Save $1,000 in 2008?
Bankrate.com has a collection of great personal finance articles. However, a new one entitled “7 easy steps to save $1,000 in 2008″ isn’t one of them.
Perhaps the most egregious error is that the article only offers six tips to save $1,000, not seven.
The article gets off to a weird start by suggesting ways to save on dining out. No mention of NOT EATING OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Better advice is to reserve dining out for special occasions instead of a fallback position when you’re too tired and/or lazy to make dinner at home. Yes, that’s harsh. I’m chastising myself too.
The second tip had me reeling, “Return unopened, unused items.” Huh? Who has tons of stuff they bought, never opened and never returned? It says, ” Nearly everyone has a recently purchased product they will never use.” That would be sad, if it’s true.
Then we get into the usual fare, of shopping grocery store sales and using the library to borrow books, movies and other items instead of buying them.
Then next, “Bundling cable, phone and Internet service” is an interesting one. This used to be a bad idea because you could get each service cheaper separately. It’s still true for those who don’t require the most robust phone and TV packages and can live with slower-speed DSL Internet service. But if you’re going to order phone service with unlimited long-distance and all the features, and you’ll get the top tier of TV programming with premium channels, then a bundle is probably cheaper.
Tip No. 6 says to negotiate with your monthly service providers, which is always a good idea to do periodically.
The last tip isn’t a savings tip at all, but a suggestion that you should invest your savings. It uses a made-up interest rate of 7 percent, which will double your money in a decade. Seven percent is an odd figure to use. Savings accounts don’t pay near that much. The preceding sentence also mentions possibly putting it in a mutual fund, for which 7 percent is a pretty meager return, depending on the type of fund.
Conspicuously missing from the list is one of what I call the “financial FITness” components. FIT stands for food, *insurance* and telecommunications. Shopping for lower insurance rates — home, auto, life — and raising deductibles are good ideas to save money painlessly.
Maybe I’m overly critical because I’ve written literally hundreds of articles like this myself — and because Bankrate.com articles — including some by the same writer — are often very well done and are worth checking out.
