A Buck A Day!

I am on a diet.....again.

As I try to lose weight (6 pounds in 6 days) I have noticed that I am saving money...!

Here is how...

Lets do this for a typical week for me... I usually eat out twice a day for 5 days (work) and eat at home the other 2. My average ticket at the restaurants is about $7....

2 meals X $7 X 5 days = $70

My new plan cost me $10 per week for shakes, and a small meal with snacks. My snakes cost me $5 per week and my meals average $1.73 each at the store. Plus on my 2 days off I eat at home.

$5 + $10 + ($1.73 X 5 days) = $23.65

So I am saving $46.35 each week on food that I would have normally been spending!
Hopefully I can use that money to buy me a new wardrobe in about 6 weeks!

Read more about my actual diet at www.TheFoodieWithin.com

One way to save a little money is to take shorter vacations. I recently took a mini vacation to San Antonio with 2 friends. We left on a Saturday morning and returned on Sunday afternoon.

Here is how we saved some money. We booked out hotel on priceline.com, we also booked a room close enough to the riverwalk so that we could walk there instead of driving or getting a Taxi. Since there were 3 of us we were able to split the cost of the room 3 ways. We also bought our SeaWorld Tickets online and saved another $10 each. We had free hot breakfast from our hotel, so that saved us even more money.

Before we even went we also decided to take the smallest vehicle between the 3 of us. Since I drive a truck I was out of the running. We saved about 50% in gas since we took a car instead of my big ol truck.


I am not saying that you need to stop going on vacations, I am just saying that you can go have a Great time and ome back rested with a mini vacation. I actually just requested the day off instead of using up my vacation days!

If you manage your own investments then you need to rebalance your portfolio every 3 months. One investment should never be more than 20% of your portfolio.

Example:

Anadarko 8%
Bonds 11%
BP 10%
Cash 12%
GE 15%
Exxon 15%
Microsoft 15%
Yahoo 14%

At first glance this looks somewhat diversified, but upon further inspection you will see the problems that need to be fixed. Anadarko, BP, and Exxon are all Energy plays, this represents 33% of this portfolio, Some of these positions need to be sold off and invested into another sector, maybe retail or food. Also you see Microsoft and Yahoo, these are both tech companies and the point could effectively be argued that they yahoo is more of a media company then a tech company, but it follows the trends of the tech sector more than the trends of the media sector. I would personally pare back my positions in Microsoft or Yahoo to make a combined total of 20%.

This needs to be done every 3 months simply because some investments will lag while others will prosper, eventually your portfolio will be lop-sided and no one wants a lop-sided portfolio.