?

I realize that this all seems abstract, but living in a day when there never seems to enough time or enough money, can we afford to not see when we are wasting our time and money, with most of the decisions we make? Take the time to understand this natural inefficiency and learn to become more productive with the time you spend towards any goal.


(For more information, I would encourage readers to read more on the subject. The book "The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Success by Achieving More with Less", by Richard Koch is a real eye-opener to how we can become substantially more effective using this perspective.)

Video Game Drain

Marketers have come to see our kids as a huge target audience. Why? Studies have shown that the largest portion of a family's discretionary income (the money left over after having paid our "must-pay" bills) is being directed by kids - think $100 sneakers and jeans. A second reason is that if they lure the kids into their customer ranks now, they have many years of marketing to that loyal customer - potentially 50 years or more.

How does this translate into a success action step for you and your family. The answer is twofold.

First we need to educate our kids. When you are with them in front of the TV and the commercial comes on for that latest greatest toy, take the time to explain that behind that commercial are some pretty smart people who are doing anything - yes, sometimes even lying - to talk your kids out of their money.

Secondly, try this technique: I sat down with my son one day while he was alphabetizing his Nintendo games (he is his father's son). We did a quick count that came close to 100 games. I then walked him through the math:

• 100 games at an approximate cost of $50 each equals $5,000 spent
• What are they worth now? (His answer: Little or nothing - maybe $5-$10 each)
• 100 games at a current value of around $1,000
• He lost about $4,000 in about 4 years

I asked him what he thought it would be like to have invested $5,000 in Nintendo or some other company. If the company's ROI (Return on Investment) was an average of 10% (a very reasonable historical average for this kind of company), he would have earned over $2,300 in that four years. Don't underestimate your child's ability to follow this. It will start some great conversations for the next few days. Even your kids will get that buying all those games was a waste.

I am not saying your child should never buy a video game. But maybe cutting the purchases in half and investing the rest could be a great decision for the whole family.

Savings Auto-Pilot

Imagine it's Payday. We're feeling momentarily rich. It's time for the little things that we have held off on all week. A Starbucks Carmel Macciato at lunch. Friday or Saturday spent doing dinner out and a movie. That quick run to the mall for those shoes you wanted all week.

STOP!!! – So far you have paid Starbucks shareholders, the restaurant owner and his wait staff, Ben Affleck and Steve Madden. Have you paid yourself? Have you put money aside for your rainy day or your future? Ahhh – just as I thought! It's just too tempting with Friday's check making you feel financially invulnerable. It's time to make some simple changes.

Much of the savings that we need to do can be put on auto-pilot. We live in the age of automatic wire transfers or ACH debit/credit transfers. Everything from general savings/investments, to retirement savings, children's education savings and savings for medical needs can be put aside automatically on a schedule you set.

If you have a standing order set up with your financial institution, they will transfer money from your main account – let's say your checking – to other accounts. Let's say that your weekly paycheck is for $500. You deposit that in your checking account and have orders set up to move $75 to your retirement account (maybe a Roth IRA), $50 to your savings account, $50 to your kids' education (possibly a Section 529 Plan) and another $25 to a Health Savings Account. At the end of the year, you would have $3,900 in retirement, $2,600 in savings towards your next car, $2,600 for education and another $1,300 for medical needs. You never once had to decide if this was a good week to save. It's automatic.

The best part is that by knowing that you really only have $300 to spend ($500 paycheck less $200 in forced savings), you will spend less. You won't fool yourself into feeling richer than you are and making purchases that you probably shouldn't.

If that isn't enough, many people forget one thing: good decisions (or bad ones) can have cumulative effects. Above we described a scenario with a person saving a total of $10,400 from $26,000 in take-home pay. What is the impact in five years if we keep that up? $52,000. It adds up quick.

If you are your own worst enemy when it comes to your finances, take the decisions out of your hands and put your savings on auto-pilot! Talk to your bank or investment brokerage to see what options they have available.

These ideas just scratch the surface of automating your savings. If you have a question, there is probably another reader/subscriber wondering the same thing. Please post your question using the comments section, below this post. I will be happy to go into greater detail in any area that seems to be of interest to all.

Live Well (Within Your Means)

We had touched on the area of over-consumption. So many of us today are very competitive in our need to have the latest and best (name your indulgence here). "Things" become our identity and our barometer of success, to ourselves, as well as to those we seek to impress: family, friends, neighbors, co-workers and clients. This might be in our clothes, cars, cell phones or expensive toys.

For a fleeting moment we have purchased happiness! Quickly we realize that we were mistaken. We have only assumed debt, filled our garages, added to our maintenance responsibilities and if we are lucky, we realize some great salesperson just talked us out of our money – again. Over time, that weight lifting equipment or motorcycle gathering dust in the garage becomes a constant reminder that we wasted our money.

If you are in the top 3% of Americans who can really afford those things, buy up! Hire someone to inventory your shoes! But for the rest of us, we should learn from the millionaires.

Millionaires don’t take out loans to buy boats or ATV’s. They don’t use home equity loans and credit card debt to finance vacations. They save. Then when they are done saving, they save some more. Eventually they have developed a series of nest eggs that can begin to provide extra income for that vacation, or boat, or home theatre – while paying CASH.

But you are looking longingly at the new BMW your neighbor just pulled up in. Forget it. He probably can’t afford it either. You’ll only be following him into the vicious debt cycle that most Americans are trapped in – picture the hamster wheel spinning freely while you get nowhere.

You want to break the cycle that almost all Americans are living in? Try something drastically different. Live like a pauper. Hold your head up high and declare that you have the patience and discipline to live well within your means. Impress yourself, as you watch the zeroes build on your bank statement. If you have the conviction to do what you believe in, you don’t have to impress anyone else.

Hit Pause

As the description of this blog indicates, we are looking at discovering or creating a better life at home. One routine that we began in our home was the Sunday afternoon dinner.

We all are busy during the week and for many families with kids, the weekends can be just as busy. Between religious obligations, sports activities and playdates, it can be hard to get the family together for five minutes. Time to hit the Pause Button!

We re-connected with something that we came to know as kids as the big Italian Sunday dinner. There are different variations of this, but simply put, it was a mid afternoon event where family and friends sat for hours to relax with the ones they loved over food and drink.

We found that this time frame works well for us. By Sunday afternoon most programmed events are over. As I tend to start work very early on Monday, I am already distracted by thoughts of work by early Sunday evening. Perfect – a couple of unplanned hours to reconnect with family before the week starts again!

Often, this time is spent at a simple restaurant. Our favorites are an Italian restaurant, which made its way out to Long Island from New York City’s Little Italy, and a Japanese restaurant where we can sit in a cozy, private room enclosed with shoji screens and with pillows to sit on.

At around 2:00 in the afternoon, most restaurants are not too busy and therefore, the meal can be unhurried. We use the time to really catch up with each other and what’s going on in each other’s lives. No one is racing from the table to “go check on something” or to start cleaning up. It’s the one moment we really seem to see and hear each other.

Life is short. Hit the Pause Button for your family and capture a few quality moments.


- Peace