We made our weekly trip to the library yesterday and just for fun, I browsed the books in the personal finance section. Now many of these I have already read, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to re-read some of them, which is a great way to spark some frugal ideas. Here’s what I borrowed:
Save Money Every Day by Ellie Kay. This book features loads of ideas, and is really very entertaining to read. The author states that
“Savings opportunities are all around us if you train your eyes to see them.”
I think that is a great way to look at things, because it really is true.
The next book I checked out is Raising Kids With Just A Little Cash, by Lisa Reid.  There is a lot of useful information in this book but my favorite chapter is ”The Time Is Money Saved Formula.” By using her formula, you can find out how much per hour you are paying yourself to cut costs.  There are 3 parts to her formula.
First, you will need to calculate retail versus homemade ingredients. The author uses the example of making pizza, so she gives a dollar total for the cost of buying a pizza at the local pizza parlor. Then, she gives a total dollar amount for the ingredients she would purchase to make the same pizza from homemade ingredients.Â
$20 (purchased pizza) – $5 ingredients = $15
Next, after calculating how much time (in minutes) you would spend making the pizzas, you take 60 (the minutes in an hour) divided by the minutes you spend making the pizza (25 in this case), multiplied by the money saved, which equals your net pay per hour.Â
60/25 minutes x $15 = $36 net pay per hour
The last step is to convert the net pay per hour into an equivalent gross pay amount, which is what the average American would need to earn as gross pay to take home that much money.
$36 x 1.25 = $45
I think I will use this formula in calculating my savings in other areas as well. This is a great motivating factor, to have a dollar amount to assign to the savings. I knew my time was valuable!
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1 Not Made Of Money : Save Money - The Weekly Roundup for 02/16/2007 // Feb 16, 2007 at 11:55 am
[...] I talked about a couple of my favorite personal finance books that I borrowed from the library. Even though I had read them before, taking another look has provided me with some more money saving ideas. [...]
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