Andy Hough

Walk, Don’t Drive

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You can save money by walking instead of driving. The option of walking might be more feasible than you think. I used to think that it would take too long for me to walk to school.

My car needed repairs last week so I had to walk to school. I was pleasantly surprised that the walk only took about 20-25 minutes which is less than what I thought. I really should walk to school everyday. It would save gas and provide me with needed exercise.

Now that my car is fixed I should continue walking to school but it is too easy to drive. I didn’t walk today because it looked like it might rain. I can see myself making these types of excuses pretty often. What I discovered last week is that I don’t really need a car. When the option of driving is removed I find another way to get where I need to go. The only reason I can justify having a car now is that I might need it for my future job. When I get a job if the job doesn’t require me to have a car I might sell my car. This would save me money on gas,insurance, repairs, registration and whatnot. The drawback is my car isn’t worth much so the best way to get the full value out of my car is to drive it until it just won’t go any more. And the fact that I like the freedom of being able to hop in the car and drive somewhere whenever I feel like it. I just have to decide if the drawbacks are bigger than the money saving advantages.

Alternative Income: Mystery Shopping

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One of my alternative streams of income is mystery shopping. This is not a very lucrative job. Many of my mystery shops amount to little more than a free meal. I mainly do these mystery shops as a diversion not as a way to seriously make money.

As an example I did a mystery shop earlier this month that paid $11 but I had to pay about $7 for my meal out of the $11 leaving me with only about $4 actual profit. When you add in the time spent entering the report and faxing the receipt you’re really not making much money for the time invested. This is why I only do mystery shops at places that are close to me and where I would normally conduct business anyway. There are exceptions, I’ve been paid $100 for mystery shops but the high-paying shops are very rare.

If you are interested in doing mystery shops do not pay for information. The way I got started is by reading the mystery shop page at Volition.com. Look at their list of mystery shop companies and read their mystery shop forums and sign up with the companies that interest you. That is how I signed up with the 3 different mystery shopping companies that I do work for presently.

Alternative Streams of Income

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Over at Lazy Man and Money he has a category on alternative income. His goal is to have his alternative streams of income match his expenses. This has also been a goal of mine for a long time so I’m going to start tracking my alternative income as well.

Since I don’t have a job right now my only sources of income are alternative streams of income. My income last month was $205.00 and my expenses were $839.12. That leaves me with a gap of $634.12 to go. Or to express it another way I’m at about 25% of my goa. I will post monthly on my progress.

My income should go up for this month but unfortunately my expenses willl probably go up as well. I plan to have several posts detailing the different things I do for alternative income.

Daylight Saving Time and Simple Living

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There are many advantages of frugal living. One of them is apparent when making the switch to Daylight Saving Time. The only appliance I had to change the time on in my house was my alarm clock. I also had to set the time on my cell phone and car. My laptop updated automatically. My total time spent was probably about one minute.

I read an item in the paper about a guy who was complaining about having to change the time on many different appliances in his house. If he was living simply he wouldn’t have had that problem. That is just one example of how living simply has its advantages.

Dumpster Diving Lite

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I received a mailer of coupons from Chick-fil-a in the mail yesterday. The coupons included ones for a free chicken sandwich and a free chicken biscuit. What made these a really good deal is that no purchase is necessary. I don’t have to spend any money to get my free sandwich.

This is where the dumpster diving comes in. Since this is such a good deal I wanted more coupons. There is a small trash can in front of my apartments mailboxes that people use to dump their junk mail. Digging through this trash can I found 5 more discarded mailers. It looks like I’ll be eating a lot of Chick-fil-a this month. I’ve dug through this trash can before to get Northwest Air coupons that I sold on eBay.

I call this dumpster diving lite because this trash can only contains discarded mail. That makes it pretty clean. I’ve never tried digging through the actual dumpster with people’s rotten food, dirty diapers, and such. It would probably take more than a free chicken sandwich to get me to dig through the garbage dumpster.