Frugality

My latest money and health hack involves not buying a parking permit for school this semester. That saves me the $96 cost of the permit. I have classes starting at 8am Tuesday,Thursday, and Friday. If I arrive on campus by 7:30am I should be able to get a parking spot on the street. If not I can park at metered parking for $0.75 an hour. Having to feed a meter should provide me some motivation to get to school early.

Now for the health part of the hack. To be absolutely sure that I can get a parking spot on the street I plan to arrive to school before 7am. I am going to just get out of bed, get dressed and go. I’ll need to take my shower at the fitness center and since I’m already there I’ll get a workout in. This is somewhat like the plan I had earlier this year to go without hot water at home, forcing myself to shower at the fitness center. That plan was derailed by the closing of the locker rooms and showers for remodeling of the fitness center. Since the remodeling is all finished the plan should work this time.

There is one more way this plan should help my money and health. In the past I usually went out for a fast-food lunch when at school. I can’t do that now because I’d be extremely unlikely to be able to find another parking spot on the street when I returned. This means I’ll need to pack my own lunch which will be cheaper and healthier than a fast-food meal.

Using this hack will make it simpler for me to save money and improve my health. I’d love to hear any money and/or exercise hacks you guys have.

I’ve posted a review of A Million Bucks by 30 on my other blog Bank Bonuses. I’m also giving away a copy of the book. You can enter by leaving a comment on this post or the review post. The only stipulations are that you can only enter once and I’ll only ship the book in the U.S to keep my mailing costs down. The deadline for entering is 8am on Friday Aug. 15,2008.

I love movies and watch a lot of them. Here is how I manage to do it on the cheap.

For DVDs I mainly use Redbox which I have posted about before. Now it is an even better deal.  When you sign up for their SMS alert system they will send you a free promo code every Monday. This month they are also sending free promo codes on Wednesday. Since the codes are good for each credit card you have I sometimes rent two movies using different cards and then have one to watch on Monday and one to watch on Tuesday. As long as I remember to return them before 9pm the rentals are free. Luckily, I have a Redbox that is only a three-minute walk away. We also have a $5 Netflix subscription to allow us to watch movies that aren’t available on Redbox.  Our cost per movie for Netflix and Redbox together is well under a dollar and even under 50 cents if we watch more movies than usual.

The other new thing I discovered this year is seeing movies cheaply by taking advantage of store promotions.  I’ve been taking advantage of these all summer and I haven’t had to pay full price -full price means full matinee price,of course- for me and my GF’s movie tickets yet.  An example is on this Slickdeals thread.  If you buy 4 Axe body wash or spray at Walgreen’s you get 2 movie tickets free.  The cost would be a little less than $7 making your movie tickets less than $3.50 each.  And you get to use the product as well.  I wouldn’t normally use Axe but I will to take advantage of this deal. If you can get a deal like this for a product you already use then it is like getting the movie tickets for free. I just go to Slickdeals once a week or so and do a search on the word “movie” to see what promos are available. I shouldn’t have to pay full price for a movie ticket for a long time.

Over at My Money Blog, Jonathan did a post about an Affordable Bucket List.  One item on his list was running a marathon which he listed the cost of as being from free to $$$.  Many commenters replied that running a marathon was very expensive and couldn’t be done cheaply much less for free.  As I stated before in my post Keeping Hobbies Inexpensive people are taking something simple and making it more complicated and expensive than necessary.

I’ve run four marathons and haven’t spent a fortune to run them. Registration fees are usually the item I spend the most money on.  You can easily save money on these by running in smaller races.  An example close to me is the Heart of America marathon which has a $25 entry fee.  You can use the Marathon Guide to find inexpensive marathons in your area. You can also often save money on race fees by registering early.

The next big expense is shoes. I usually spend only about $30 on my running shoes.  Many people think you can’t possibly get quality shoes for that price but I disagree.  I’ve run four marathons and have never had any knee, ankle, or feet problems despite being about twenty pounds overweight.  The trick here is to buy shoes that were originally more expensive and have been marked down to about $30.  When I lived in Nevada I bought my shoes at Big 5 Sporting Goods which usually had a good selection.  I bought my last pair of shoes here in Kansas City at Off Broadway shoes.  I try to purchase a brand that I’ve used before and had good results with such as New Balance.  You can find New Balance shoes cheap online here.  They had New Balance running shoes for under $30 when I checked this morning.

The last expense would be running apparel. You don’t really need to spend anything on this.  You can run in an old pair of gym shorts and a t-shirt.  Running shorts will be more comfortable though and help prevent chafing.  My solution for cheap running shorts is to buy swim trunks when they go on clearance at the end of the season.  This is what I’m currently using and they work fine and the cost was about $5.

Those are the only things you need to spend any money on to run a marathon.  I’m not counting food since you have to eat anyway.  There is no need to buy any gels or special foods.  Since I’ve always been overweight when training for marathons I didn’t feel a need to buy any extra food at all. The key to running a marathon on the cheap is the same one to doing many things on the cheap-keep it simple.

Since I’m soon going to be unemployed I need to replace my job income. Towards that end I decided to brainstorm ten ways to make more money. These are the first ten ways I came up. Not all of them are good ideas but I just wanted to think of some ways to increase my income. I’d love to hear any ideas you have about making money also.

1. Get another job- This is the most obvious idea. It is going to be a fallback for now because I really want to make money from my own business and want to be free from any schedules.

2. Sell plasma- This could be done whenever I felt like it. I probably won’t do it though because there isn’t a collection center close to me and I think there are other things I could do that would have a better return.

3. Increase my blog income- This is easier said then done. Several things I could do to possibly increase my income are add adsense to this blog, add other affilliate programs, post more often, promote my blog, and change the design. There are many more things than that but that is a good start.

4. Launch more web sites- I won’t be launching any more blogs. I can barely keep the two I have updated. There are some other sites I want to launch. I have several domain names and have being doing research on PPC and keywords and such. I just need to get the sites launched.

5. Write articles for Associated Content- This isn’t a big moneymaker but I like to write and this would be a good place for articles that aren’t appropriate for my blogs. I can also publish and be paid for articles that I later make in to blog posts.

6. Other writing- I’m sure there are other places online that pay you for writing I just need to do some research and find out what they are. Also I could submit articles to offline publications.

7. Tutor- My LSAT score is high enough to qualify me to tutor but the one test prep company I applied to didn’t hire me. I’d prefer to do this on my own but am not sure how to go about it. I need to develop some tutoring skills. I have the knowledge but am not good at imparting it to a student.

8. Be a Guinea Pig- I’ve done many medical studies in the past and made good money from them. I need to call the local clinics and see if they have outpatient studies I could do while in school.

9. Surveys, Mystery Shopping, etc- I could also look to increase the little things I do for extra money now. This isn’t a very good option though because there are a limited amount of opportunities available and most of them don’t pay much for the time invested.

10. Sell stuff- I don’t own much but it would be helpul to sell a few things before I move at the end of September. What I really need to sell is the few hundred comic books I have in storage at my mom’s house. The vast majority of these books were bought at cover price or less and I got my value out of them when I read them. There really isn’t much point to keeping them now but I’ve delayed doing so out of laziness and a belief that I should be able to sell them for more than what they would fetch on Ebay. I need to research whether an Ebay store or some other way would be the best way to sell them.