So the following morning I’m driving my car to work when I start hearing some clunking coming from my front right tire, my car is pulling right, and my brake lights are coming on. I keep driving to work but the clunking, pulling, etc keeps coming back. The car was overdue for an oil change so I figured I’d suck it up and take it to the shop and see what was wrong. Well long story short – turns out I need two new drive shafts, a bunch of exhaust leaks fixed, something about a resonator pipe, clutch, air filter, you name it. Grand total would be about twice what I paid for the car (I paid $700)

In theory I think I would only *need* to fix the two drive shafts which would come to $387, but when you only pay $700 for a car you never really plan on doing much maintenance work on the car (at least that’s my opinion). SO right now I’m in the market for a new car (in the frugal sense of new car). If I can’t find anything in the short term I may end up biting the bullet on the drive shafts, but unfortunately it looks like I’m probably better off rolling the dice with a new beater.

So was this car a total failure and proves that you can’t consistently spend less than $1000 on a reliable car? To be honest I think my off the top of the head goal is to have the car last more than a year. If I can spend less than $1000 a year in car costs I think I’m doing ok. This is by far the shortest I have owned a car before something major happened, but I still owned the car for almost a year, only paid $700 for it and will get at least $100 back when I take it to the scrap yard. So $600 for 10 months of reliable service still isn’t the worst problem to have. The best part is I am in no way tied to my cars if something bad happens. I am in no way obligated to have to fix them and if something bad like this happens I can just laugh it off – although I really did enjoy this car and am upset that we will be parting ways so quickly.

What do you think? Am I an idiot? Should I be spending more on my cars? I only use my car to drive to work and run errands, my wife has a relatively newer/nicer car (99 Accord).

Tip 1 – Don’t rent your car from locations at the airport.
This was one of the biggest money saving items for us when we were renting our vehicle. Often when you do a search on hotwire, travelocity, orbitz, etc. they tend to show you rates of rental cars through the big auto rental chains, but the location tends to be at the local airport. The problem with renting from say Enterprise at the airport is that most rental agencies located at airports get levied an airport surcharge fee that they happily pass onto you the customer. So the initial rate before taxes sounds good, but in my experience the airport surcharge fee can add anywhere from 10-20% onto the cost of your rental. What we did was found a great deal on the internet and instead called the Enterprise location 1 mile from the airport and it saved us nearly $50 in extra fees,taxes, and surcharges (they had the same base rate).

Tip 2 – If you are taking a long trip find a place that will get you unlimited miles
In my experience nearly none of the major rental agencies websites will let you choose unlimited miles. You usually get 200 miles a day or 1400 miles a week and then each additional mile is a certain fee (20-50 cents a mile) – which can add up really fast. The only way I have found to get unlimited miles is to search using a discount search site like hotwire, orbitz, travelocity, etc. Also a sort of an unique tip. In my experience hotwire the first time you search for a certain vehicle/date combination will show you 1400 miles per week, if you simply then change the pickup time by say a half hour and search again your 2nd and each consecutive search will give you unlimited miles for the same price. I know call me crazy but it worked like charm every time. Once you have an unlimited package that suits your needs call the company directly and they will almost always match it and might even give you more perks for going directly through them so that they don’t have to pay the 3rd party vendor for booking the car.

Tip 3 – When booking unlimited miles make sure of the terms
Many rental agencies have unlimited miles, but there are stipulations like you have to stay within 400 miles of the rental agency or can’t take the vehicle outside of any of the bordering states. About half the places I called had stipulations like this so if you plan on going further it is worth your while to ask as if you go outside of the specified area you will get charged the standard mile rate for every mile of your trip. Like I said its 50/50 so be sure to ask.

Tip 4 – Do your homework before getting rental insurance from the rental car company
In many cases if you have comprehensive auto insurance on your primary vehicle it will give you the same coverage when you are renting a car, so the rental car insurance is redundant and a waste of money. Call your insurance agent before hand to see if this is the case. If your insurance only covers part of your liability or loss or none at all – option #2 is to call your credit card company. Many credit card companies offer insurance for free to their card holders if they make the purchase with their credit card. This can save you loads of money as rental insurance can cost nearly as much as the rental itself.
Note: My Chase Visa gives me Collission/Loss/Theft insurance for free as long as I decline the auto rental insurance and charge the rental on their card

Tip 5 – If booking online look around for promo codes.
This should be common sense, but there are absolutely tons of them out there and some of them are great deals. My wife found a 20% off web coupon that saved us $80 up front and the physical location when we called them had to problem taking it. Also there are many programs set up with major companies. Most rental car agencies let you enter in a contract code and will give you special discounted pricing, free insurance, etc. My company does have a deal with National rental, but in the end I could find better rates on my own. If you scour forums you will often see other people post other companies contract #s which will work if you punch them in, be careful though as you may be asked to show proof of employment and even if you are not asked if you get free insurance through the deal and crash the car you most likely won’t be covered. My word of advice on entering contract codes into websites is only use ones that you are rightly entitled to.

My wife was watching the Good Morning America show the other day and they had Todd Wilbur on there promoting his book and website Top Secret Recipes. Apparently Todd had dedicated 15 year of his life to duplicating famous name brand products and dishes. I was a little skeptical at first, but apparently on the show he made about 3 or 4 of his cloned products and the show went and brought in the real thing and had people do a blind taste test. With all of the items people couldn’t distinguish which was which and in some instances a majority of people picked his product because they thought it tasted better.

So that night my wife took a recipe that was given on the show for Red Lobster garlic biscuits and decided to make a batch. The recipe’s always include ingredients that you for the most part are going to have around the house and are very easy to make. I think my wife only spent about 5-10 minutes before putting the biscuits in the oven and I am being completely honest with you when I say they tasted exactly like the real thing. We don’t go to Red Lobster that often but when we do about the only thing we care about are the biscuits and now we can make them in the comfort of our home for a fraction of the price of going out to eat at Red Lobster.

Many of the Top Secret Recipes are probably actually healthier than the real thing and are easy to make. The website www.TopSecretRecipes.com has hundreds if not thousands of recipes on their website. Some of them are free and others they just give you a teaser recipe and you can purchase the rest of the recipe for 79 cents. If you plan on trying out quite a few of the recipes you may want to purchase one of his books. Unfortunately I have not purchased any of his books (there are lots of them under the Top Secret Recipes name) so I can’t recommend which is the best. In fact that is part of the reason I have not purchased his book yet, because there are like 7 different versions of the book, all with different recipes, and I want to do my homework and find out which one would suit me best before splurging the $10 for a book.

Anyway just thought I would let you know about this guy and his book and site. I have no affiliation with him or his products and get nothing in return, I just thought the idea was pretty cool, and the one product I have tried so far was spot on. He and his recipes also seem to get pretty good reviews. So stop going out to eat so much and just make the same delicious products at home. Plus once you have the recipes you can have Red Lobster garlic biscuits, Chili’s baby back ribs, Hooters Buffalo wings, an Orange Julius Orange Julius, and a Dairy Queen Blizzard all in one meal. Talk about going out to eat!!

Overseeding is probably the #1 thing you can do to a lawn to make it look great. Overseeding is simply planting grass seed over the top of your existing lawn. There are a number of ways to accomplish this, but in this article I am going to go with what I did to my lawn last spring as I had just incredible results. My lawn went from bare patches, lots of weeds, and dead areas to people asking me if I had my yard sodded.

When to overseed
Overseeding is best done in early spring (hopefully after the last frost) or in late fall when the brunt of the summer heat has left. You will also want to make sure that you have not put down any preemergent fertilizers (pretty much any non-organic fertilizer) as almost all non-organic commercial lawn fertilizers/weed killers have chemicals in them that stop seeds from growing. Seeing as how we need our new grass seed to grow you will want to be very sure that enough time has passed for the effects of the Scott’s or whatever you use on your lawn has worn off. That’s why spring is probably your best best if you use those products.

Preparing your lawn for overseeding
The first thing you need to do is to mow your lawn as short as your lawn mower will go. This is very important because the new grass that you are planting needs access to sun light and a fair shot at growing without your existing grass choking it out. Note your lawn will look like crap for a couple weeks.

The next thing to do is to remove thatch that has built up in your lawn and work up the soil. Thatch is basically dead grass that accumulates on the top of the soil below the grass. Thatch is more of a problem with lawns who use chemical versus organic fertilizers, because in organic fertilized lawns there are many more microbes which actually love to feast on the thatch. So if you have a super healthy organic lawn thatch is a non-issue, another reason why you should consider organic lanwncare as in the long-run it actually is less maintenance. Anyway dethatching your lawn can be done 1 of two ways. Rent a dethatcher that can be pulled behind a riding lawn mower, or grab a rake and get a good workout. You will likely be surprised at how much thatch you have in your lawn. If you are too frugal to rent a dethatcher and too lazy to rake your entire lawn by hand you can just concentrate on the problem areas in your lawn (bare spots, very thin grass, etc). It is still important to make sure you work the soil a little bit so that the sees have a chance to settle in and establish themselves.

The next thing to do is to buy grass seed. Here is where you can use your digression. Many people recommend that you buy the best grass seed possible as it is going to be a little more difficult for this grass to take root due to the existing grass in place. That being said it’s grass seed so I’m not exactly sure a company can make a seed grow better than the next one, it’s sort of out of their hands. Anyway you will want to make sure you don’t buy a bag of annual ryegrass or anything like that. Even though ryegrass does very well and grows very fast, if you buy the annual type you will have not accomplished anything long-term. My advice here is go ahead and get a Kentucky Bluegrass or something that does well in your region, looks very good, and hopefully matches your existing grass.. The good news with overseeding is that you are not going to use a ton of grass seed so the expense is not going to be that great. I overseeded the heck out of my entire lawn last summer and still have over half of the big bag of grass seed that I purchased.

Another thing that you may want to do is go ahead and pull any weeds that may have sprouted in your lawn. I actually purchased a weed hound last summer and while it’s not perfect it gets the job done most of the time. You want to set the weeds if there are any back as far as possible that way if they do actually recover, hopefully your new grass will have taken hold in that area and will be able to drown out the weed permanently. If you have a super thick lawn, which you will if you overseed a few times, weeds become less and less of an issue because they simply don’t have a fighting chance against your super thick carpet lawn.

A word of caution. By the time you get to this point your lawn will look like crap. Don’t be discouraged, it’s only temporary and within a couple weeks it will be back to normal and a month later your neighbors will be asking you what you did to your lawn because it looks so great.

How to overseed
You can technically overseed by hand and spread the grass seed in the bare spots. Be careful that you don’t spread it too thick as if you have too many seeds in one area they will have to fight with each other over resources and may actually be weaker grass as a result of it. General rule of thumb is you don’t want more than 15-20 seeds per square inch.

What I recommend though is that you use a broadcast lawn spreader and spread the seeds over the entire lawn. The advantages of using a lawn spreader are that you can do a more even job and it’s not that much work to do your entire lawn. Trust me you will want to do your entire lawn as even in the thick areas there is likely room for improvement and your entire lawn will look great.

Note: if you used your lawn spreader for spreading weed killer or other chemical lawn product you will want to wash it out very thoroughly otherwise your grass seed may not grow due to the preemergent chemicals left over in the spreader. Better safe than sorry.

As far as what setting to set on your spreader I’m not going to try and guess and give you a setting as every lawn spreader is different. My best advice is to pick a setting and go over a really bare spot in your lawn. Then use the rule of thumb from above that you should have about 15 seeds per square inch. If you don’t have a bear spot my advice I guess would be to go to a lower setting as you can always store the left over grass seed and use it again in the fall or again next spring.

After seeding it wouldn’t hurt to take another pass over the lawn with the dethatcher or rake just to work the soil a little bit, although I didn’t do this last spring and still had great results.

The only other thing you really need to do is make sure this new grass gets enough water. Hopefully a rainstorm or two is in the forecast, but if not you will probably want to water the grass immediately after overseeding, and then it’s up to you as far as what you think of spending money to water your lawn. I probably watered 15 minutes a night for 3 or 4 nights in the first week and then after that I sort of let mother nature take over. Obviously if you live in a very dry climate you will probably want to do more watering. Just use your own judgment here and make sure your lawn has enough moisture to support these new seedlings.

Now it’s time to just sit back and watch as your lawn transforms itself into a super thick green masterpiece. Overseeding is something that can and probably should be done a few times, but honestly after the first time you should see very very noticeable results.

After a Google search once again led me to your site, I thought I’d let you know how much I appreciate your quest, and your efforts to chronicle them. We’re about a generation apart, my oldest daughter arriving at 30 a couple months before your August 2009 deadline, but I’m amazed how in step your thinking is with mine. At the same time, I’m jealous over how easily these thought patterns seem to come to you, while I rely on trial-and-error conditioning to reach the same conclusions!

My wife and I raised eight children – a “Yours, Mine, and Ours” effort that did terrible things to our finances, but did teach me how to be cheap…very cheap. As things improved over the years, maintaining the same cheap lifestyle allowed me to make an aggressive, belated (beginning in my late 30s) start to saving, and I think we are now nicely on target for retirement down the line. I’ve started a campaign to urge my kids towards saving, and perhaps they can come closer to emulating you than me at your age.

I had a conversation with my son, Aaron, over the July 4th weekend in 2005. Then a 23 year old college student, he was quite poor at handling his finances, much better at spending it than earning or planning; somewhat cliche, I suppose. He had borrowed some money from me to handle credit card bills that didn’t match his cash flow, and was disturbed that he couldn’t pay me back as agreed. He had borrowed from me several times before, and while not adept at managing money, he was surprisingly responsible at paying it back. But this time, he had too many bills and was overwhelmed. I pulled him aside before he headed back to school, and told him to forget about repaying me this time.

This was a big deal to me; I was in a position where missing a few hundred dollars didn’t mean scrambling to figure out how to eat, like for years it would have. It might not cost $800,000 to raise a child, but eight are still expensive, no matter how you calculate it! He was certainly thankful, and I hoped this could relieve the pressure a bit. Soon he headed back to school, along with his fiance. Two hours later, their truck was hit on the expressway, and they were both killed.

I have lived frugally for over two decades – sometimes out of necessity, sometimes out of habit. I was struck by how many of Aaron’s friends mentioned that he knew how to live, how to enjoy himself. I’m not sure I do. While I admire your goals, and thank you for openly sharing your thoughts (and even though I suspect you don’t require the reminder) I submit this cautionary offering to remind you to enjoy yourself, too. Balance.

I don’t know if I can really add much more to Doug’s email that will get the point across any clearer. It’s great being frugal and building that mentality of saving money and letting the miracle of compound interest work away, but it’s a fine line between saving for better things tomorrow, and enjoying your life today. Unfortunately tomorrow may never come and so be careful you don’t sacrifice too much now for something that may or may not happen in the future.

In fact the night before I received this email from Doug I was actually talking about ways to get my wife and I to spend money on things that weren’t entirely necessary. Certainly not forgoing our retirement savings and filling the house with plasma tvs and expensive cars, but finding more of a balance in our spending so that we are enjoying a little more today. Basically my wife makes a couple thousand dollars singing for weddings and substitute teaching and I make a few thousand dollars doing web based stuff on the side. Essentially we are making sure that all of this money goes to things we normally wouldn’t spend money on. It’s actually going to be hard, but I think this is a good way to get us started in enjoying ourselves a little more today. I’ve also thought about donating plasma and this money would also go into our fun fund. So then if we want a plasma tv, new golf clubs, (actually having trouble thinking what my wife would like to spend money on – just like the millionaire next door my wife is more frugal than I am) furniture??, etc.

The nice thing about this method is that once we get used to living the good life and actually spending money it only allows us to spend as much money as we’ve earned doing side jobs. Meanwhile we can still pay our bills and save for retirement on my normal salary – maybe I’ll even allocate a small portion of this to go to our fun fund. Anyway I want to thank Doug for sharing his story with me and while I always knew I needed a little more balance, this email is actually making me act.

Purchased
1990 Ford Escort
Purchase Date: 10/2004
Mileage: 90,000
Cost $1000
Sales Tax $50
Repairs: $463 (tie-rods, timing belt)
Maintenance (oil-changes) – $100 (5)
Insurance Costs: $575 ($115 every 6 months)
Total Expenses= $2288

Sold
Sold: 04/2007
Mileage 129,000
Money Received – ($125)

Stats
Total Cost – $2163
Total Miles driven: 39,000
Total Months owned: 30
Cost per mile: 5.5 cents per mile
Cost per month: $72.10
Cost per year: $865.20

Things not included: vehicle registration fees (same regardless of car so not included). Also gas, because it’s too hard to keep track of, but my car did get over 30mpg.

Now I have never done this for a car before so I’m not sure how great these stats actually are, but my guess is if most people did the same calculations with their cars they would probably incur higher costs than I did. Overall I was not horribly satisfied with the results I got from this car as I got rid of it way before I wanted to (I was hoping to get at least 150,000 miles out of it. Like I said the car still ran and I could have repaired it, but I came across a good deal in my Corolla and decided to pull the plug on the Escort.

I will keep similar records with my new car and hopefully after a few cars I will have a good idea of what is a good cost per month/year/mile for a vehicle. My guess is that the above stats for my car over a 30 month period are probably less than the average person’s cost after only a few months, especially if you buy a new car. Heck the sales tax, insurance, and monthly payments would probably exceed my total costs after only 2 or 3 months.

Anyway I think that from a purely financial standpoint, buying a sub $1000 car after doing your homework is by far the best way to minimize your vehicle expenses. I’ll be totally honest with all of my repairs and costs as I own my vehicles and I can be your guinea pig to see if this actually works. Granted my new car might blow up tomorrow and I would have to eat crow, but I still only have $750 invested in it, I know I can get at least $100 for it at the junk yard, so I’d be outu $687.50 (sales tax included). That’s not a really big hit, so when you drive vehicles like this you are sort of diversifying your risk. Instead of putting $10,000-$30,000 in one vehicle which could just as likely blow up. Not to mention the depreciation difference in the vehicles. My car can only possibly depreciate $650 from the purchase price

I guess really the only big downer for some people to driving a car like this is that it doesn’t look pretty and new. For me I purposely seek out vehicles with rust problems because I know that it has no negative effect on the car’s performance, but it will greatly reduce the cars purchase price. I put no value in cosmetics, but Kelly Blue Book and most other people put a great deal into the cosmetic appearance which is good news for me. That being said, you can still find a good cheap older car with no rust and a good body. Just know that you will be paying extra for those attributes.

1. The old car still runs and if I needed to I could drive it to work every day for quite a while
2. I bought the old car 2 1/2 years ago for $1000 and the only repair work I had done on the vehicle in two years was replacing the timing belt and a broken tie-rod. I’ll do another post figure out the total cost of ownership per year for my Ford Escort later.

The only reason I decided to replace it was that a few months ago my car started releasing a gas/exhaust smell from the engine. The car’s exhaust is completely fine as it was replaced shortly before I bought the car, but I decided that I did not want to take it in to get looked at or repaired and that I would start to look for a new car. My dad said I got a leaky gasket (I know nothing about cars) and I don’t know how much that costs to fix, but I figured since I got a new job I could splurge and get myself a new car.

The new hot rod
So I’ve been keeping an eye on the classified ads for a replacement car. I like to buy directly from individual people, because then I don’t have to pay the huge dealer markup. Buying anything from a dealer, pretty much means you are throwing money away. So last weekend I happened across a vehicle that interested me and gave the owner a call. The owner I believe was from India or some other middle eastern country so I couldn’t really understand much over the phone, but he mentioned that it had a new radiator, new exhaust, ran great, and had a little rust under the door (perfect!!). So despite it being pretty late on a Friday night I wanted to go check the vehicle out because used Toyota’s tend to go fast.

By the time I got to the car it was relatively dark out. The car is a 1992 Toyota Corolla 4 door manual transmission with 196,000 miles. I could see visible rust on the underside of the driver side door. I actually get really excited when I see rust, dents, scrapes on a car because that is going to lower the resale value considerably. Seeing as how the only thing I care about is mechanical stability rust is a welcome site. Sort of like when you are looking for a fixer-upper house to flip you should be looking for pet urine stains on the carpet, horrible paint jobs, and other stuff the lowers the value much more than it costs to fix.

Not only did this car have some rust, it has some other pretty unique properties that helped lower the asking price for me. One – the driver and passenger side door handles were broken off completely on the inside. The owner said that in the cold frozen winters of Wisconsin the plastic had froze and he ended up snapping them off. Ok no big deal I thought the General Lee was cool and it didn’t have door handles, besides you can simple roll down the window and let yourself out right? Wrong the driver’s side and passenger side windows were also defective and would not go down more than 1/2 inch and then trying to get them back up in the track was nearly impossible. So to get out of this vehicle you actually had to reach into the back seat and roll down the back seat window, reach your arm out the window and open the driver’s door from the outside. Ok maybe not the safest or most convenient thing in the world.

The other things that made testing the car out unique was that it had no plates and the owner wouldn’t let me drive it on the road, so I could only drive it within the apartment complex parking lot. It’s a manual transmission (which I love) and the clutch (at least the first 2 gears) seemed in tip-top shape and the car drove very smooth. I just tested out some basic things in the car (blinkers, hazards, break lights, head lights, high beams, steering, breaking, alignment). The interior of the car was spotless and all of the accessories worked superbly (radio, heater, AC, speedometer, etc). While driving the car with the individual he received two other calls to look at the car that night (probably his buddies ) so I decided to go ahead and give him is asking price for the car right there. I’m a horribly negotiator and have paid the asking price on all of my cars and taken the first offer on all of my jobs. Needless to say I thought I saw a good bargain and my guess is I’ll get my money out of the car even with poor negotiating skills.

Kelly Blue Book on the car has the car listed at $1350 in fair condition (yeah I know it might be below fair, but all the things wrong with it have no affect on my value of the car). The guy was asking $750/obo and I paid $750 for it. It was 9pm on a Friday night and the owner was smart and wouldn’t take a check. So I had to go to the ATM machine to see how much money I could get out of the ATM machine. I’ve actually never used an ATM machine before so I had no idea if I could get that much money out. Turns out I could only get $500 per day out. However $500 cash, a check for $250, and an ATM receipt showing the $500 withdrawal and over $5000 still left in the checking account was good enough to seal the deal.

Eye Candy

So here she is. The next morning I realized there was a little more rust than I had originally thought and that the back tires were bald, but no sweat off my back. I actually lucked out and it had the exact same tires as my Ford Escort and my Ford Escort tires had lots of tread on them. So I simply swapped tires. Then I decided to take the door handles from the back a seat and put them in the front. This was a piece of cake and worked great. I never have anyone in my back seat and even then what could be better child safety locks . While taking the panel off the door to fix the inside handles I noticed that the bolts that align the window were loose. I simple moved them back to where the “worn” spot was on the inside of the door and tightened them up and the windows work great now too. So in an hour or two of work I fixed just about every detail that was wrong with the car (minus the rust and back seat handles) and it cost me no $$$. In fact had the guy simple spent the half hour to fix the door and windows I’m sure he could have easily gotten over $1000 for the car. I may attack some of the rust spots next weekend, but for now I am thrilled.

Window problem so easy my 1 year old son can fix it

Most people want to drive a car that portrays their image and I think this car fit’s me a to a tee. It may not be the most flamboyant car in the world, but I think it was a great value, meets my needs perfectly, and slowly but surely contributes to my net worth instead of decreasing my true net worth like most people’s cars do. I dunno if it’s just because Toyota’s are so much higher quality than most of the domestic cars I have ever driven, but this car drives like silk and I’m very excited I made the swap. As for my old car, I don’t know if I want to go through the trouble trying to sell it to another person who values cars the same way I do, so I am probably going to take it to the local salvage yard and try to get a couple hundred $$$ for it. This will lower the total cost of ownership for the car and make my decision to buy sub $1000 cars even better.

Anyway seeing as how my first post on my car was so popular I figured it was my duty to keep you informed with my car change decision. I will run the numbers on my old car for total cost including oil changes, repairs, etc. and will keep a running total with my Toyota. What I think you will see is that from a purely financial standpoint you will not even come close to the value you get from buying cars like this.

Anyway glad to be back in the blogging flow of things, my phone lines magically started working yesterday and buying a new DSL modem fixed all my problems, so you can expect to start getting at least daily posts from me during the week again.

photo by Jae Lynn

This another one of those things that I have a hard time understanding. Why is that when people come across unexpected money that they have to spend it immediately. When I was talking to this individual I started recommending he look around on-line for some of his purchases as he could likely get a much better deal than shopping at circuit city and honestly I was just trying to have him put the “make believe” money down for a few hours and think about things. Unfortunately he really didn’t want to wait to go home and do research, he wanted his toys now, and that money was just burning a hole in his pocket.

Me on the other hand I tend to be the complete opposite. I have trouble forcing myself to do something fun with the money and usually use it to pay down my debt or save for something bigger like retirement. In fact since the first of the year, I have come across over $3,500 of completely unexpected money and did not spend a penny of it. It all went towards paying off our HELOC.

Now I’m sure there is a happy medium here on what to do with unexpected money and I think I can come up with some general ground rules on what to do with unexpected money.

• STOP – RELAX – THINK. Don’t think you have to do something with this money right this second. Let your emotions die down and really think about the best way to use this money. Make sure you will be completely happy with your decision and give yourself a chance to think out of the box a little bit. Rushing into things is only likely to make you feel like you ended up wasting your money on something you really did not need.
• If you have debt, especially high interest credit card debt, you should probably be using a large portion of your unexpected money to pay down this debt. When you are paying 20%+ interest the only way to get ahead is to make large payments towards that debt, otherwise the interest will just keeping digging you in a hole. Debt is a very stressful thing for most people and feeling like you are getting a leg up on it can be very rewarding.
• If you are behind the ball on saving for retirement go ahead and use some of it to start or add to your retirement accounts. Again this is a very stressful part of life for most people and it can give you a sense of relief to know that you are better off than you were yesterday. Remember the most important thing about saving for retirement is that you START and start NOW.
• Have fun with some of the money. Do something you normally wouldn’t do and something that you and your family will truly enjoy.

This is where the balance comes in. Your individual situation is going to tell you which end of the scale you should be on. If you have high credit card debt or haven’t started saving for retirement I would recommend that a majority of your money goes to that area. If you are a scrooge like me and have trouble splurging here and there maybe a larger part of it should go to something fun, like a vacation.

The real lesson here for spending unexpected money and money in general is, spend it on what is truly going to make you happy. Think happy a year or two from now and not 30 minutes from now. If it’s the act of spending the money that is making you so giddy about what you are doing with your money than you probably should sit back and wait for a better idea, because in a day or two that feeling is gone, and then you are stuck with some junk you really didn’t need or want and a pile of debt, no money saved for retirement, and no money to take that trip with the family this summer.

However a few years ago I found out that they make books on tape. This is great because I can be driving in my car, laying on my couch, or doing countless other things and can listen to books. I have found this to be extremely helpful and is probably the only reason I have “read/listened” to a few financial books in the last few years. The audio books are often abridged version so they cut out the extra fluff from the books and get to the point. They downside though is that they are relatively expensive when compared to paper book version of the book and only some of the newer or most popular books come in audio format.

Getting to my point usually once a year or so I decide I’m going to get educated and purchase a couple books. Usually means audio books, I do fall into the trap of purchasing real books occasionally to save money or if they don’t offer an audio book, but these always sit on my shelf unread because again I can’t sit down and read books. I usually do my shopping on Amazon and also usually make use of the used books vendors that sell on Amazon. I’m usually able to get a used book/audio book for a fraction of the new price and I have yet to get a used book that wasn’t in mint condition. So I usually think I’m getting these books for a pretty good deal (usually about $5-$7 after shipping).

Then this last weekend I had a revelation just as I was about to checkout with my audio book copy of The Millionaire Next Door. I remembered hearing something about these places called libraries. Basically they are just big buildings that store books and they let you read them for free. In fact you can even rent them and take them home for a certain period of time and that’s free too. They also happen to carry audio books, in fact a library in my area even carries an audio cd version of The Millionaire Next Door. Seeing as how I don’t listen to my audio cd books more than once I figured I could try this library thing out. Sure enough I got my copy of The Millionaire Next Door for free. Granted I had to actually go get it from the library, but my parents own a store directly across from the library so I just had my mom run across the street and pick it up for me so I didn’t have to pay mileage. Even if I did though, remember gas prices are cheap.

Anyway I know this was probably a complete waste for 90% of you, but honestly I always forget about libraries.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and I am only posting this because I heard such great things about it and had such wonderful results myself, please consult with your physician before trying this magical elixir.

image by: André Karwath aka Aka

What I found was what appears to be a pretty fail safe cure for a sore throat over at earthclinic.com. They recommend that you you gargle with Cayenne Powder. Now before you think it’s crazy, go ahead and read the 135 people or so that have commented on the site about their amazing results. Believe me I was a little skeptical at first too and the thought of gargling with cayenne pepper powder makes you cringe, but honestly it is not that bad, not even near as bad as a common sore throat. You don’t really taste the cayenne at all and the only part that burns a little is when you spit it out the tip of your tongue burns a little bit and if you get it on your lips it will also burn a little, but nothing unbearable at all and nothing that won’t go away with a quick rinse of fresh water (note don’t gargle the fresh water as you want the cayenne to stay on your throat and work its magic.)

My Recipe
I don’t think there is really a science to this thing as if you read around there are tons of different recipes and all seem to have very good results. So here is what I did to make my cayenne sore throat elixir.

• 1 standard drinking glass of hot to warm water
• 1 teaspoon of cayenne powder
• a couple pinches of salt for good measure (most people say its not necessary but it won’t hurt)

That’s it! Just simply take a mouthful and gargle away. There are two things that I want to point out though. One you will need to constantly stir the elixir right before you gargle as the cayenne likes to settle at the bottom and two you may want to gargle with your eyes closed as maybe I’m just a bad gargler, but one time I did gargle some of the mixture into my eye (note: cayenne pepper in the eye burns)

My Results
Like I said I was to the point where I could not swallow anymore. Within minutes of gargling the cayenne powder and water I could feel a marked improvement. I kept gargling my glass of water and cayenne powder on and off for about 45 minutes and my sore throat kept dissipating and dissipating. When I woke up this morning I noticed two things. One my sore throat was essentially gone and two my sinuses and throat were completely free of any kind of gunk you get when you are sick. I feel so clear and so good I just had to let others in on this little miracle. Certainly this remedy should not take the place of seeing your doctor if your conditions do not get any better, but for about 10 cents of cayenne powder it’s worth a try to see if you can save a costly trip to the doctor. I can’t think of a cheaper remedy to a common ailment that has such excellent results. In fact the next time I get a head cold I am going to try some cayenne gargling because it really does clear everything out and the process is not nearly as bad as it sounds. I honestly feel amazing today compared with how I felt last night and the 3 days before that.

Other options from Earth Clinic
Hot Apple Cider Vinegar & Cayenne Pepper
I did not try this one, but it seems to have similar success. This one you actually drink rather than gargle and again people feel great. The recipe is found on the same page as the cayenne gargling.

Again all of the credit goes to the wonderful people at Earth Clinic for posting this cure and commenting on the results.