C and I have always been pretty good with our money. We’re not the best and I actually even stopped doing our budgeting by using the Force method since I realized that I could get a higher interest rate in our ING Checking account (referral link) with a balance over $50K. A lot of our savings are as liquid as can be since we’re looking to purchase a house soon. I’ve been busy (read: lazy) over the past few months in tracking how we’re doing.
One thing I did see: my company 401K says that it’s up 10% for the past 30 days and only done 30% for the past 12 months. That’s what the website provided analytics stated, but I’m not sure if that’s looking at the actual investments or just the balance. I hope that’s the actual investments since I’ve been contributing a lot to it over the past year.
So back to the point I was trying to get to: I think we are spending more in this economy than we were before. It might be lifestyle inflation, as we’re increasing our incomes. But I think it’s really because of the great deals that are out there. Travel is our major splurge. I’m a big believe in conscious spending (link). We normally pack our lunches and don’t spend a lot going out, compared to our demographic group (young twenties/thirties couple living in an exciting city). Once I get on a traveling project, I’m traveling every week and it’s easy to take a weekend trip somewhere rather than go back home. C takes probably 5-10 business trips a year. So we try to combine a lot of our business trips into weekend vacations. In 2009 alone, we’ve already taken 4 trips that have been somewhat subsidized by one of our companies.
What’s the point of this? When you life a modest lifestyle compared to your income, you can take advantage of deals when everyone else is hunkered down, trying to avoid all discretionary spending.
P.S. This posting has been brought to you by Credit-land.com. This is a good site for all your credit card application needs.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Thoughts on Spending Money
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1 comments:
Well, we in Malaysia seem to be doing well we have high growth and high inflation. An example of inflation would be the local desert "cendol" bought about a month ago at the price of $1.20 in local currency would now sell for $ 1.80 in local currency. Job growth is also strong as we have 2 jobs for every worker and Malaysia imports in foreign labour to do jobs that local workers do not want to do. Hence our problem in Malaysia is now high inflation and good news, high growth.. We do not understand why the Western Media keeps on saying we are in a Recession. Yes our economy slowed down in March 2009 but after that period our economy is now experiencing high growth and high inflation thanks to China's strong buying of Malaysian goods and services, thank you China ! So please do not say Malaysia is in a Recession when it is not, only the US is in a Recession, the rest of the World is booming thanks to China !
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