Posted on 12/31/2017 12:51:08 PM PST by PJ-Comix
Wow, now THAT is a great deal!!! I looked into T-Mobile before I left AT&T, but it didn’t sound like the service would be as fast or reliable in my area as some of the other providers would be. I’ve heard it has some of the very best “big city” and international coverage available, though.
Congrats on an excellent deal!!!
I cannot advise saving money on meat. First goal is to eat healthy animal proteins from healthy animals. Once you have achieved that, look for deals from farms or farmers markets or something. But don’t buy cheap feedlot beef etc. it literally becomes you. And your health will save you money and agony.
I didn’t buy the iPad and saved $600.
Bought a clothesline in the summer and dried everything on it.
Also in the summer did most cooking in crockpots to avoid using 220 stove.
Finally talked hubs into ditching cable! Bill was getting close to 200 a month for the triple play with only 1 teevee that we pretty much quit watching the last couple of years.
The only time we watched was a bit of local news to keep up with wildfires. Why pay for something you can get for free?
Got a digital teevee antenna that brings in several dozen channels and bought the amazon fire stick. We already had amazon prime.
Also got rid of landline through cable provider and bought a magic jack.
Paying just under 80 a month now for just internet. Phone is 35 a year.
Also, we rarely eat out. I make almost everything from scratch. Anything we buy for the house or clothing usually comes from the thrift store.
We’re also big time homebodies so lots of money saved by staying home instead of traveling and whatnot.
Back in the 80’s I wondered where my conservative fil got some of his crazy ideas ... till I found The Ecoonomist on his coffee table!
Dumped cable/ $80.00 pm
Paid off house / 2,400
Paid off car/ $400
Paid off credit cards/1800
Semiretired
Depends on location. Here it works good.
I miss Winco from previous 2 towns of our residence. I think it is same as Cub foods. We have many Publix stores here, but they are the priciest. Winn-Dixie is cheaper for items we can not find at Aldi.
Unlimited text and data from 140 countries with calls 20 cents per minute.
All for $30 a line!
I'm thinking of going to the boat docks and buy fish direct from boats arriving with fish. I know it is fresh plus I can get it cheaper that way. Instead of paying about $30 for a 7 lb red snapper perhaps just $10.
Cut off cable. Moved to our farm where we have a good well, propane, septic system so utilities cheaper. Retired so much smaller wardrobe. No longer supporting any children. Down to two old but healthy pets. 99% debt free.
I've been binge watching "Justified" on Amazon Prime.
Also, we rarely eat out.
For that use GroupOn and buy ONLY when they have their 20% discount on the deals which is frequent. In addition to restaurants, sometimes you can get grocery deals. For me it is Gino's Italian grocery in Hollywood, FL. For about $23 (after the discount) I get $40 worth of groceries. Even wine if I want.
I haven’t done it yet, but am going to get rid of my landline. Need to buy a magicjack or something.
Switched my electricity provider earlier this year and cut that bill down a bit.
Using Veteran Energy now.
How is T-Mobile’s service in various locations? I heard the coverage is not as good as ATT.
Not when you work the BOGO deals and combine with coupons. For example, right now my refrigerator is filled with 8 oz packs of cubed ham steak that I got for FREE from Publix. I use those for my omelets.
Will look into that.
Upped 401k to 12% and plan to bump it a percentage point every so often until the pain point.
Think again!
Moved mine to aggressive.
3 to 17 percent jump.
My wife bought one and never uses it.
Her money.
KISS of investing:
Scott Adams, author of Dilbert: “I once tried to write a book about personal investing. After extensive research I realized I could describe everything that a young first-time investor needs to know on one page.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Christine Benz, Morningstar Director of Personal Finance: “Simplicity is one of the greatest—but in my view, woefully underrated—virtues when managing a portfolio.”
Bill Bernstein, author of Four Pillars of Investing: “”The more real people I get to know, the more I am convinced the simpler the solution, the better the solution.”
Richard Bernstein, Merrill Lynch strategist: “Investors find it hard to believe that ignoring the vast majority of investment noise might actually improve their performance.”
Jack Bogle: “Simplicity is the master key to financial success.”
Dan Bortolotti, CFP, and author of The Money Sense Guide to the Perfect Portfolio: “The peace of mind that comes with a simple investing strategy is priceless.”
Jack Brennan, former Vanguard CEO and author of Straight Talk on Investing: “It’s in the interest of many financial service companies to make you think that investing is difficult.—It’s really quite simple.”
Warren Buffet: “To invest successfully, you need not understand beta, efficient markets, modern portfolio theory, option pricing or emerging markets. You may, in fact, be better off knowing nothing of these.”
Scott Burns, creator of The Couch Potato Strategy: The advocates of complexity are generally people who are making their living from the complexity they create for us.”
Ben Carlson, author of A Wealth of Common Sense: “”I’ve spent my entire career working in portfolio management. This experience has taught me that less is always more when making investment decisions. Simplicity trumps complexity.”
Jean Chatzky, NBC Financial Editor: “The problem with so much personal financial advice is that it’s unnecessarily complicated, often with the goal of selling you something you don’t need.”
Andrew Clarke, author of “Wealth of Experience”: “In investing, simple is usually more productive than complex.”
Jonathan Clements, Wall Street Journal columnist: “Investing is simple. To be sure, you can make it ludicrously complicated.”
J.L.Collins, author of The Simple Path to Wealth: The more complex an investment is, the less likely it is to be profitable. At best they are costly. At worst they are a cesspool of swindlers.
Paul Crafter, author of “Investment Guide”: “After doing it all, I now feel I’ve come around in a complete circle, ending up with this: The more I learn, the less I really need to know.”
James Dahle, Editor of The White-Coat Investor: “In my view, the simpler the financial product, the better it is for the consumer.”
Edsger Dijkstra, famed physicist: “Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”
Laura Dogu, Ambassador to Nicaragua and co-author of “The Bogleheads Guide to Retirement Planning”: A simple portfolio is actually the ultimate in sophistication. It almost always lowers cost (including taxes), makes analysis easier, simplifies rebalancing, simplifies tax-preparation, reduces paper-work and record-keeping, and enables caregivers and heirs to easily take-over the portfolio when necessary. Best of all, a simple portfolio allows the investor to spend more time with family and friends.”
Michael Edesess, author of The Big Invesment Lie: “As a mathematician I know when mathematical-sounding analyses are little more than elaborate sales pitches, designed to thoroughly obscure the simple fact that smart investing is non-mathematical and accessible to everyone.”
Albert Einstein: “The five ascending levels of intellect are: smart, intelligent, brilliant, genius, simple.”
Charles Ellis, co-author of “The Elements of Investing”: “KISS investing—Keep It Simple, Sweetheart—is the best and easiest and lowest cost and worry-free way to invest for retirement security.”
Javier Estrada Ph.D., Professor of finance: “Simplicity is often underrated; simple static strategies (balanced portfolios) have been shown to perform as well as—and often better than—more complex strategies in a wide variety of settings.”
Paul Farrell, author of “The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing”: “Perhaps the most amazing insight I got out of this review of the investment habits of Nobel laureates is the simplicity of their investing strategies.”
Rick Ferri, CFA, advisor, and author of six financial books:[/i] “Don’t assume that a complex strategy is better than a simple strategy. The only thing extra complexity is likely to add is extra cost.”
The Finance Buff: “Making fewer decisions usually leads to better results than making more decisions.”
Future Metrics looked at the performance of 224 pension plans over about 14 years compared with the performance of 60% S&P 500 index and 40% aggregate bond index benchmark. Of those 224 plans, only 19 beat that simple benchmark.
Gensler & Baer, authors of “The Great Mutual Fund Trap”: “If you simply buy and hold you don’t need to read investing magazines, watch financial news networks, subscribe to newsletters, or pay a broker to execute new trades.”
Benjamin Graham, author, teacher, famed investor: “If you merely try to bring just a little extra knowledge and cleverness to bear upon your investment program, instead of realizing a little better than normal results, you may well find that you have done worse. — In the stock market, the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics, the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions we draw therefrom.”
Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve: “This decade is strewn with examples of bright people who thought they built a better mousetrap that could consistently extract abnormal returns from financial markets. Some succeed for a time. But while there may occasionally be misconfigurations among market prices that allow abnormal returns, they do not persist.”
Morgan Housel: financial columnist for Wall Street Journal and Motley Fool’s “Simple almost always beats complex.”
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Laureate: “All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions”
Edmund Kean: “Complexity is easy. Simplicity is hard.”
Kiplinger: “The big secret to successful investing is that it’s actually not all that complicated. Most of the mumbo jumbo doesn’t matter.”
Darrow Kirkpatrick, author of Retiring Sooner: “In financial life, you should run from complexity, and run toward simplicity.”
Michael LeBoeuf, author of “The Millionaire in You”: “The master key to wealth can be summed up in just one word: Simplicity.”
Bruce Lee: “One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity”
Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Peter Lynch, legendary fund manager: “If you spend more than fifteen minutes a year worrying about the market, you’ve wasted twelve minutes.”
MIT Study: “The less well-informed group did far better than the group that was given all the financial news.”
Scott MacKillop, CEO First Ascent Asset Management: “ People who don’t know any better equate complexity with sophistication. But truly it takes more sophistication to build elegantly simple portfolios.”
Joe Maglia, CEO TD Ameritrade: “Wall Street goes out of its way to make investing incredibly sophisticated and complex because they can make a tremendous amount of money by doing so.”
Burton Malkiel, author of “Random Walk Down Wall Street”: “The overarching rule for achieving financial security: Keep it simple. — The most important financial advice is stunningly simple and fits on an index card.”
John Markese, CEO of American Association of Individual Investors: “If you have more than eight funds you should slap yourself.”
Wm McNabb, Vanguard CEO: “If you can’t understand an investment product in five minutes, walk away.”
Eric McWhinnie, chief analyst, Wall Street Cheat Sheet: “Keep your investment strategy simple and steer clear of complicated vehicles that are designed to benefit the people selling them.”
James Montier, author of The Little Book of Behavioral Investing : “Never underestimate the value of doing nothing.”
Morningstar Guide to Mutual Funds: “Good investing doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, simplification may lead to better investment results.”
Issac Newton: “Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.”
Suze Orman: “We make investing so complicated and it really is not. — A total market index fund is a great one-stop-shopping choice that provides you instant diversification among different types of stocks.”
Mike Piper, financial author: “There’s an entire industry built on convincing us that investing is complicated.”
“David Nadig, president of Index Universe’s ETF Analytics: “Most investors—myself included—are better off the simpler we keep things.”
Jane Bryant Quinn, syndicated columnist and author of “Smart and Simple Financial Strategies”: “You shouldn’t buy anything too complex to explain to the average 12-year old.”
John Rekenthaler, Morningstar Research Director: “How many funds should you have? Four to six should do.— A complex investment strategy, with many moving parts, means more wheels that are stuck at any given time, leading to more questions and more uncertainty.”
Rodc on Bogleheads Forum: “While doing this financial engineering my wife who does no math just shook her head at my optimization games and said, ‘Rod, life is uncertain, get over it.’ After a lot of work, I discovered much to my surprise, she was right.”
Allan Roth, CFP, CPA, author and advisor: “Investing in eight words: Maximize diversification and discipline; minimize expenses and emotions.”
Paul Samuelson, Nobel Laureate: “Investing should be like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas.”
Bill Schulthies, author of “The Coffeehouse Investor”: “When you simplify your investment decisions, not only do you enrich your life by spending more time on families, friends and careers, but you enhance portfolio returns in the process.”
Chandon Sengupta, author of “The Only Proven Road to Investment Success”: “There is overwhelming evidence that the simplest possible investment method works much better than all the other more complex ones.”
George Sisti, CFP, MarketWatch contributor: “There is no perfect portfolio — yours should emphasize simplicity and shun complexity.”
Larry Swedroe, author of “The Successful Investor Today”: “The more complex the investment, the faster you should run away.”
David Swensen, Yale Chief Investment Officer: “As a general rule of thumb, the more complexity that exists in a Wall Street creation, the faster and farther investors should run.”
Henry David Thoreau: “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
Andrew Tobias, author of The Only Investment Guide You Will Ever Need: “I believe in selecting the most straightforward and easiest-to-implement strategy for achieving our goals.”
Tweddell and Pierce, authors of “Winning with Index Mutual Funds”: “Keep it simple. Investment success depends on asset allocation, diversification, and risk management, not on complexity.”
Eric Tyson, author of “Mutual Funds for Dummies:” “Planners may try to make it all so complicated that you believe you can’t possibly manage your finances or make major financial decisions without them.”
Walter Updegrave, Editor of Money magazine: “Simpler is better. Ignore the siren song of sophisticated investments”
Richard Young, author of “The Intelligence Report”: “If you can’t run your portfolio taking 60 minutes a month, it’s too complicated.”
Karen Wallace, Morningstar senior editor: “Having fewer accounts can help you streamline your monitoring and rebalancing efforts. And having your assets in one place can allow you to better assess your overall asset mix.
Jason Zweig, Wall Street Journal columnist and author of “The Intelligent Investor”: “The less you fool with your portfolio, the less often you’ll play the fool.”
Warren Buffett: “There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.”
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