Staying out of debt is difficult.  Terribly difficult.  It isn’t made any easier if you rationalize yourself into debt, either.  Many of us spend a good deal of our time and energy trying to get out of debt, and stay out of debt.  We do that through so many devices, and each have our own system that helps us along the way.  Budgeting is obviously a big tool that many of us use to make sure that we have enough money to pay the bills, and ourselves at the end of the month.  We figure out how many months it will take to pay off this debt, or that debt, and then budget out that amount over that many months.

Sale © by markhillary

Many years ago, I spent a few years working as a salesperson at a retail store where bigger ticket items were popular.  Computers, televisions, and cell phones were big sellers, and good for commissions.  As part of our training for our jobs, we were trained on the many ways to sell a customer on the item they were looking at, and even how to convince the customer that they needed the upgraded item.  One of those sales tactics was to help them rationalize the purchase.  And, chief among the ways to do that was to take the price of the item, break it up over a set amount of months (24, 36, 48, 60) and tell them how much they’d be spending “a month” for the item.  Suddenly, that $2000 computer (it was that long ago) becomes a $25 a month purchase.  Psychologically, people are more likely to purchase something if it’s under $100.  Even if that “under $100″ is in the form of a monthly payment for several years.

Salespeople are the only ones we have to watch out for when it comes to this tactic in particular.  Pay special attention the next time you’re looking at purchasing something.  See how many times over the next month, you attempt to rationalize a purchase based on what it will cost per month on credit over what the total price will be.  I think you’ll be surprised just how often you use that same sales tactic on yourself.

Don’t rationalize your way into debt.  Fight back, and stick to your guns.  That purchase has a total price.  And if you’re buying it on credit, that price will be far larger than if you had purchased it with cash.  More importantly, don’t saddle yourself with more debt just because the “monthly” price is more palatable.

As you know, I started my new job last week.  I also had a very busy last few weeks away from work.  As a side effect of all of that, I haven’t had the time I would have liked to have had to write posts here.  I’m hoping that will change some in the next few days, but for now, this is the best you’re gonna get.   I’ve got a few nice posts up my sleeves, so keep your eyes open for those.

In the mean time, don’t forget to go and enter to win one of the copies of Money Rules in the giveaway that I’ve got going.  The odds are still pretty good, and it ends on tomorrow!  Go enter to win a copy of Money Rules!

Beating Broke was included in three carnivals last week:

Carnival of Money Pros hosted by Young Adult Finances

Carnival of Financial Camaraderie #32 hosted by Young and Thrifty

Yakezie Carnival – The Facebook IPO Edition hosted by One Cent at a Time

Thanks to all of the hosts for including my posts!

Working from home is an increasingly popular choice for many people who may have found entering, remaining in or returning to the general job market a struggle. Parents wanting to balance working life with caring for their children are perhaps the most likely group of people to want to work from home, since doing so allows for maximum flexibility.

There is a whole range of businesses that can be operated from home, from will-writing, to copywriting, to ICT support and phone-based sales. Approximately two million businesses are based at home in this country. As well as being flexible, basing your business at home is much cheaper than arranging premises. You may well have to check with your local planning office as to whether or not you need permission to change the use of your home from ‘private dwelling’ to ‘business premises’ but other than that you can make your business fit around your home life without much adaptation.

Wiarton Insurance © by Explore The Bruce

However, it is important to remember that just because you are working out of the safety of your own home, there are still liabilities and responsibilities that you owe to your customers, the public and any employees. You will need to make sure that you have adequate employer liability insurance in place for all manner of situations that might apply to your business.

Special business premises insurance will probably be necessary to cover the building and contents that might not be covered by your standard home insurance. Indeed, if you are running a business from your home and there is a fire or theft, you might find that your existing home buildings and content policy provider refuses to pay out if they were not informed that you were running a business from home. That’s because running a business from home can increase the risk of theft or fire and your premiums won’t necessarily have reflected that risk. This situation can leave you without a pay-out for any part of your losses, whether or not they were connected to your business.

If you have any employees, you are legally obliged to have Employers’ Liability Insurance (if you don’t, you will receive a hefty fine per day) of at least £5million to cover potential claims made by your staff.

Public Liability Insurance standard cover offers £2,000,000 of cover and as it’s so hard to guestimate what kind of cover you might need, this is a fair level of cover to aim for. Other types of insurance can offer different levels of cover depending on the type of business you’re running and the value of the things you want to insure. So for example, if your business is mainly office-based, you can estimate the value of your office equipment and the time it would take you to replace any lost data. If you keep stock at home (e.g. if you are in sales) then you can easily place a value on the maximum amount of stock you’ll have at home at any given time and buy sufficient insurance to cover it.

You can even choose to take out ‘business interruption insurance’ to cover periods when you are unable to carry out your business but still have overheads to meet like wages.

Even if you get separate business insurance, you must inform your home insurance company that you’re operating a business from home or you might find that your home insurance is invalid. Similarly, check that your car insurance doesn’t just cover you for social and domestic purposes and that it does in fact cover you for business travel.

Finally, if your business involves any kind of expertise offered to clients, you should also get Professional Indemnity Insurance to protect against claims that you have been negligent in the advice offered.

The Work Revolution

By: Dr. Julie Clow

There are so many gurus and life coaches out there that are telling everyone that they can that the only way to truly be happy with work, is to leave work, and get on an entrepreneurial journey.  There’s books, seminars, and more than enough websites that are dedicated to helping you find a way to escape the daily grind that is your work.  Dr. Clow thinks there’s a better way to go about it.  In The Work Revolution, Dr. Clow lays down the argument that it isn’t that you need to find an escape from work, but that work as we know it is in need of a revolution.

The 9-5 workday has it’s roots deep in the factories and assembly lines of the industrial revolution.  Dr. Clow posits that we are deep into the throws of a new revolution.  An information revolution.  No longer are we constrained by the physical localities that we work, and often find ourselves working with others within our company that are in entirely different timezones, and even different continents, than we are.  Work needs to change, she says, and we have to help it.

Of course, the book isn’t all about just the hours we work.  And, it’s not just about what we as the employees and workers can do to change work.  Each of the sections has a dedicated section for employers and leaders on how they too can help change the way we work, and make our companies better.

If you aren’t ready to make the jump to self-employment and entrepreneurship, or just don’t want to, but aren’t satisfied with the work environment that you are in, take the time to read this book.  It’s full of lots of information and new ideas on how work can be given a push in the right direction towards change.

On a more personal note, it’s interesting to me that I ended up with this book for review at almost the exact same time that I was making a decision on returning to the workforce.  Many of the points that Dr. Clow makes on how work is broken, and how companies are dysfunctional stuck out to me as things that I had become unhappy with in my old job.  At the same time, I saw many of the things that she suggests as ways to make a move towards a work revolution that were already happening at what would become my new job.  Just that fact alone has made me much more comfortable with making the decision to take the job.  Proof positive that The Work Revolution is a good book to read even if you’re currently looking for a job!

Beating Broke was included in five carnivals last week:

Carnival of Financial Planning – Edition #234  hosted by Personal Dividends

Yakezie Carnival – Earth Day Edition hosted by The Frugal Toad

Totally Money Carnival #65 hosted by Debt Black Hole

Festival of Frugality #334 hosted by This, That and the MBA

Financial Carnival for Young Adults #10 hosted by 20s Finances

Thanks to all of the hosts for including my posts!

This is a bit of a hard post to write. If you’ve been following the I Quit My Job series, you’ll know that I quit my full-time job back in November 2011 and have been working a part-time job and running my websites ever since.  With any journey that entails so much change, things are always changing.  Several weeks ago, I made the decision that it was about time to start looking for a new full time job.

Resume t-shirt © by WikiThreads

Why, you ask?  Do you want the simple answer, or the complicated one?  The simplest answer is that I’m running out of money, and need to earn more.  Obviously, there’s more to it than that, but that reason is the largest of the bunch.  In truth, it’s less of a reason as it is a symptom for a few other reasons.  One of the biggest of those reasons is a lack of preparedness.  When I quit my job, it wasn’t after months of planning and saving.  It was a decision that I came to after a week and was based far more on an unhappiness with the position I was in.  I don’t regret having made that decision, and I truly feel like I’m in a better situation now than I was there.  The fit of the position and I had fallen out of sync, and it was time for me to go.  Nevertheless, it wasn’t the soundest decision financially.

When I quit, I decided to give the new situation of blogging and a part-time job 6 months to see where it went.  While the part-time job remained fairly stable, the blogging income has been anything but.  My income on that front has fluctuated by several hundred dollars from month to month, and hasn’t grown at the rate that I had hoped it would.  Because of that, and the fact that I was operating on limited funds to cover any differences between my income and what we needed to pay bills, I’ve got to make the right move here and get a job.

In a way, I feel like I’ve failed.  But, sometimes, you have to fail in order to move ahead.  I’ve failed in that I wasn’t able to grow the income from this and other sites at a rate that would allow me to continue doing what I’ve been doing for the last 7 months.  I’ve failed in that I wasn’t able to see that lack of growth in time to find better (other) ways to increase my income.

I’ll be in a better place.  The new job is at a company that I feel is much more in-line with what I want in an employer.  They’ve got a very progressive business model that I feel is very unique in North Dakota, and was key in my making the decision to accept their offer.  While looks can be deceiving sometimes, I don’t think that they’re that far off.  Many of the issues that I had with my previous employer don’t exist at my new employer from what I can tell.  Time will tell, but I truly believe that I’ll like and enjoy my new job.

I’ve struggled a bit over the last few weeks, after I accepted the position, as to what it meant for the direction of this site as well as my other sites.  What I’ve decided is that Beating Broke isn’t going anywhere.  I really, really enjoy the interactions with you, and the writing that I do here.  I may have to scale a few of my other sites back a lot, and will likely get rid of a few of them as well.  I may even scale back how often I write here, but at the moment, I plan on continuing the 3 a week schedule that I’ve been keeping.

That decision is two-fold.  I enjoy Beating Broke as a creative outlet.  I also am not giving up on my dream to do this on a more full-time basis.  I want to continue to grow the site as best I can so that I might, someday, be able to come back to what I’ve been doing the last 7 months.  But, hopefully, next time, I’ll do it right and do a lot more planning and saving in order to do that.

What would you have done in my position?  What other thoughts do you have? How about questions?

Yesterday, I told you that I’d be giving away a few copies of “Money Rules” by Jean Chatzky, and today, I’ve got the giveaway for you.

It’s easy to enter, just pick one (or all) of the methods in the entry form below, follow the instructions, and off you go! The giveaway ends on May 15, and I’ll announce the winners shortly after that. The giveaway is open to U.S. residents age 18 and older.

While there are several ways to enter, I’d really like to see everyone take advantage of the blog comment option and share one of your personal “Money Rules” with everyone else. I think it’s a great way to add value to the book, and to help share a few rules without having to read the book.

Go enter!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Money Rules : The Simple Path to Lifelong Security

By: Jean Chatzky

Chatzky is a pretty big name in the realm of personal finance media, so when I was asked if I wanted to review her latest book, I jumped at the chance.  In Money Rules, Chatzky aims to break down personal finance into it’s most simple denominators and give it out in a set of rules.  Overall, there’s 94 rules.  Each is a paragraph or two long.  And, each is pretty solid.  I had a hard time finding any of the rules that I could argue against.  There are a few that are borderline, but I think that they get a pass in the sense that they can be considered a standard personal finance rule.

There are some readily acceptable rules too.  Increasing savings with each raise, not treating your primary home as an investment, not shopping hungry, and 90 others.  From the longer ones, to the shorter ones, the book is a quick read, at 114 pages, so you don’t really have any good reason to not read it.  I think that it’s one of those books that you can read quickly, and refer back to occasionally for guidance and reaffirmation of some basic personal finance principles.  Because of it’s size, you’re not going to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty details of each point, but merely get the point and be able to find ways to apply it in your own life.

Currently, the book is a bit over $10 at Amazon in paperback, and a bit over $9 for the Kindle.

P.S. I’ve got a couple of copies to give away, so come back tomorrow to see the details on that!

Beating Broke was included in three carnivals this week:

Carnival of Financial Camaraderie #30 hosted by My University Money

Carnival of Money Pros hosted by My Journey to Millions

Yakezie Carnival – 4.22 Edition hosted by Faithful with a Few

Many thanks to the hosts for including my posts!