Chapter 2

Smart Spending will give you your investing money

      Some of us have lots of money just sitting in our bank accounts, so much money that we don't know what to do with it. You fortunate souls can skip this chapter.

      The rest of us may feel like it's been impossible to save because we are barely making ends meet. We're living paycheck to paycheck, juggling payments on our credit cards and loans all because we couldn't wait to have things.

      Maybe we've had no choice. Raising children is so expensive, with the high cost of clothes, child care, after-school activities, and maybe braces. The price of gasoline makes us crazy every time we have to fill 'er up, and our utility bills are high enough to start a revolution. And taxes?  We all agree they're way too high!

      So how can we find an extra $2,000-$3,000 a year to invest? Well, we only need to save $5.48 each day. In this chapter you will not only learn how to automatically save $5.48, but much, much more.  But this isn’t the way:

       My ex-wife, bless her heart, came home with a pretty new dress. She assured me that it was too good of a bargain to pass up, "It was free”!  It was obviously an expensive dress, so I asked her to tell me why it didn't cost her anything. "Well", she explained, "it was on sale for half-off the regular $200 price. So I bought it with the $100 I saved. And since the sales tax was less, I really came out ahead."

      I guess it takes a person with a special kind of logic to see the world this way. (But then maybe she was hoping it would make sense to dumb ol' me)

       My earliest experience with frugality was watching my mother saving aluminum foil and using it a second time for roasting or baking. She also saved the rubber bands from the newspaper that was delivered every afternoon. She would carefully compare the supermarket ads for bargains, and of course, clip the coupons.

       My mother canned fruits and vegetables that we grew, darned our socks, made our Halloween costumes, and re-used Christmas wrap and ribbons. She hung the laundry out to dry instead of insisting on an electric dryer. We exchanged some clothing with cousins and baby furniture too. Our hair was always cut at home.

       Of course every aluminum can and soda pop bottle was saved like it was made out of gold. My mother always seemed to know which kind of things went on sale in which months. But nobody would say she was cheap or a spendthrift or a tightwad. This was all a pretty normal way of saving money.

      Then there was an uncle, who bragged how he had a way of reusing vacuum cleaner bags. He would even put his electric bill and payment in the same envelope with his neighbor's, to save a few cents on postage. He must have had a mile of string stuffed in a drawer, along with dozens of 1 inch pencil remains. He re-used his calendars, since every 7 years (except leap years) January begins on the same day of the week. He drove a 25 year old car.

      He only wore one color of socks, black, so when the wicked washer/dryer duo would eat one, he was never left with a sock without a mate. His shower curtain had been repaired so many times with duct tape that you had to laugh at it.