Posted by M.S. on May 20, 2009
There are some fantastic deals right now if you plan to do any traveling, since the economy in the doldrums!
Recently, I took a trip to Chicago and needed a rental car while I was there. I found a fabulous deal at Enterprise Rent a Car through Hotwire.com for a midsized car at only $ 19 per day!
When I arrived at O’Hare Airport, I was given a BRAND NEW Chevy Malibu–with only 11 miles on it! It worked like a charm and even better- it smelled like a new car!
I was driving in luxury while still being frugal!
Check out those Hotwire deals!
Posted by M.S. on May 1, 2009
Did you know that the moment a car is driven off the lot, it is worth alot LESS than when it was purchased 5 minutes earlier? One of the very best and easiest things you can do to save money, build wealth and get rich is to ONLY buy USED older model cars.
Remember the rule we have practiced for 32 years–We try to only invest in appreciating assets–NOT depreciating assets. Because our goal has been to save as much as possible, we have NEVER invested in new cars!
Buying used cars has put loads of extra money in our hands which we used to buy stocks, mutual funds and investment real estate. We’d rather gain wealth than try to impress other people and make automobile companies richer!
So, in keeping with that philosophy, 3 years ago we purchased a used company car, as it was about to be sent to the auto auction. The car is a 2002 Ford Taurus, it has 170,000 miles on it and we only paid a couple thousand dollars for it. It’s not super pretty, but it gets us where we want to go!
We figure we have saved $12,600 on that car in the past 3 years, since the average car payment is about $350 per month times 36 months = $12,600. Invest that money for 20 years and you’d have almost $60,000 if you could earn 8% on the money! The car still runs, so we are continuing to save money each month!
We’ll take the money rather than the new car or the admiring glances!
Click here to calculate what you can save.
Posted by M.S. on April 24, 2009
When we were married in 1977, after graduating from college, our entire savings was $500.
We promptly spent that $ 500 on a used and functional (but very ugly) pea-green colored Plymouth Duster car. You know the type—similar to the one on the Dukes of Hazards. The “ugly” car worked fine and got me where I wanted to go. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t new, but it worked.
My husband was a salesman, so his company gave him a car. So—at that point we had 2 great cars at a total cash outlay of $ 500. Not bad. But, now we were BROKE.
Both my husband and I had majored in Business is college because it gave us a marketable skill (we could get a job) and it would help us understand the workings of personal finance and building wealth. We learned that rich people do things differently than people that were always struggling to pay the bills.
The # 1 thing that has influenced ALL our buying decisions is this: Whenever possible, spend your money on items that will go UP in value—not on things that go DOWN in value. Thus–the $ 500 “ugly” car. It would have been throwing money in the garbage can to buy a brand new expensive car! We wanted to BE rich– not just LOOK Rich!
Our goal was to purchase real estate as soon as possible to build equity and have a place of our own. That required some serious saving for a down payment. We figured we needed to save more than 10% on a $ 70,000 purchase price for all the costs . That meant we would need to save approximately $ 12,000 by the end of ONE YEAR–that’s $ 1,000 a MONTH.
Considering we were each only earning about $ 14,000 a year in 1977—that was almost 50% of our pay we wanted to save!
AND WE DID IT!
Not only did we do it ONCE—we repeated that procedure 3 times in a 5-year period!
The primary motivator behind our intense saving effort was we did NOT want to rent an apartment more than one year—since the rent money was making the landlord rich—not us.
We bought duplexes rather than single-family homes because we could own, rent and control a larger value property. We would rent half the building, until we moved out, then we’d rent it all, so the tenants were paying the mortgage off! What a deal! Frugal to Rich!
