You know all that crap you have sitting around in your closets that you almost never use?

Sell it.

Get on eBay, Craigslist, wherever and sell your stuff.  It is amazing how much money you can get for all that crap you have laying around.

My suggestion, use craigslist.  It is faster, easier and less of a pain in the butt.

Meet people in secure locations, like Starbucks, and sell them your stuff that you don’t use.

“One man’s closet full of crap is another man’s Christmas presents for the family!”

This is the question that Mint.com asked me when I was trying out their “online money management website”.

Mint is a piece of software that will download transaction history information from your bank’s website, and put it up against your other account information to create a comprehensive reporting of where your money is going.

The trick is, if you are like me and spend alot of cash, it doesn’t explain everything.  The things it does the best with are your electronic transfers.  The times when you used your debit card to pay for things.

Some features that I liked:

It hooked into Sallie Mae and all my bank accounts, and then it calculated my net worth.  I don’t like my net worth, but to be able to monitor it here was very cool.

It will give you graphs that show you how your total spending breaks down.

It will help you set up a budget and monitor your spending.

If your account gets low, it sends you an email.

If you have an “alert” like a finance charge from the bank, it will tell you.

I’m on my phone posting this, actually.

I was looking for a barcode scanner application and found pricepad instead. It is a free app that allows you to save information about items you want to buy to your phone.
You can save name, price, barcode number, genre of item, and personal notes. Then when you are looking at the same item later, you can search through your saved items.

I am going to give it a try for grocery shopping, starting by putting the items from the circulars in first.

this is just a quick post to share a link that is awesome -

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/about/

this guy knows his stuff. it’s definitely a useful read.

cheers!

We went to King Soopers tonight and bought groceries:

Our total: $197.33

Store discounts: $26.84

Coupons: $9.30

Multiplied Coupons: $4.10 (doubled up to a dollar)

Grand Total: $157.09

We saved 20% on our bill!!!

Now for the fun part. We guessed at how many meals we were planning on getting out of this trip to the grocery store: (a meal may be breakfast, lunch or dinner. All numbers are guesses based on past experience)

Macaroni grill + chicken: 6 meals

Chili: 8 meals

Spaghetti in the crock pot: 6 meals

Sausage and O’Brien potatoes: 4 meals

Red Beans and Rice: 4 meals

Bagels + cream Cheese (1 for breakfast): 10 meals

Box of cereal: 7 meals

Total: 45 meals

Cost per meal: $3.49

This price per meal also includes all of the cleaning supplies that we got, and the $14.00 we spent on cat food (which we pay our grocery envelope back from our pet envelope, see envelope system). Without the cat food, the cost per meal goes to: $3.17 per meal.

I will try to update these numbers as we make the meals, to tell you how many actual servings we got out of each one. This way, you can have the true numbers as they come out.

We made all the meals we mentioned and were only off by 4 meals total, mostly because we just ate too much when we made it…Oops.  Either way, that means that we got away with $3.83 per meal that week.