The particular money-saving idea I’m about to present is a timely one. It’s beginning to get warm outside. Soon, the prospect of turning on the A/C will begin to nag at even the frugally-minded. So I’m just going to jump right in and make a suggestion some people might think is crazy:

Stop using the A/C.

I’m also going to suggest that you refrain from purchasing any other cooling device to replace your air conditioner - except for maybe a cheap electric fan, since the running cost for fans is negligible.

I’ve estimated using spreadsheets created by Energy Star that I might spend $140 annually if I ran an energy-efficient room A/C unit, or $216 if I ran an energy-efficient central cooling system (FYI, here’s the spreadsheet for central air and here’s the one for room A/C). That’s too much money to spend on something that’s totally unnecessary. That’s right, I said it: air conditioning is unnecessary. You don’t need it and it wastes money.

Air conditioning technology has only been around for about a hundred years. That means that for hundreds of thousands of years of human history, people got by without A/C. And they liked it!

Okay, I’m not sure if they liked it or not, but my point is this: our culture has fairly strict standards about what constitutes “comfort,” and these standards aren’t by any means the only ones a person might choose to live by. If you adjust your own standards downward, you’ll save money, and this applies not just to air conditioning but to many choices all of us have to make every day.

But the idea of adjusting your standards downward is kind of depressing, isn’t it?

I don’t really think so - because the concept of what “upward” and “downward” mean is totally dependent on your perspective. As I pointed out in this recent post, you can change your personal finances for the better by changing your perspective.

If you start living without air conditioning, you’ll find you don’t need it. You can sit in your room and chat online without running the air conditioner. You can watch TV without running the air conditioner. You can have a conversation with a friend without running the air conditioner. You can even get a good night’s rest without using the air conditioner. I’ll admit that it takes some time to get used to that last one - but at this point I, having deprived myself of A/C for a long time, find that I don’t at all need it to get to sleep.

I assert that once you’ve adjusted your standards downward, you generally get used to it quickly and you stop even noticing the adjustment. It’s not “downward” anymore at that point, it’s just normal.

I would go so far as to assert that this applies to any choice you might make that does not directly impact your health, as I don’t advocate ruining your health for the sake of a couple bucks.

So what do you think? Is this idea too extreme?

If you try turning off your A/C this summer, I think that you’ll be able to adapt to the situation - and save some cash!

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

I used to have a friend who was incredibly cheap and swore by free haircuts at the local beauty school. It turns out that beauty schools are always looking for guinea pigs for the students to practice on, so if you have one in your area, try giving them a call. Not sure if you have a local beauty school? Check out this very extensive list of beauty schools throughout the US.

High-class salons will also sometimes cut your hair for free. They’re constantly trying out new stuff, and they like to experiment on non-paying customers. For instance, in NYC, there’s Bumble and Bumble. They force you to go through a screening first in which they evaluate the appropriateness of your hair (whee!) and you might have to wait a while until you can get an appointment - but haircuts at this place normally run you $100, so getting one for free is an incredible bargain.

Craig’s List is also a great place to find somebody who’ll give you a free cut. It’s as simple as going to the sub-site for your area and searching for “free haircut” under “services.” I was able to find free haircuts in Chicago, Phoenix, LA, Atlanta, San Diego, you name it. Thing is, these ads are often posted by cosmetologists looking to practice a certain style at a certain time, so your haircut will be on their terms and not necessarily your own.

I have to confess that I myself have shied away from free haircuts. I’ve always been a little bit frightened about what those students might do to me - but I have to say that my friend never got hacked up too badly, so it’s probably just prejudice on my part. If you consider yourself adventurous, this is a great way to save a little cash.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

Among the many things I enjoy in life, opening up bank accounts takes a spot pretty close to the top. Huh? you say. Just what kind of sicko are you?

Well, okay, it’s not really that I enjoy opening up the accounts. It’s not really that I even enjoy having the accounts. It’s not that I even use the accounts.

It’s just that I like grabbing up account opening bonuses.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out iBankBonus, a site that maintains a large list of banks across the US which offer sizable monetary bonuses for opening up accounts. The bonuses range anywhere from $25 to $200, and to get them you’ll have to fulfill a certain list of requirements, generally including monthly direct deposit.

The thing is, sometimes the banks get really tricky with the requirements. Sometimes there are obscure terms and conditions in tiny print on page 37 of some document you signed and if you’re not aware of these details you can end up having to pay a bunch of fees or you can end up not getting your bonus. And sometimes, the banks play dirty.

I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you several cautionary tales about the lengths banks will go to to not pay out these bonuses. I’ll also tell you about where I screwed up. If you decide to play the bank bonus game, I hope you’ll learn from my mistakes!

Bummed Out by BOA

This happened a few years ago when I was still a student. Bank of America was offering a $75 bonus for opening a checking account with a $100 opening deposit and monthly direct deposit.

I made it very clear at the branch what I was doing (that is, that I was looking to get the $75 bonus, and that this was basically the only reason I was opening the account, but that I might continue to use it if I was pleased with it) and the lady who helped me open the account was very good-natured and thought this was a creative way to make money. She helped me open up a student account. Because I had waited until 4:30 PM on the exact day the promotion was set to expire and didn’t have enough cash on me to make the opening deposit, I went to the ATM and used my credit card to get a cash advance of $100. (Note: it is generally a very bad idea to do this. In this case, I paid the credit card off by phone the very next day to avoid paying gobs of interest.)

A little while later, the bonus still hadn’t come through. I called in to ask why and was told that student accounts weren’t eligible for the bonus. Well, dangit! Why didn’t you tell me that when I opened up my student account?!

I dug out the original terms and conditions for the promotion and sure enough it said right there in very small print that student accounts were not eligible to receive the $75. What a bummer!

Hey, Citibank - you still owe me $200!

One of the most frustrating experiences I have ever had with any bank occurred when I tried to milk Citibank for a $200 bonus. The terms looked very simple: open up a checking account and a savings account. Make a large opening deposit. Set up direct deposit. You’d get $100 for making the opening deposit, and after 90 days, Citibank would give you the other $100 for maintaining monthly direct deposits throughout that period.

I opened my account over the phone. I waited for the related materials to arrive in the mail. They didn’t come, so I called back. My address had been mangled by the rep, so I gave it again. I was told that after my materials arrived, I’d have to go in to a Citibank branch to verify my identity.

The materials arrived, and I went to the branch and showed some ID. A very nice man took down all my info and faxed it over to Citi HQ.

I called customer service again to make sure I was all set up to receive the $200. It turned out that somehow the promotion code for the bonus hadn’t been applied to my account, so I had the representative apply it again. I was told that I was back on track to get the $200.

Right around the time the first direct deposit hit my account, I received a phone call from Citibank informing me that the account was being closed. “But why?!” I cried. Citibank had been unable to verify my identity. “But I watched the guy at the branch fax all that stuff in to you!” I protested. Tough luck; they hadn’t received it. They’d already spoken to me about this on the phone, they claimed - but the conversation supposedly happened on a day when I was on an airplane all morning and afternoon, and you can’t get phone reception at 30,000 feet! “What’s gonna happen to my opening deposit, and what about the direct deposit that just hit my account?” I asked. The funds would be mailed to me in the form of a paper check which would take a week to reach me.

We’re talking about thousands of dollars that were tied up. I’m just thankful that at that point, I wasn’t living paycheck to paycheck anymore (at one point, I was), so I was still able to buy groceries and pay rent.

I received the paper check within a few days, so that was nice. I assumed I’d still be receiving at least the first $100 of the bonus, which again was supposed to be credited based on the opening deposit I’d made, but that amount hadn’t been added on to the check that was mailed to me.

I called customer service to ask what was up. They more or less wouldn’t give me the time of day, so I worked my way up the chain of command until there was nobody else to whom the buck could be passed and I received Citibank’s final, official, answer: I wouldn’t be receiving the bonus because my account had never been opened!

I really have to applaud the creativity of this line of thinking. Somebody had to be really smart to come up with that. The only thing Citibank couldn’t explain is how one could make a deposit into an account that hadn’t been opened, and how an account that hadn’t been “opened” could be “closed!”

Bummed Out by BOA - Again!

I guess I didn’t learn my lesson the first time I tried to wrangle an account opening bonus from BOA because more recently I tried it again. This time I knew a thing or two about this game, I figured: I would refrain from opening a student account (I graduated a few years ago anyway), and I would open the account online to avoid any confusion about my address and about any promotion codes that needed to be applied.

I didn’t receive any materials by mail, so I called in to ask what was going on. It turned out that those materials had been mailed to my old address - the one that was on file from when I attempted to do the $75 promotion and was denied. I had definitely not entered that address into the online application. I had the representative fix my address.

The unfortunate part is that by the time I had the representative fix my address, the promotion had already expired, and BOA refused to honor it. I won’t go so far as to claim that they mailed the materials to the wrong address on purpose, but there shouldn’t have been any confusion about the info I entered into the application, so this mistake was at the very least a sign of sloppiness on BOA’s part.

So that’s the story of how I didn’t get the second BOA bonus, either. Dagnabbit!

The Moral of the Story

I know that some people out there probably think that I deserved to get screwed in the above instances for trying to play the system. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying to make a little extra cash from legitimate, legal bonuses offered by the banks, and I also don’t have any problem with banks enforcing their terms and conditions (though when they play dirty, that’s something else entirely).

Banks make offers such as these to bring in long-term customers. If they pay out $200 to somebody and that somebody subsequently chooses to use that bank exclusively for decades, the $200 was a smart investment. The banks also know that many people will not read the fine print and will screw up and that they won’t have to pay out a lot of these bonuses. It is my personal impression that some less honest banks also deny bonuses they have, in actuality, obligated themselves to pay.

The larger point that I’m trying to get across by posting all this stuff is that life these days is all about complications like these. Whether or not you choose to play the bank bonus game, it is always an excellent idea to read the terms and conditions. When you apply for a credit card or a mortgage or a lease or whatever, know what you’re signing up for. Know what you’ll be penalized for. Understand the full effects of every action you choose to take. That’s what financial responsibility is all about!

I hope you enjoyed these stories. If you’re interested in hunting down some bank bonuses for yourself, you should expect about half of your efforts to fail for one reason or another. Banks are pretty smart, and sometimes, they’re nasty.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

So I participated in five blog carnivals this week… and was awarded an editor’s choice in two of them! Hooray!

My Carnival Submissions

Carnival of Debt Reduction #138 - hosted by Rocket Finance and featuring my post So what are you doing with your economic stimulus check?

Carnival of Money Stories #58 - hosted by Free From Broke and featuring my post The economics of biking, which was honored with an editor’s choice. Neat!

Carnival of Personal Finance #151 - hosted by Alpha Consumer and featuring my post Gen Xers, Ys: Are we a bunch of spendthrifts? The post was honored with an editor’s choice. Hey, that’s pretty cool!

Festival of Frugality #124 - hosted by Frugal For Life and featuring my post Stuff I won’t buy cheap.

Money Hacks Carnival #11 - hosted by Save and Conquer and featuring my post Why I’ve stopped paying bills by mail.

My Favorite Posts

…that are from these carnivals but are not by yours truly.

Frugal Tips: How to make 10 ordinary things last longer - Some original tips here. From The Digerati Life (via the Carnival of Debt Reduction).

Free time or more money - which is it? - “When I was just out of college, all I wanted was money,” says Lisa. “Now, pushing fifty, all I want is time.” From Greener Pastures (via the Carnival of Money Stories).

Proposed: a month of extreme frugality - I totally support this line of thinking. This kind of brainstorming is what you have to do to master the art of cheapness. I don’t agree with all the rationale presented here, but the post is thought-provoking. From Funny About Money (via the Carnival of Personal Finance).

The ultimate guide to understanding the food crisis - This is a thorough and fascinating post. The only way it could really be better is if it magically transformed into an economic trend and forced those blasted food prices down. From Cheap Healthy Good (via the Festival of Frugality).

“Secret” eBay and Craigslist hacks that will save you thousands of dollars online - These tips could indeed save you thousands of dollars on big-ticket items. From Erica.biz (also via the Festival of Frugality).

How to save by making credit card payments more real and tangible - I totally support some of these tips but others I’ve disobeyed, like, 1000 times over. For example, I’ve exceeded the number of credit cards Dorian recommends (one) by exactly thirteen (I think I’ll post in the future about the reason why I do this). I see myself as a financially responsible person, so you might guess that I’m not in total agreement with all these tips. I’m recommending this post because it is well-thought out and provides a contrast to some of my own views. For instance, see my recent post about why Dave Ramsey has the credit card thing all wrong. From The Personal Financier (via the Money Hacks Carnival).

Other Links

How I Spent My Stimulus - A very clever and amusing experiment. This a blog where a bunch of people post about what they did with their economic stimulus checks, offering a really neat glimpse into other people’s lives. So far I’ve only seen one entry from a guy who tossed the check into an IRA.

Free Road Atlas - DHL will send you a free road atlas if you answer a couple questions and agree to receive marketing emails. I signed up. I hope this isn’t a chintsy little pamphlet - it looks like it’s a nice full-size atlas.

Okay - so I didn’t stumble across the free road atlas offer all by myself. For a while I’ve been reading this neat blog called Be Thrifty Like Us, which is pretty bare-bones but which always features useful info about coupons and freebies. In this recent post, they highlighted the atlas freebie offer. Due to the influence of this blog and Money Saving Mom, I think I just might get sucked in to couponing. Men are allowed to use coupons too, right?

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

Like many of us these days, I don’t have a land-line phone, which means I can’t use a regular fax machine, which means I either have to go to Kinko’s and pay wads of money to send and receive faxes, or find some roundabout free way of doing it. As luck would have it, there is, in fact, a roundabout free way of doing it.

No service I know of will allow you to both send and receive faxes for free, but there are several services that will let you do one or the other, so by using multiple services you can do everything you need to do without having to wheelbarrow your life savings in to Kinko’s.

Receiving Faxes

For receving faxes, I like eFax. Wait, I did say this was free, didn’t I? You may wonder why you don’t see any reference to “free” on their home page. Well, the free options are buried layers deep in their site. Don’t feel like going digging? Click here to sign up for an account that allows you to both send and receive faxes free for 30 days, or click here to sign up for an account which is permanently free but which can only receive and not send faxes (I’ve opted for the latter).

You’ll be assigned a fax number that’s most likely not located anywhere near you - mine is in South Dakota - which is reserved for your use only. When someone faxes you at that number, you’ll receive a file attachment at the email address connected with your eFax account. You’ll need to open that file attachment using the eFax Messenger software. The format of the faxes is proprietary, but eFax Messenger will let you convert to a PDF.

I’ve been using eFax for a couple years now and I’ve never had any problems with it other than the occasional junk fax. I’m almost certain that these faxes come from eFax itself, since very few people have access to my eFax number. I guess that’s the price you pay for free!

Sending Faxes

There are several services that will let you send faxes for free. I like FaxZero. It’s reliable and convenient and will allow you to fax a PDF or DOC file. I find that I’ll occasionally have a need to print out some kind of PDF form, complete it, and fax it in, but it’s easier and cheaper to edit the PDF on the computer and then fax it over using eFax - totally paperless.

I’ve attempted to use other such services before, but I’ve had problems with very limited coverage areas and with faxes simply not being sent. So far, I haven’t experienced those issues with FaxZero.

The catch is that FaxZero adds a page full of ads to whatever you fax, so it’s obviously not appropriate for certain uses. I wouldn’t fax a resume using FaxZero, for instance. Also, there’s a limit of two free faxes per day, although I think you could get around this by using a computer with a different IP address, or you could choose to shell out $1.99 for a fax with no ads.

These two services are very useful if, like me, you don’t have a land line. By using both of them together, I haven’t paid to send or receive a fax for over a year. Yippee!

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

When’s the last time you stopped by a Blockbuster Video (or any other major rental chain)? Their prices are insane! You can expect to spend $3-$5 to rent a DVD that’s not even new - one you could most likely purchase yourself for less than $10. Doesn’t this sound a bit batty?

Luckily, it’s not at all necessary to pay to rent videos. There are several totally free rental options, and if you take full advantage of all of them, you shouldn’t ever have to pay to rent a movie again.

Rent at the Library… For Free

I’m not sure why most people don’t think of this. It didn’t occur to me either until I was already at the library one day and discovered there was a big room full of DVDs and the selection was awesome. In addition to the requisite action, comedy, drama, and horror flicks, they have a whole bunch of foreign films, music DVDs, and other specialty stuff that you can’t find at Blockbuster. My library rents videos for free. I think there are some that charge a small rental fee, but it’s never as much as one of the big rental chains would charge. The library might not occur to you as the first option for renting videos, but it has the huge advantage of being free (or darn close).

Rent By Mail… For Free

Many online rent-by-mail services offer free trials. Even Blockbuster is operating its own rent-by-mail service. I’ve used it before and I certainly prefer it to paying $4 a pop in the store. Anyway, there are enough of these services that you can go for quite some time without having to fork over any dough. When one trial runs out, cancel it and move on to the next one. Online rental services have two additional advantages: convenience and, in most cases, an absurdly huge selection.

Blockbuster Online - 2 week free trial.

DVD Avenue - Use promo code “tuner” to get a two week free trial. If it’s expired, try checking RetailMeNot for a new code.

eHit.com - 10 day free trial. Specializes in Asian films, but has a fairly large selection of other stuff.

HiT Movies - 15 day free trial. Note that adult video rentals are a big part of their business. The site is not extraordinarily offensive if you stay out of that section, but I thought I should warn you.

Netflix - 2 week free trial.

Tiger Cinema - 10 day free trial. Stocks Chinese, Japanese, and Korean films, with a small selection of other stuff.

Watch Online… For Free

Just recently, some services have popped up which will allow you to watch streaming movies online, which means there’s no need to check out a DVD. Some of these also offer free trials:

CinemaNow - 3 day free trial.

TotalVid - 7 day free trial. Deals only in “specialty” videos (anime, sports, instructional, etc.) and TV shows.

Vongo - 2 week free trial.

Rent From a Video Rental Kiosk… For Free

Red Box is the big name in video rental kiosks - that is, the automated rental thingies that are popping up at lots of grocery stores these days. Red Box offers free rentals every Monday if you know where to find the coupon codes. Credit goes to Hustler $$$ Blog credit for making me aware of this tip.

DVDPlay is another video rental kiosk company. They’re not as widespread as Red Box, but they offer one free rental to anybody with an email address (or - don’t tell them I told you - as many rentals to one person as that one person has email addresses). Click here, give them some marketing info, and you’re ready to go.

Oh yeah, note that I’ll receive a commission if you click on some of the above links and rent videos. I’ve made every attempt to not let this affect my unbiased reporting, but I just figured I’d let you know.

Enjoy the free movies!

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

So it occurred to me recently that in this day and age, there is really no reason to pay your bills by mail. Doing so is wasteful in at least two ways: 1) you lose most of your ability to profit from float and 2) you’re forced to use stamps, which are getting expensive.

Theoretically, you want to keep your money in an interest-earning account until the last possible second, but paper checks make this tough to do. Generally, you lose out on the period of float between the time you write the check and the time the funds are actually deducted. You could try to calculate when the funds will actually leave your account and update the balance then, but in my opinion, that’s too much of a pain and is likely to lead to mistakes. It’s better to pay by a method that’s immediate. Here are a few options:

Pay Directly Online

Most car insurance companies, electric companies, gas companies and so on will now allow you to submit your payment directly online. This is nearly always a good idea, especially if you can pay by credit card (then you can take advantage of cash back and an even longer period of float). The exception is if the company charges a fee for this service, and some do.

Use Your Bank’s Bill Pay Feature

If the company you need to pay charges a ridiculous fee for paying directly online (what a silly thing to do!), you can use your bank’s online bill pay feature. Most banks, even small ones, now offer this service. If you don’t have online access to your account, ask your bank to set you up. In general, the bank will mail out a paper check to whatever person or company you want - for free. I’ve even used this feature to send checks to my friends before. The bank doesn’t care if the recipient is a business or just Joe Schmoe.

I’m always a little bit wary that the bank isn’t going to mail the check out on time, so I don’t cut it too close. This means I give up float in favor of saving a stamp. If you’re good at math, you’ve probably already figured out that this does not benefit you if the check is really large. In such cases, it’s better to keep the advantage of float and pay for the stamp.

Pay in Person

On several occasions, I’ve also paid my credit card bills in cash by going to a branch of the bank that issued the card. The purpose of doing this is to take the greatest possible advantage of float. It usually isn’t worth it to go out of your way to pay in person unless the payment you need to submit is really large and you’d lose out on a lot of float.

For instance, let’s say you need to pay off a $10,000 credit card bill. If you’ve got a bank account or some other investment that earns you 5% interest, you’ll make something like $1.37 for each day you don’t pay off the bill (not counting any late fees the bank will assess if you don’t make your due date, so for goodness’ sake, pay on time). Paying by mail forces you to submit the payment earlier than any of the other methods I’ve described, and that’s not what you want. Generally, the advantages are much smaller than this, but hey, I’m all about sweating the small stuff!

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

In case you didn’t know, tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day. Comic book retailers across the country will be giving out free stuff. The rules for how the giveaways work differ at each store, but if you’re at all interested in comic books, you might as well stop by and get a free one. You can check out the official Free Comic Book Day website here.

I haven’t read a comic book in a long time. When I was a kid, I was nuts about them. Still, I wouldn’t mind a some Superman or a little X-Men… as long as it’s free.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

I was walking down the street the other day when I passed by a bunch of newspaper vending machines and one particular headline caught my eye. “Affluent Gen Xers, Ys spurn lavish life,” the headline read. Fascinating, I thought. I wasn’t aware that there was any tendency toward tightwaddery in my generation. I felt like reading the article but instead of plunking my quarters into the machine I remembered the headline and continued on home and pulled up the article online, saving myself 50 cents or whatever the paper cost.

Anyway. The article points toward an encouraging trend among people in their 20s and 30s - a trend away from consumerism and conspicuous consumption, a trend toward environmental consciousness and financial stability. The article refers to these individuals as “yawn”s - that is, young and wealthy but normal. These are basically filthy rich young adults who choose to live frugally. They could live any way they want to but they recognize the power of their wealth and choose to use it for stuff more enriching than displaying their richness.

Well, that sounds alright.

Then I happened across this MSN.com article which aims to explain “Why Generation Y is broke.” (”Is it because we’re dumb, arrogant, or simply uneducated?”) The article cites some pretty depressing statistics which are intended to prove that Generation Y is deep in debt and doesn’t know jack about personal finance. It’s getting deeper in dept. These young adults are too engrossed in MySpace and AIM to care about compound interest and all that.

First of all, I think it’s interesting that the media can paint these two incredibly different pictures of the same group of young adults, and it’s interesting that different talking heads can talk in totally different ways about the same thing. I’ve gotta question - which trend is legitimate? Or are they both legitimate? Are some people working themselves deep into dept while others are a million miles away from that madness? Is this generation really screwed?

What do you think?

I’ll share with you what I think. I think that on the whole Americans of any generation don’t know much about personal finance. Maybe the current crop of young adults is particularly bad - I’m not really sure. There are always going to be a few people who “get it,” and there’ll be others who flounder around and get themselves into big nasty messes.

But I don’t think my generation is in trouble just because it’s engrossed in Web 2.0. I think this generation has a greater power to sort through and pass judgment on a greater amount of information than any generation ever before. We’ve been dealing with it since birth - all the advertising, the electronic media, the whatnot.

If this generation had been taught to pay attention to personal finance - to understand the rules of money - we’d master it the same way we’ve mastered the intricacies of Facebook. But nobody ever taught us the value of living cheap. Nobody ever taught us about the power of compound interest. Big surprise that so many people don’t understand how to play the game, or even in some cases that the game exists.

We’ve got to have teachers in schools teaching their students about all of this. Why isn’t this happening? One reason is probably that the teachers don’t understand personal finance. They’re in debt themselves. Look at the statistics: Americans across all age groups are overspending!

I’m hopeful about the ability of this generation to understand personal finance if given the chance to learn. People need to start reading their credit card terms. People need to understand what they’re doing when they apply for mortgages. The world is getting more complex by the minute, and this generation has demonstrated that it has the ability to deal with complexity. That’s why I think we’ll be okay if we can manage to educate ourselves, since the American education system hasn’t done much to teach us about money.

Come to think of, motivation may be what this generation really lacks. If something isn’t handed to us, we won’t reach out for it. We won’t read personal finance books unless forced to. We have short attention spans. This is a trait that has to be overcome. Once it is, Generation Y will be very well off - in terms of economics and in terms of other kinds of richness that are much more important than that.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!

So I recently spent about $100 on bike supplies. It’s rare for me to blow $100 on any one project or thing, so you might guess that there was some special rationale behind this expenditure. There was.

I inherited my bike from my dad. It was a top of the line model in the 70s. The upside of this is that it has the feel of a top of the line bicycle and the downside is that it has the look of an artifact from the 70s. Ever since I moved to LA, the bike had been sitting in the storage room at my apartment building with a busted tire and cobwebs all over it. Then the other day, it hit me: biking would improve my health, lessen my cost of living and remove me from the horrendously stressful situations that I seem to get into whenever I’m behind the wheel of my vehicle.

I had been neglecting my bike for a couple reasons. Getting the tire fixed was too much of a pain, and I had concluded that it was too dangerous to try biking in the urban jungle. There was also the simple fact that the bike was out of sight and out of mind. But you know what, now that I’ve got it all fixed up, none of these reasons really seems like a legitimate obstacle, and I’m glad I can use it again.

One of the reasons I enjoy my bike - and it’s not one of the less important ones - is the way it makes my life cheaper. Let me explain.

As I said, I invested about $100 in bike supplies. Here’s what I got for my money: a new tire and inner tube, a bottle of slime for preventing flats, a tire patching kit, a pressure gauge, a gel-filled seat cover, a helmet, and a pump. I spent $30 on the pump alone and I seriously hesitated before making this purchase, calculating how many times I could fill up at using the $.75 air machine at the gas station before the pump would pay itself off. Then I actually tried filling my bike tires at the gas station and found I couldn’t achieve the tire pressure I needed, so I buckled down and bought the pump.

I calculate that if I use my bike to commute to my part-time job each day, this $100 expenditure will justify itself within a couple months. How’s that? Well, I live about 5 miles from my job, and I calculate that it costs me about $1.50 to drive this distance (maybe I’ll post again in the future about how I arrived at this number). When I bike, it costs nothing. So assuming I don’t have any more maintenance costs in the near future, I’ll start profiting from my investment in those bike supplies after 33 round trips (33 x 2 x $1.50 = $99). That’s not counting other trips I might make using my bike instead of my car.

But wait! you cry. Biking wastes time, and time is money! Well, biking takes a little longer than driving, but when you live in a congested urban area, there isn’t really that much of a difference. Including the time it takes to park my vehicle and walk a short distance on both ends, commuting by car takes me about 30 minutes. Biking takes 45. But you know what, biking is also great exercise, and I’d have to spend at least 30 minutes in the gym to equal the exercise I get by commuting round-trip to work on my bike. (And actually, one of the main reasons it takes 45 minutes on my bike is because I travel a roundabout path that uses mostly less congested side streets which seem safer to bike on.)

Biking offers real economic benefits for me. It’s also an easy way to get exercise, and it’s way more relaxing than driving. Perhaps it’s a little more dangerous. I can’t really say, although this article claims otherwise. I’ll keep my helmet on, stick to the side streets, and continue to enjoy the many tangible benefits of biking. Does that sound too cheesy? I’m serious - I really enjoy biking and don’t regret blowing the $100!

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to my RSS feed or subscribing by email!