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This is an interesting title isn’t it? Have you ever heard of putting your children in debt to make sure later in life they don’t fall into it? I believe that most people get into debt trouble at one point or another in their lives only to learn to live within their means. Why not teach your children that at an early age? Chances are you’ll be a lot more reasonable than Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Dinners Club etc…

You can get into debt as a child, in your teens, in university, afterwards etc… Bottom line is until you’ve bought something and gotten sick of it but still had to continue paying for it you don’t know what being in debt is like. It’s also a ball and chain that enslaves you and keeps you working. How can you even consider quitting your job and following your dreams if you have debts to pay? Until you feel the pressure of debt first hand you don’t realize how bad it feels and how much more you end up paying in the end thanks to interest.

When I was a child I used to sleep with a consumer magazine; I wanted everything! I had a short attention span and went from one item to the next. If my parents had been billionaires I would of wanted them to buy entire stores. Didn’t matter what it was I wanted it and I wanted it now.

When I was about 10 years old I bothered my parents endlessly for something that I don’t even remember. I can’t remember what it was but back then it meant the world to me. It was an overpriced gimmick made of cheap plastic; that I do remember. My father told me that he would lend me the money and I’d have to pay him back in increments. I was ecstatic; couldn’t have been any happier! Hours went by and I played and played with this gimmick; then days went by and after a week or so I had gotten completely fed up with it. It went into a pile with the rest of my belongings and just collected dust.

The difference between this discarded toy and the others was that I hadn’t even begun paying for it yet and the honeymoon was already over! I remember it took me months to pay this item back. I’d do my paper route and give over a portion each week to my father to pay for this item that I had no use for and had basically forgotten about completely. If I didn’t still have to pay for it I probably would have totally forgotten about it.

By the time I ended up paying my father back in full I had learnt an incredibly valuable lesson about debt; it’s to be avoided at all costs. Some things you have to go in debt for though such as a home or schooling if you don’t have any help from your family. Unless you strike it big early in life chances are you will have to have a mortgage. Apart from a mortgage, I’m proud to say that 17 years later I’m still debt free. I have never had a credit card balance in my entire life. Each month I religiously pay off my credit card. They charge you 18%! That’s highway robbery.

The point of this story is that everyone has to learn about debt for themselves. The sooner you learn about it the better off you are in life. Instead of learning your lesson with a $10,000 furniture and kitchen set from Leon’s for the first apartment you rent why not learn about it at age 10 for some toy that cost you $50? At the time I thought my parents were being unfair but in hindsight I can’t thank them enough.

Almost everyone I know has credit card debt for consumer products ranging from clothes, computers, golf clubs, vacations, ski passes you name it. Unfortunately they are being billed at 18% interest or higher. For lots of them unless they completely detach themselves from the physical world for a year or so I can’t imagine them ever getting out of debt. How much harder is it to save for a down payment on a home when you have 5-$20,000+ in credit card debt being charged at 18%!?

If you have children my advice to you is to get them in debt for something small and stick to your guns and make sure they learn a lesson that things do have to be paid back. If you do that once and they still want more charge interest next time; they will quickly learn their lesson and it will help them financially for the rest of their lives. I’m not saying to never give your children anything; what I’m saying is everyone has a reasonable limit. Once they’ve passed that limit make them the proposition and go from there. You’ll know when the time is right and in my mind this is one of the most important financial lessons they will ever learn. Live within your means!

Money is often an enigma to many people. You never get enough and it never lasts long enough to be productive. Money doesn’t have to be an enigma! One of the easiest things you can do to start having more with what you already have is looking at the percentage price difference between comparable items instead of just dollars and cents.

When I’m shopping if I need product X I’ll go to the aisle and look at all the competition. You only need to do this once or twice in the beginning and then you’ll instinctively know for next time which product is best for you. Let’s say item X has a price range of $2.69 – $3.49. Often times you will think who cares it’s only an extra $0.50 - $0.80. The reality is that $3.49 is actually ~30% more expensive (2.69 * 1.3 = 3.497).

Would you pay 30% more for any other comparable item if it was more expensive? Say a dehumidifier for your basement and the price range is from $269.99 - $349.99. Chances are you wouldn’t because you’d look at the price tags and say “I can save a lot of money going with this item and it’s basically the same.” If you want to make all of your dollars go as far as they can you have to be mindful of percentages. Many of us struggle to find enough money for larger items because we routinely squander our money on smaller items which most definitely add up daily, weekly, annually etc…

Courtesy of Flickr

The grocery store is a great place to get a grasp of percentages. If you aren’t great with math I’d recommend you bring a calculator the first few times. Basically look at all the items you buy on a daily / weekly basis and be mindful of what the overall price range is and what segment you are buying. Most items typically have a generic brand, middle of the road brands and then a few brands that are well marketed, easy to reach, have attractive packaging and the most expensive. Take a look at the ingredients if you are skeptical; they are often very similar if not almost identical. Saving 20-30% on many items is a lot easier to accomplish than you would think. All these small transactions by themselves aren’t much but they do add up. To stress my point I want you to come up with a number in your head for the amount of money you spend on groceries weekly. Let’s say you spend $100 a week on groceries as it’s a very easy number to work with. If you follow the plan above and manage to shave 30% off your bill buying essentially the same stuff you’ll be saving $30 a week. That’s $120 a month or $1440 a year! Isn’t it crazy how all those micro payments add up into a rather large sum of money?

Just to make this post fun I’m going to throw in something else. Let’s say you spend $100 a week on groceries but actually play the percentage game and begin saving that $1440 a year. Over the next 10 years that money is $14,440 before any interest! Considering most of us home owners have a 20+ year mortgage; how nice would it be to be able to pay down your mortgage by an extra ~$14,000 before interest over 10 years while keeping the same work week and eating habits? Chances are if you have a larger family you’ll spend more than $100 a week and therefore save even more. If you have a newborn child and begin practicing this percentage savings game by the time that child is 20 years old you will of saved over $28,880(before interest) on your grocery bills; enough to get them going in college.

There are lots of ways to save big money from our daily lives by playing the percentages. Take the time to see for yourself how much you can save. If you went from all the top priced goods to lower ones you may save even more then the figures mentioned above. Paying attention to percentage differences isn’t only applicable to groceries. With some practice it will ideally become a mindset and something that routinely runs through your subconscious before you purchase anything.

Like most bloggers I check my feedburner stats daily. I’m interested in lots of the stats I can pull from the site and obviously in my subscriber count.

Nothing can be more demoralizing than coming in and seeing a large drop in your subscribers from day to day. You can start to doubt yourself and ask yourself questions like was it because I did or didn’t’ do something? What am I doing wrong?

When I first bought this blog the very next day after the deal had been done the subscribers dropped to 117 from 199. I was thinking to myself wow what have I done wrong already? What’s going on here!? Sure enough the very next day it went up to the high 190’s.

I’m here to tell you to relax and that feedburner seems to be all over the map. I did some quick searches online and I’m not the only person who has noticed feedburner to be somewhat inconsistent. Problogger, ChrisG and others have also reported at sometime or another that feedburner seems to be having issues delivering a proper subscriber count.

Don’t get too attached to your daily feed count and if some days it takes a sudden drop don’t worry about it. Chances are it’s just a miscount and things will be back to normal tomorrow. Sometimes it could be that it’s not adding your email subscribers or something of that nature. If you focus on building useful content specific to the niche audience at hand readers will come naturally as a byproduct of your work.

I’m off to go get my wisdom teeth pulled! Supposedly it gets riskier the older I get and since I currently have insurance I figured now is the time. What really sealed the deal was when the dentist told me that unless I’m incredibly careful I will get cavities. I figure I can have them removed all together now or have to deal with cavities and possible removal later… Hopefully I’ll have a post for tomorrow but if I’m out cold and nowhere to be seen in the blogosphere you’ll know why!