Save Money by Reducing Your Utility Costs

Light Bulbs
Replace conventional light bulbs with the new compact fluorescent bulbs, they are four times as powerful and will last ten times as long.

Thermostat
Keep your thermostat set no higher than 68 degrees in winter and no lower than 78 degrees in summer. In winter, every degree higher can raise heating costs by 3%. In summer, every degree lower can raise cooling costs by 6%.

Water
Set your hot water heater temperature between 110 and 120 degrees. Having the temperature any higher is unnecessary and is wasted energy.

For laundry, stick to doing large loads of laundry which use about 21 gallons of water. Avoid doing several small loads, which each use about 14 gallons of water. By doing one large load instead of several small ones, you can save around 7 gallons of water. It might not seem like much, but over the course of a year, it will add up.

Don’t run the dishwasher unless it’s a full load and instead of using the heat cycle, let the dishes air dry.

New Year, New Resolutions, New Budget

You toasted with champagne, watched the ball drop in Times Square, and resolved to get your financial life back on track this year. What do you do now? Are you going to let this resolution fall by the wayside like so many other people’s do? Or are you actually going to follow through this year?

Where do you start?

The key part of getting your financial life back on track is planning, making, and sticking with a budget. I know…that dreaded “b” word! But, if you are going to actually do it this year…that is the only way to go.

If you are like me, you overspent and overindulged during the holiday season. The bills are probably just starting to come in, and as you watch your credit card balance go up and your bank account balance go down, you have got to be thinking “why me?!?”. If you had a budget you wouldn’t be dealing with that right now. You would have spent as much as you had allotted for holiday gifts and parties, and that would have been it. I know this sounds harsh, but that is why you need a budget!

So where do you go to get started? CNN Money has this wonderful little section called “Money 101”. It can help to walk you through the first steps of creating a budget, and also offers a plethora of information on other financial decisions like buying a car, saving for retirement, and investing in the stock market. But stick with the budgeting section for now, and you can worry about the other financial tutorials when you get your financial life back on track.

And, even after you finish making your budget; know that you can always turn to payday loans to get you that extra boost to pay off those holiday bills. They can be just the extra padding your budget can use when you are getting started.