Gather Little by Little

This article is part of an ongoing series called Money Saving Monday. Each Monday, I share tips and techniques you can use to start saving money.

I’ll confess, I don’t do much of the cleaning around the house, at least not on the inside. My wife and kids take care of that. I do most of the cleaning on the outside though along with keeping our cars clean. I know a number of personal finance bloggers have had some success with frugal house cleaning products, so I thought I would share some collective wisdom I’ve gleaned from them. If you are interested in some frugal car cleaning products, I did write an article about those as well.

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This is a guest article by Jeff who writes at Caddickisms where he shares his “thoughts on everything”. If you like this article, make sure you head over to Caddickisms and subscribe to Jeff’s feed.

Back in July, I missed a payment on one of my credit cards. I only missed it by 12 hours, but still, I missed it. This was a big problem, because I had heavily loaded this particular card under an excellent promotional balance transfer rate of 3.99% for the life of the balance. Give a credit card company a reason, and they’ll rip those promotional rates right out from under you – and missing a payment certainly qualifies as a good reason, from their perspective.

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Ever take on a little too much? I seem to have done so over the past few months. The problem is I have all of these ideas and things I want to do, but not enough time to do them, at least not without sacrificing things that are more important to me.

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Creating and maintaining a personal budget isn’t hard. There are many different options including the old tried and true paper and pen method, using a spreadsheet, and even specialized software packages like You Need a Budget (my personal favorite). Regardless of which option you choose to use, all options require selecting categories.

What are personal budget categories?

Personal budget categories are a way of grouping your expenses so you can track where your money is going each month. When creating a budget, you’ll allocate a particular amount of money to a category then track your expenses against it. Once your expenses meet the amount allocated in that category, you have no more money to spend in that particular category.

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While driving to work, I often enjoy listening to the various morning shows. One of the common themes is to ask the listeners a crazy question and have them call in and share their story or experience. I thought it might be both fun and interesting to do something similar here on Gather Little by Little. This post is the first in on ongoing series I am going to run called Share your story, where I’ll throw out a question and you can share your answer. If you have a blog, I encourage you to blog about your story and I’ll add a link in.

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I received a letter from my employer the other day stating that they will begin offering a Roth 401k program in addition to our traditional 401k program beginning in 2009. I had read a little bit about them in the past, but decided since they were now an option for me to begin utilizing, I should probably learn more about them and wanted to share my findings with you as I understand they are becoming more and more prominent.

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