Sensible Ways to Save Money

You know how every New Year's Eve, you tell yourself that the following year, you are going to be more financially responsible? Well, there's a reason why that doesn't happen. It's because you haven't given yourself new ways in which to try to make it happen. And that's what we're here to do. To give you new ways to save money on everything you buy.

Here's the thing - you need more ways to save money. You can't open a personal-finance website on the Internet without looking at bunches of tips on how to save money. That's not what you need. You need something that doesn't confuse you with hundreds of tips. You want the rules condensed down to just four or five easily followable principles. For instance.

You want to never buy anything new. You can buy old. You don't want clothes new, furniture new, or cars new. You want something utilitarian. You want things that work. And old stuff does that very well. Lots of people, most people in fact, still fall far the "buy new" charm. What do they do with their old stuff? They sell it to winners like you.

Every manufacturer out there desperately wants you to believe that this year's model is way, way better and cooler than last year's model. And anyone who buys last year's model is not as cool. It wasn't easy for them to make you believe is, but they've been working away at this for decades. So now, when the latest iPad or iPhone comes out, the very model that three months ago, you thought you was the coolest thing in the world, feels outdated and so stuck in a time warp.

To understand how silly this is, you have to look at how poor people in poor countries getting by on $100 a month around the world, if they receive an iPad 1 for instance, or something just as wonderful, would go, "but it's not the latest, is it?".

It's when you see that kind of absolute slavishness to the "latest and greatest" that you see how absolutely meaningless this is. One of the best ways to save money is always to pick something two or three generations old. It doesn't matter at all that it's not as cool. Just one or two years ago, you would have been totally proud to own it. What's changed now?

This whole thing about keeping up with the neighbors has got to stop. You and your neighbors can be friends, and you can share stuff. Tobody needs a full-sized ladder one to a house, a barbecue grill, power tools - there's lots of stuff that people can just share across houses with their friends. Why not?