LexChoice Finance

Financial News and Information

The Importance of an Emergency Fund

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If you don’t have an emergency fund, you can pretty much bank on an emergency! As soon as you finish reading this article start planning on how you can start funding one!

As you know there are thousands of financial advisers and experts on TV, radio and the internet and almost all of them will agree on one thing, you need an emergency fund! One of my favorite theory’s about an emergency fund comes from Dave Ramsey. Ramsey suggests having $1,000 in an emergency fund while you are getting out of debt. Once you are debt-free you should start pouring money into an emergency fund until you have 3-6 months of your income saved.

Why do you need an emergency fund?
Unfortunately, life doesn’t always happen as we plan. There are unforeseen expenses that tend to always pop up, and usually they at the worst times possible. If you don’t have the cash to take care of them, the typical American will throw the expense on a credit card and plan to pay it off over the next several months. But what happens when another emergency pops up while trying to pay off the first emergency? As you can see it can be pretty easy to start racking up some pretty hefty debt. If you have a fund in place to cover emergencies you’ll rest a lot easier at night.





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Don’t wast moeny on your children’s enertainment

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I I am obviously not telling you to skip entertaining your children. Everyone needs some type of entertainment in their life, especially children. My point is that children need very little to keep them satisfied. From my experience with my own two children you can easily find simple things around the house to keep they busy for hours.

Simple things such as a cardboard box can be turned into a princess castle with fancy windows, crayon colored flowers and baby doll filled rooms. Or do a little cutting and it can just as easily be turned into a race car or big wheel truck. If your children are more of the artistic type find some old newspapers and magazines and let them cut out their favorite foods, toys and games. Paste them onto a big piece of construction board to hang in their room. To us it may sound silly but to a child it will light up their faces and save you cash.

I think parents of get caught up in what they think their kids will enjoy. I remember once my wife planning a fun filled night out of town. We would stay the night in a hotel and get up early the next day and spend the day at the zoo. We spent roughly $100 in gas, $100 in hotel charges, $50 in zoo tickets and even more money in food.

We walked into the gates of the zoo and our 5 year old wanted to know where the rides were. After explaining that we were there just to walk around and look at animals she was very disappointed. Our 2 year old fell asleep about 1.5 hours into the adventure. We walked around for about another hour and everyone was ready to go home.

We did learn that our family wasn’t zoo people but we also learned that we could have saved or hundreds of dollars, stayed in town at our house, went somewhere fun to eat and played family games at home. We would have had much more fun and saved hundreds of dollars.

Turn off the TV, Save Money

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No matter how frugal you already are everyone can probably think of at least one way to save a little extra cash each month. Today, try turning off your TV. I know what you may be thinking… my television doesn’t use a lot of electricity. Actually, on average a TV at most costs 4 cents per hour to operate. Sure it adds up but there are other things to consider when watching TV.

Television is completely designed around advertising. A typical 30-minute block of time now includes 22 minutes of programming and eight minutes of television advertisements. Over 25% of television is companies trying to sell you something. Obviously it works or advertisers and marketers wouldn’t be paying millions of dollars to advertise on network television.

So… get off your couch, turn off your television and find a hobby you enjoy doing that’s free. You’ll save yourself some money and possibly get healthier as well.

Cheap, fun, entertainment for the family

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I’m always on the lookout for a cheap way to provide entertainment for our whole family. Doing a quick search on the Internet you can always find hundreds of ideas for cheap family entertainment. My search today brought me to Queens’ Free and Cheap Summer Fun Guide.

No, I’m not from Queens, but there are many other websites similar to this one that provides you with cheap or free opportunities for your family to have fun. Family entertainment doesn’t have to be expensive. With the shape our economy is in these days every saved penny counts. As Queens’ Mammas points out there are many great opportunities in your area such as parks, workshops, parades, concerts and fireworks.

Do some searching on the internet for cheap, fun, and free enertainment opportunities for your family. No matter how big or small your town is there are ways to enertain for free or very cheap!

A great deal at the consignment store

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Today my wife got a phone call from a friend who just visited the local children’s consignment store. She informed her that they were having an end of summer clearance sale on all their summer clothes. Since we have two small girls my wife decided it would be a good idea to at least go take a look and try to scout out some leftover deals.

The consignment store was offering a deal where you could stuff a bag full of clothes and only pay $15. I thought it would be a pretty good deal if the bag was a decent size. I’m all about saving money so I gladly watched the children while she went to scope things out.

About an hour and 20 minutes later she returned with her bag full of clothes. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the bag was a decent sized bag. She actually crammed exactly 40 articles of clothing into the bag. All of the clothing was name brand clothing and looked new. So she bought the clothes for about $0.38 each. The best part is that everything she bought was something she would have probably purchased anyway. Sure it’s mostly for next summer but you just can’t beat a sale like this!

If you really want to save some money in the clothing budget check out consignment stores. Most of them only buy back clothing that looks new so there is still plenty of wear left in the clothes. Most of the clothes are also top name brand clothes, so you can be stylish and still save a lot of cash!