Well, you heard it here first folks because about two months ago we told everybody the US kind of it was in a recession and now the large majority of the so called experts on Wall Street and the economists etcetera are agreeing that yes, we are in a recession which means a lot of us are looking for a few extra bucks because bucks are tight and just go to the grocery store if you don’t think I’m right on that, forget about trying to fill up your car.
So what I’m here to do today is to try to give you ways to find a few dollars that you may have sitting around the house that you are not even aware of. Number one, for you that have credit cards that are in great shape, you pay everything on time or better yet you pay your balance in full. Check it but particularly those of you that pay carrying a balance but do it consistently on time and don’t run up the bills on it. Call your credit card company, say “Hey how about giving me a lower interest rate.” They will cut your monthly payments, allow you to make the same payment and add more to the bottom line to get rid of the overall.
Now here’s another idea for you. To cut back on your monthly expenses, what you need to do is maybe consider Netflix which you can get order and have it delivered right to your house and you don’t even have to pay to mail at back as a way of having a nice front, first run movie on the house without having to pay those ridiculously hard prices at the theaters and not even talking about the ticket you’ll buy the popcorn. Holy macaroni you have to float alone just to get a piece of popcorn.
So there is a way to do that, you know see about your cable, are you really watching all those high premium cable channels that you subscribe to. You know if you’ve got HBO and Show time and the Movie channel etc. etc. and you don’t want any of those things. Call your cable company, get rid of it, watch you cable bill go down and it will help save some money each and every month.
Ken’s idea is instead of going out and spending a lot of money, invite friends in for game night. So what are you going to do? Throw a poker party fix it so that you win all the money? No we are just talking about getting some friends into your home and, you know having a few drinks there and some pretzels and popcorn or some of their dessert or whatever and playing some games right in the house. You’ll be amazed how much fun you can have just getting together with a group of friends playing Pictionary or something. So think about that as a way of cutting back on those weekend lets go out bills.
Don’t use ATM cards from another bank because they charge you a fortune to do it. Some of them now are charging as much as two and three dollars if you are not within that bank and it’s a strange ATM. So don’t use other ATM’s when you can use your own and plan ahead if you have to because if you have to travel a bit to get to your own bank’s ATM machine, just make sure that you got all your ducts in a row and you know when you need to go there.
Sell lousy investments. I venture to say with what the stock market’s been doing lately; you can find a whole bunch of those. They’re losing you money, sell them, and put them into something that will make you a few dollars even if it’s only a few dollars. It’s better off than losing any money and if you have any US savings bonds lying around the house, I mean there are millions of dollars of these bonds sitting in drawers and chests and who knows file cabinets around America that have reached their final maturity and they are not earning one red nickel. Have some of those? You can cash those in, pay taxes on the gains that they included, the interest that was paid along the way but it will free up some money you’ll find a whole wealth of money in savings bonds that aren’t paying anything anymore.
And check your insurance policies, are you still paying for an insurance policy you really don’t need anymore? Get rid of that, save yourself the premium, maybe it is a whole life policy. There’s some cash back to you and if you have gift cards that you know you are not going to go to the store to use, sell them. Believe it or not, you can go to eBay or CardAvenue.com. Get cash for those gift cards, stay out of the stores that will keep you away from temptation.
Prune out any credit cards that have a fee. If you are paying a fee for something, you don’t need to anymore so get rid of it and if you have any gently used books around the house that you are not saving because you want to re read it a future date, you can go to cash4books. That’s cash, the number four books dot net. Sell them and get some more money, and if you want a clean house completely? Spring is coming, have a garage sale.
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