It’s time for new year’s resolution, again! People’s most popular resolution is “to get fit, work out more, make time for the gym …” In other words, be fit and healthy. Well, I actually started mine several weeks ago. I enrolled in a weight management program (WMP) that not only teaches me how to eat the right foods, it also includes how to bump up my metabolism through exercises and trim those giggling stored fat cells with the end result of losing weight and toning the body. I do not consider this a “diet”, gone those and each time they work, once I get off them, I gain the weight back and then some. Sounds familiar? Yes, because diets usually deprive you with the food you like to eat. Once off the diet and your back eating the same foods that got you to be over-weight and fat! [Read more...]
Book Review: How to Make a Budget: Simple Budget Techniques and Tips on Saving Money
Book Review: How to Make a Budget
Recently I wrote about how to create a simple household budget that will allow you to track where you are spending your money. Bryan Carr’s Kindle Edition e-book, “How to Make a Budget: Simple Budget Techniques and Tips on Saving Money” takes the realm of budgeting a notch higher. His book not only helps you see where you money goes, but it also features several money saving tips that are quite useful, as well as what to do with the money you saved following his suggested frugal spending.
His recommended budgeting strategy is to create a baseline budget using data from your recent three months statements of all your bank accounts and credit cards, including receipts of purchases. Although he added receipts of purchases includes cash, this is where I find the baseline input lacking. We usually do not get receipts for our cash purchases such as your lattes, magazines, parking fees, fast food and the likes. These could add up to a lot when we calculate how much these are costing us for three months. This flaw, however, is compensated by the free budget template that can be downloaded from his site. I always prefer digital recording of dollars and cents rather than paper and pencil that is so yesterday. [Read more...]
10 Steps for Clearing Your Clutter
Uncluttered Room
I used to devote a day or two clearing my clutter and organizing my home. This usually happens either when I have company coming over or when I can’t barely move around the room causing me so much emotional stress. Yes, I dreaded those days so I procrastinated and did not do it often enough. When I finally committed myself to simple living lifestyle, I poured over magazines, books and Internet postings about how to declutter and get organized. I came to realize that clearing your clutter needs not only determination, but a practical plan from start up to maintaining the uncluttered room .
The best way to clearing clutter is to do it in baby steps, following a Kaizen way of personal life. This way, the task does not become overwhelming and it does not take all your time to create an organized, uncluttered room for your simple living lifestyle. While in the process of clearing your clutter, put your buying binge on hold. [Read more...]
Sold Our House In This Down Housing Market
Almost two years ago, we decided to sell our Southern California home of 13 years when we found out that we will be moving overseas and that there is slim possibility of moving back to Southern California after that move. Our real estate agent warned us that it may take a while to sell our house due to the down housing market. There are houses like ours that have been on the market for almost a year and are still not sold. I told her that I will give it a try and I will ask God to help me find a buyer.
Several weeks before we sign the listing contract, we started to prepare the house for sale. It was quite hectic. Firstly, we had to get rid of all our unnecessary “stuff”. My husband and I have different opinion on how to handle this situation. His style of getting rid of the stuff is to load them in a rented dumpster and let the dumpster’s company to deal with the stuff. I did not want all the stuff to clutter our landfills. I wanted to either sell the stuff on Ebay, Craig’s List or through a garage sale, and donate those that did not get sold. We also did not agree on what is unnecessary. Since we did not have a lot of time to agree on what to get rid of, we took the lame way – we got rid [Read more...]
Kaizen for Personal Life
Kaizen is a combination of two Japanese words, 改 (“kai”) which means “change” and 善 (“zen”) which means “for better”. Put together, Kaizen indicates “change for better”. It has been translated universally as “continuous improvement”. It signifies the possibility of change through slow, incremental constant steps, creating powerful quality improvements in business and manufacturing processes. Having been trained in management and quality engineering, I used Kaizen in my former corporate life.
Kaizen’s concepts are real simple, yet it takes discipline, consistency and determination to be able to adapt them in our personal life.
Living Debt Free
We live in a society that constantly inundates us with advertisement for this and that gizmo; why we deserve to own it NOW, coupled with the added enticement to pay later (“we accept credit cards” or “get easy installment payments” ). No wonder so many of us are in deep debt. I used to buy based on emotion – the ads convincingly enticed me that I really need it, so therefore I should buy it and buy it now. With no second thought, I used to pull out my wallet, pick out one of my assortment of plastics and proudly proclaim, “charge!”. You correctly guessed what I ended up with, mounting credit card debt.
When I finally became cognizant that I needed to change my lifestyle to pursue prudent living, I chose [Read more...]
Budgeting Made Simple
Do you know where your money goes?
Budgeting is for everyone – rich or poor alike. It is a useful tool for tracking where our money goes. It helps us to live within our means and get out of debt. It can also help us save for the future. Budgeting, simply put, is a spending plan.
However, before we can accurately set up a household budget, we need to have a good understanding of what we’re spending our money on.
Here are the stepping stones on how to create a budget:
SS-1: Keep Track of Every Penny Spent for the Next 30 Days
Buy an inexpensive small notebook and list every expenditure you make however small it may be. If you put a quarter into a parking meter, write that down, too. This is the best way – writing it down right after you spend. If this is too tedious for you, the next best thing is to recount the expenses you made throughout that day at the end of the day. This will require a good memory and not more than 15 minutes each day. Because I tend to forget [Read more...]