Buying Groceries

One way to save money on your grocery bill is to buy everything fresh and cook from scratch. Packaged food is usually a lot more expensive even with deals and coupons. However, packaged food is often easier and are a great way to go for a busy night.

There is an easy way to tell if you are getting a good deal or not. See what you usually pay for fresh food per pound and apply that pricing to packaged food. For example, most of the fruits, vegetables, and meat that I buy are around $.99/lbs, maybe $1.19/lbs. Therefore, I look at the packaging I buy and if 16 oz of something is about a dollar, then the package is a good deal.

You might spend $1.99/lbs on fruits, veggies, and meat on average, so, for you a 16 oz package of something should cost around $2, an 8 oz package should be a round a dollar and so on.

Rule of 72

If you need to quickly figure out how long it will take you to double your money at a certain percentage rate, you can divide 72/percentage rate. For example, you found a mutual fund with an average return rate of 8% and you invested $1,000. You'll have to wait 9 years (72/8) for the investment to become $2,000.

Lower Your Credit Utilization Ratio

Credit utilization ratios look at how much credit you use opposed to how much credit you have available to you on all credit cards. If you are using too much of your available credit limit, your credit score can be negatively affected. Ideally, the credit utilization ratio should be below 10%. However, many financial advisers will say below 30% is fine. Therefore, if you have a $3,000 credit limit on all your credit cards, you cannot spend more than $1,000 per month if you want the credit utilization ratio to be below 30% and no more that $300 if you want the credit utilization ratio to be below 10%.

Opening more cards could be a solution as your available credit would go up and, therefore, your credit utilization ratio would go down. If you do not want to open any more cards as having the inquiry for the application for credit will appear on your credit report for 2 years and will also negatively affect your credit score, there are other solutions. It's simple. Pay your credit card twice a month to lower this ratio. If you have a total credit limit of $3,000, but constantly make around $600 in purchases per month, pay $300 of your credit card charges before a statement is created to lower the statement balance to $300, making your credit utilization ratio 10%. Credit Karma has an estimator to see what your score would be if you made any changes. See what happens when you lower your credit card balance. Remember that your statement amount is your credit card balance weather you pay it off each month or not.

Easy Conversion for Hourly Wage to Salary

Quick tip: If you quickly need to know how much your wage per hour equals in yearly salary, you could do it in two seconds. Multiply an hourly wage by 2,000 and the result will be the actual salary with two weeks of unpaid vacation. For example, $25/hour is $50,000 a year per this rule. Actually, it is $52,000. However, most hourly positions do not have paid holidays, so take away two weeks for vacations and you will get $50,000.

Rule of 100 - Portfolio Diversification

To know how much of your portfolio should be invested in stocks vs. bonds/CD/other safer investments, you can use the simple rule of 100. What you need to do is subtract your age from 100. For example, if you are 25: 100-25=75. You should have 75% of your portfolio invested in stocks and 25% in bonds, etc.

Of course, if you want to be more aggressive, you can invest more money in stocks or the other way around. If you want to be safer, you can invest more money in bonds and CDs. However, the rule of 100 can provide a basic guideline.

A New(ly Discovered) Search Engine

Nowadays information is readily available, however, sometimes you just want a snapshot of what you are looking at or a clear 'yes' or 'no' answer. Here is a great search engine WolframAlpha. The search engine will tell you almost about anything with a quick snapshot. This is great for checking out a company if you want to buy the stock (type: Google), finding out the population, weather, and median home price of a city (type: Washington DC), by finding out how much you will pay in interest over a life of the loan (type: loan 10% interest 10 years $10,000), etc.

 

Try it out and look at the Examples page to see what else this search engine can do.