A penny saved is less than a penny earned
The latest bottom line has a cover story written by the ultimate cheapskate.
He writes that by today's standards, the penny in your hand is not worth as much as the penny that you earned. He says that it depends on your tax bracket.
If you pay 30% of your paycheck in taxes, then the money in your hand is worth less than what it took to earn it.
I'm probably making it harder to wrap your head around this, but I found it very fascinating.
If you pay 30% of your paycheck in taxes, you have to earn roughly 1.3 cents to have 1 cent in your hand.
Damn, that hurts.
The idea is that knowing this should cause you to think more about the items that you are purchasing. Something that cost 100 dollars to buy cost 130 dollars to earn.
This short article in Bottom Line is really messing with my head. The guy is very good at being cheap.
He recommends having a 'designated cheapskate' much like a 'designated driver' when going on any shopping trips. Take turns. Then you have one person who will be saying 'Do we really need this?' and 'Is this cheaper online?'
This comes after hearing the estimate for some brake work on my 94 volvo 850. I am working very hard at saving money and the estimate from the DEALERSHIP is more than I want to spend. However, the Foreign Auto places are only open from 8:30 to 5:30 Monday thru Friday. It's totally sucky. I haven't decided what to do. I think I am going to first rescue my car from the dealership, and then try to get some weekend estimates and then do the repairs every other week in baby steps instead of one chunk at a time.
Of course the dealer said that it is hard to access the brakes for them to do repairs and it is better to do everything at once.
The weird thing is that I thought I could see the brakes just inside of the tire hub. That doesn't seem that hard to reach. Of course, I fear the dealer. They said that it would be 8 hours of labor and would run 800 dollars. I can't believe that their shop rate is lower than a hundred dollars. How can 8 hours of labor equate to an 800 dollar bill?
Watch out, cheapskate, here I come.
Submitted by - David Johnson