money saving tips – Page 6 – Luv Saving Money

Finding Scholarships for Your College Major

My oldest son is at the end of his junior year of high school. He’s been attending college fairs, he’s scheduled to take his SATs, and he knows what he wants to go to college for, and even which college. He’s looking at biology with a fisheries major. His ultimate career goal would be to work for the fish and game commission.

We found out that in Pennsylvania, there is only one school that offers this major as an undergrad program and it’s Mansfield University. I’ve asked for guidance from other parents who have recently been through the college application process (it really is overwhelming). Also doing my own searching and education has yielded some results. Of course the hope is always that maybe he’ll qualify for a some grants and/or scholarships.

If we take my son’s fishery major as an example. I started doing searches for scholarships, fisheries scholarships, and scholarships specific to Mansfield University. I was actually surprised to find several. One of which was the Ralph Abele Conservation Scholarship that includes several conservation majors in Pennsylvania including fisheries. I was able to find this buy searching the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat commission website. I also found that many colleges and university have scholarship funds set up from donations and trusts specific to the university and even majors. There are scholarships geared towards auto mechanics out there too. If fixing damaged cars is your thing, there’s scholarships out there for you.

There are scholarships that anyone can apply for but are lesser-known like the Melvin Brewing Scholarship. This scholarship is for students who are currently enrolled either full-time or part-time in a college or university. Melvin Brewing Company also does a fair amount of Philanthropy work around Jackson Hole, Wyoming and beyond.

This post is sponsored by Diamond Links.

3 Easy To Use Money Management Tools

Creating and managing a budget can be difficult. Even if you are not a business owner, it is important to organize your finances so that you are able to afford the things you want, and save for your future as well! There are many tools available which can help you with tracking your spending, paying your bills, and assisting you with saving and investing for the future.

One such app is called You Need A Budget (YNAB). This tool has a very intuitive interface, and syncs all of your accounts in one place. Having everything in one spot makes it simple to take an overview of your current financial status, and where you can make improvements. You are also able to sync up with family members so you all have instant access to the budget plan. YNAB costs 84 dollars a year, but on average customers save around 6,000 dollars! You can find out more about how YNAB differs from other budgeting apps here.

Secondly, it is important to make sure you are saving! It is recommended that 20 percent of your income goes towards savings. Chime bank has a helpful automatic savings tool which rounds purchases to the nearest dollar. The roundup is then transferred into your savings account! Chime also has no fees which can save you over 300 dollars a year. The average individual spends around 329 dollars a year on banking fees, so a bank with no hidden fees is another great way to save!

BillGO is another great app for assisting you with your budgeting and finances! BillGO allows you easily view all of your bills on one simple app. Everything is always up to date, and the app is extremely easy to use! They even have option which makes it easy to split bills. This feature is perfect for those who have roommates and may be splitting rent and utilities!

Although creating a budget and managing money can be difficult, there are tools out there to help. Find the app that works best for you, and get your finances back on track!

Ways to Turn Your Money into More Money

When you’re sitting on your savings, your wealth is growing only as fast as you can save. Worse yet, every dollar and cent of your savings is losing value thanks to inflation. You need a better solution: You need to earn interest. You need to use your money to make money. Here are four ways to do that.

Buy a house

If you’re paying rent, you have an expense that is not helping you much in any meaningful sense. Sure, you need a roof over your head, but it would be much better to own that roof (and, you know, the whole house under it). If you buy your home, you’ll still pay something every month, but you’ll also be the owner of a very valuable asset.

And that asset could actually grow in value. Over time, homes of distinction can be worth more and more. If and when you sell your home, you may find that the money you spent on it has created more money for you.

Buy stocks

Budgeting and saving are important, but they won’t help you generate much real wealth on their own. To really get rich, you need interest. And to get maximum interest, you need to do more than just stash your money in a savings account. You need to invest.

Stocks are the obvious choice. Stocks are shares in companies, and they can increase in value over time and be sold and traded. As a beginning investor, you may want to be a bit careful: Aim for a diverse portfolio (a simple path to diversity is to invest in funds, such as exchange-traded funds and mutual funds that hold lots of stocks within them) and minimize risk.

Once you’re comfortable with your nest egg, you may want to take some spare cash and make bigger and riskier moves. That could mean targeting riskier stocks, or it could mean opting for other forms of investment entirely.

Invest in bonds, commodities, or currency

When it comes to investments, stocks are the obvious example. But, of course, there are far more things that you could be investing in. Take real estate, for instance, or bonds. And then there’s currency, which you can bet on simply by converting your money to the currency that you think will increase in value (relative, of course, to the U.S. dollar and other currencies). Like stocks, these investments can be as risky or safe as your strategy. The complexity of some of these markets does, however, tend to attract more daring investors.

Currency is a particularly exciting place to invest right now because of cryptocurrencies, which are digital currencies made possible by blockchain technology. Be careful, though, because cryptocurrencies have been quite the wild ride of late. The potential for huge gains is there, but so is the potential for damaging drops in value.

The best cryptocurrency to invest in is the one that you can afford. Cryptocurrencies should be a growth area for you, not a retirement plan. But if you use them right, and bet on the right cryptocurrencies in the long term, you could get a very nice boost to your wealth sometime down the line.

Invest in your education or business

There are a few powerful ways to turn your money into more money in very direct and immediate ways. But there are always ways of reinvesting your money in the person who got you this far — yourself.

You work hard to earn your money, but maximizing your effort isn’t the only way to maximize your earning power. You can and should also improve your earning power by growing your resume or your business. Consider using the money you’ve earned to invest in a course that will award you with new certifications and resume items, or take the money you’ve made and use it to expand the business you run. Eventually, more money could come back to you in the form of increased earnings.

Which States Have The Biggest Holiday Budgets?

Stats provided by Wallethub.

I live in a little town in Pennsylvania. Cost of living is low but job opportunities are also more scarce than other areas. I sometimes watch those car commercials where the luxury car is sitting in someone’s drive way with a bow and think who does that? Well maybe it’s more common in your area.

So who are the big spenders around the US?

Cities with the Biggest Holiday Budgets
1	Flower Mound, TX ($2,761)	11	San Ramon, CA ($2,036)
2	Sunnyvale, CA ($2,575)	12	Cary, NC ($2,010)
3	Naperville, IL ($2,528)	13	Plano, TX ($2,006)
4	Mountain View, CA ($2,524)	14	Troy, MI ($1,965)
5	The Woodlands, TX ($2,444)	15	Palo Alto, CA ($1,940)
6	Bellevue, WA ($2,411)	16	Rochester Hills, MI ($1,919)
7	Sugar Land, TX ($2,321)	17	Pleasanton, CA ($1,913)
8	Allen, TX ($2,244)	18	Newton, MA ($1,888)
9	Pearland, TX ($2,238)	19	Rockville, MD ($1,870)
10	Maple Grove, MN ($2,156)	20	Shawnee, KS ($1,842)

Hmm I wonder if I have any relatives in any of these areas lol? Seriously though, if you’re from this area do you think these stats hold true? As a family of 5 we don’t even spend as much as those in Shawnee, KS apparently does for Christmas. I’m wondering though if those stats include things like holiday dinners, travel, wrapping supplies, and everything that goes along with that?

And how about these stats:

Cambridge, Massachusetts, has the lowest debt-to-income ratio, 17.91 percent, which is 4.2 times lower than in Menifee, California, the city with the highest at 76.10 percent.
Fishers, Indiana, has the lowest expenses-to-income ratio, 59.13 percent, which is 1.7 times lower than in New Haven, Connecticut, the city with the highest at 99.43 percent.
Metairie, Louisiana, has the highest savings-to-monthly expenses ratio, 219.41 percent, which is 2.2 times higher than in Glendale, California, the city with the lowest at 98.21 percent.

Interested to know where your town/city ranks? You can find out on Wallethub HERE

Being a family of 6 plus buying for other family members we could get into debt up to our eyeballs if we wanted to but we don’t. We set a budget per kid and a budget per family member that we buy for. Hubby and I have a budget for each other too. If it means one kids only gets one thing because they wanted a laptop while someone else get 5 things and still doesn’t hit max budget that’s ok. It helps when they’re older and understand budgets and the value of money too. I also save my cash back rewards and survey site rewards until about October then cash them in to help take a dent out of holiday spending too.

Deferred Interest: How It Can Cost You

This post is sponsored by Diamond Bloggers. Any opinions expressed are my own. Data provided by Wallethub.

The average shopper is set to spend $1,007 this holiday season. A good chunk of that will be put on credit. It’s not uncommon for stores to push their credit cards and offer things like first time purchase discounts and deferred interest. You’ll here “yea if you open up a store card today you have no interest for a year” which sounds like a good deal but stores know what they’re doing. 82% of people are unaware of how deferred interest actually works.

WalletHub recently released it’s 2018 deferred interest survey and it’s Store Credit Card Landscape report to help you with these retailer financing options.

Deferred interest is when a retailer advertises a low introductory APR – often 0% – and gives a consumer the chance to pay for their purchases without interest, only to slam them with interest charges (as if the regular APR had been in place from the start) if they are unable to do so. This can result in a shopper spending up to 27.5 times more on interest relative to a normal 0% credit card offer.

Retailers almost count on a consumer to not be able to pay off the debt in the time frame they offer the 0% APR. Let’s say they offer 0% APR for 1 year, You’re paying it on time you’re doing good but maybe you’re only making the minimum payment or a little more thinking “I’ll have it paid off by the end of the year” but something happens that you can’t. On day 366 boom all that interest they would have normally charged is sitting on your credit card now. All that work you did to pay on time and it’s like starting from the beginning because of the interest charges.

So what do these surveys from Wallethub have to say?

Key Findings:

85% of store credit cards with 0% intro APRs have deferred interest.
82% of people do not know how deferred interest works.
79% of people, who understand how deferred interest works, think it is unfair; 62% think it should be illegal.
64% of people say 0% financing is a bigger draw for a store card than a first-purchase discount.
The average store card with a first-purchase discount gives 29% off.
The average store credit card has a regular APR of 28.62%.
The average store credit card with a 0% intro APR has no interest for nearly 17 months.
All store credit cards have $0 annual fees. The average general-use credit card charges $15.88 per year.

Expert Commentary:

The cost of a happy holiday season all too often seems to be some post-New Year’s pain, as overspending catches up with us and expensive interest charges start rolling in. In the past five years, we’ve spent a total of $3.2 trillion on holiday shopping and racked up $238.8 billion in credit card debt during the fourth quarter.

A lot of times, people plan for a bit of post-holiday debt. But other times, would-be holiday savings can turn into big surprise bills due to a dangerous feature of most retailer financing plans called deferred interest. Deferred interest is when a retailer advertises a low introductory APR – often 0% – and gives a consumer the chance to pay for their purchases without interest, only to slam them with interest charges (as if the regular APR had been in place from the start) if they are unable to do so.

Although 85% of 0% APR store cards have deferred interest, fewer than 2 in 10 people even know what it is. So consumers who are unfamiliar with the term are not alone, but most shoppers are vulnerable to getting burned by this trick. One big reason for that is major retailers don’t seem to care about being more transparent. They don’t tend to list what the regular, deferred interest rate will be in large enough font or in a prominent location. And their average transparency scores are unchanged dating back to 2015, according to WalletHub’s research.

“Marketers and retailers are always trying to make money. Some will exploit consumers’ weaknesses and vulnerabilities in order to do so,” said Kelly Goldsmith, an assistant professor in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “This has probably been true since the dawn of commerce, and it will probably never change.”

But perhaps unsurprisingly, consumers who learn what deferred interest is, how it works and how common it is aren’t happy about the situation and want change. Nearly 8 in 10 people say deferred interest is “unfair,” while more than 6 in 10 people go as far as to say it should be illegal. Indeed, it is fair to wonder why regulators would allow this type of “gotcha” pricing to persist, especially after so many other financing tricks were eliminated in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

“I think it should remain legal because it can be a good deal for all parties involved, but I think it should be highly regulated,” said Rick Scott, associate professor of finance at Saint Leo University. “Borrowers should have to sign a short, well-worded, and easy to understand disclosure that they understand that the 0% financing is temporary and that they should be on the hook for substantial interest charges if they do not pay off the financing by the end of the teaser period.”

In the meantime, there are plenty of other ways to prevent deferred interest from costing you. You could take advantage of a 0% retailer financing offer, despite the risks posed by deferred interest, as long as you’re prepared to pay your bill in full by the deadline. You could also get a 0% credit card on the Visa, Mastercard, American Express or Discover network, which won’t have deferred interest.

Or, you could strive to pay for your holiday purchases in full within a single billing period. Rewards can really help with that. For example, the average store credit card with a first-purchase discount gives 29% off. And several general-purpose credit cards have sign-up bonuses of $500+ for spending a few thousand dollars within a few months of opening an account.

As long as you have a plan and stick to it, there’s no reason your holiday cheer has to come to an end come 2019. Not even deferred interest needs to spoil the fun.

“The internet age has made it easier than ever before for consumers to educate themselves about the various costs and benefits associated with promotional offers, like deferred interest financing,” Northwestern’s Goldsmith said. “Consumers should take advantage of this amazing advantage they now have and use these resources to inform their decision making.”