How we bought our HDTV
Posted by WoB in Necessities, Spending Money on July 16, 2009
Several months ago, my wife and I started looking into getting a flat screen TV. We had essentially been paying for high definition service from our cable provider for years without enjoying it and we wanted that to stop.
We began looking online at the various sites that seemed to have low prices. We were trying to get the gist of what our budget would get us. We were looking to stay around $1000 but we would go higher if it made a difference. I had my eye on a few that seemed to be good deals. After printing a few of the prices out we decided that we had to see the performance in action. We drove to the local Sears and started staring into the screens, trying to clue into the difference between the styles. Plasma, LCD, 1080P, there were some really nice TVs. The problem was that I was holding a piece of paper that had a few of the same TVs at Sears, but for prices around half of what they were charging. It was a good learning experience.
Later that week we stopped by Wal-Mart to see what they had and the picture quality of even their top model was terrible. You could see images dragging all over the place. Nothing was crisp; all of the lines were blurred. These models were right in the $1000 – $1200 range which was where we wanted to be, but I couldn’t get myself to buy any of them. I would have been embarrassed to have them in my house.
We went to a high-end electronics boutique, and they had some really nice TVs, but again, their prices were way too high and the worst part was they were showing a Blu-Ray of fish swimming slowly around. The picture quality was amazing, but because we watch a lot of sports, I wanted to see the picture moving faster in a more realistic setting for my needs.
We wound up going with a TV from Amazon.com. It was the same TV that we had seen at Sears for $2800, but we paid under $1400 including “white glove” delivery. The TV was delivered 3 days later while my wife was home alone. She called me as soon as they arrived and when I got there 9 minutes later the delivery guys were gone, the TV was out of the box, and sitting on the living room floor waiting for me to setup.
She and I moved the old tube TV off of the stand and replaced it with the new Samsung 46″ 1080P LCD with 120 Hz. What a difference. I had called the cable company and had them turn on the high def service the day before, so I plugged in a few wires, I also bought the HDMI cables from Amazon for under $10.
What a picture! Everything looks so realistic. It really is an unbelievable difference. I know that there are a lot of bloggers saying that cable is a waste of money, but I’m sure they have never seen a baseball game in high def. Hockey is unbelievable and basketball is just ridiculous. You can see what type of beer that rowdy fan in the 15th row is drinking even when they are out of focus.
Since I bought the TV, the price had gone up by $200 or so for the same model, but if you are looking, I have included a link to the one we chose. I can’t give it enough praise.
Save your stuff
Posted by WoB in Necessities on July 15, 2009
What would happen if your hard drive were to come to a screeching halt tomorrow? Would you lose all of your documents? How about all of those digital photos or your music collection? There are a few simple ways to avoid this problem altogether.
Microsoft has a product that it calls skydrive that gives you 25 Gigabytes, which is probably about as much as you will need to back up most of you documents unless you have digital video or tens of thousands of pictures. You could back up the very essential ones. I’d recommend getting an external hard drive. You can get a terabyte or 1000 gigabytes for $120. This is more space than you know what to do with, but it sure is nice to know that you will not run out of space and have to select things to delete.
There are programs that you can use that will back up your entire computer, but for most people, the occasional backup of a few folders is enough.
For me, I backup my whole document folder, which has my school documents, all of my website stuff, my giant digital photo folder and all of my music. I keep all of the programs that I use on disc and would be able to download any of the other programs again if I needed to.
Monthly, I drag and drop my document folder and replace the old one. It takes some time, but it is nice to know that I will not lose everything if my laptop should die, or if I should accidentally spill a margarita on it, God forbid. You laugh, but a roommate of mine had that happen to hers and it wasn’t funny to her. We all thought it was hilarious.
I also backup my toolbar folder. If you don’t know what this is, and you have a machine running windows, create one; it is well worth it. Create a new folder on your desktop, name it something small, like “T” and drag it to the top right-hand corner. Put a few documents that you access often into it or put some shortcuts to those documents. Once you have some files in it, right click the taskbar and select toolbars, go down to new toolbar and choose this folder. Now you should have a nice little quick launch area. Keep this up to date with documents, folder and shortcuts to documents that you use often and it will surely save you time. It’s pretty cool, right?
Multiple savings accounts
We now have 5 savings accounts. We have a rainy day fund, a house down payment fund, a vacation fund, a big purchase account, and a house account. It sure seems like a lot of accounts now that I have typed it, but they each have their own purpose. There is a constant shifting of funds between these savings accounts as things take priority, or get drained down.
It is great to have multiple accounts. There is some time spent maintaining the balances of each, but that is far outweighed by the organization that it allows. Each of these separate buckets creates a bit of formality to deal with when we want to make purchases and this makes it a conscious decision.
With online savings accounts, they are easily set up once you have one, and you can open or close them as you please on the fly. I feel that the more you have, the better, and because of all of the compartmentalization, I find myself really surprised when I take a look at the total of all of the accounts. It’s nice to know that if something were to really go wrong, I could dip into other sections if it was necessary.
If you don’t want to take it to this extreme, you should really have at least two accounts. Start out with a rainy day fund and then once this is at capacity, move some into a account to be used to save up for something. Whether it is a vacation, or a house, it is a good way to keep things apart on paper and in your mind.
I can’t afford that
Posted by WoB in Credit Cards, Introduction to finance, Savings on July 8, 2009
It’s tough to know when to pass on something you want. Just about every day, I come up with something that I would like to buy and I obviously don’t make all of those purchases. Whether it’s the newest item in electronics or a new shirt, you need to know when to admit when you can’t afford it. One of the easiest ways to do this is with a budget. If it’s not in the budget, then it’s not for me. There is room in my budget for random purchases, but each of these purchases has to be weighed against each other to maximize my purchasing power.
Another deterrent that I use is to come up with a determined time value of my money. If it takes me an hour of work to take home $20, then it would cost me 10 hours to afford something that costs $200. Once I have that value, I would weigh it against the cost of the item in question. Would it be worth a quarter of a work week to have it?
When I was in college, I never said “I can’t afford it” and it took me 5 years to dig myself free of that. I ran up some serious debt. If people were going out to grab some dinner and drinks, or going to the movies, I would always go. I had the latest technology and made a lot of bad decisions. I had a lot of fun and wouldn’t trade it for anything, if only for the lessons that were learned. It sure took a lot of hard work to undo though and it was an expensive lesson.
I was on my way as soon as I realized that I couldn’t afford it all.
Find money for a vacation
Posted by WoB in Necessities, Spending Money on July 7, 2009
If you’ve ever had to go without a vacation, I might have just found the tool for you. Travelmuse has a travel calculator that takes the money you could have spent on relatively arbitrary daily items and shows you vacations that you can take for your sacrifice.
Just select a few things that you might be willing to do without and after just a few clicks, you will be browsing vacations that you could afford after just a year of tightening your belt. You can even select your type of vacation get prices from your local airport. You just might be on your way to a vacation far sooner than you thought.