How to Save With Cutting-Edge Tech

Believe it or not, new gadgets can actually slash your spending over time

David LaGesse

An economy in the dumps has taught many consumers to live without the extras. And that would seem to include the latest in gadgets: New HDTVs, MP3 players, and game consoles can cost a bundle. But some of the best in fresh tech not only comes cheap; it can even save cash over time. Here’s how savvy buyers can cut their budget and still brag that they’re on the cutting edge:

TRIM THE CABLE.

One of the best ways to save on tech is to trim your monthly cable subscription, which often exceeds $100. Simply cutting out extra movie channels can save consumers as much as $600 a year. A cheaper alternative is to purchase a Netflixsubscription for $9 a month and get as many DVDs as you can watch, one at a time. There’s typically a two-day delay between shipping a disk back and receiving another.

Netflix also offers instant Web streaming of more than 17,000 TV shows and movies. Watching those streams on the living room TV is easy with a Roku box, which starts at $80. Roku owners can also pay a few dollars to stream a movie from an even larger selection at Amazon, and Roku recently added about a dozen “channels” that offer video from other Internet sites.

A variety of Blu-ray players, flat-panel TVs, and other boxes such as Apple TV also can stream Web video to the living room, “but Roku is the simplest out there right now,” says Chicago resident C. J. Chilvers. “It also offers the most diversity.”

Cut the cable completely.

Chilvers lives in a condo that doesn’t have good over-the-air reception. Otherwise, he says, he would have taken the next step of cutting out cable altogether. Digital broadcasts now offer crystal-clear video and audio with an old-fashioned antenna, including what videophiles claim is an HDTV signal that’s sharper than cable or satellite. Cutting the digital tier, or basic cable, altogether can mean the loss of live news and sports that aren’t yet available online. But it can also save consumers another $600 a year.

Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps!

Benjamin Franklin once said, “He who spends less than he earns truly has the philosopher’s stone.”

Now, that might sound like common sense to you, and it is. You’d be surprised, though at how many people actually live way beyond their means. If you don’t believe me, how do you think we got into this economic nightmare in the first place?

This past election year we heard chants about change (in mind set, way of life, belief)? I can’t say. But one idiom stuck with me during one of the speech by a candidate, “Pull Ourselves up by the bootstraps” I am omitting “the dusting” part of it. Anyways what is this?

Nobody really knows the origin of the idiom, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” It doesn’t really matter where it came from or who said it first. The point is in the meaning. To pull yourself up by your bootstraps is to improve your own situation without any help from anyone else.

 I’m guessing that the idea behind it is that if you get yourself into a mess, you can get yourself out. Well, at least that’s how I’m interpreting it.

So you got yourself into a mess. So, you want to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, but you don’t wear boots with straps, could care less what the idiom means, and just want someone, somewhere to give you the tiniest bit of hint on what to do to get yourself out.

 Your Faithful Frugal Friend is here to help. Read on for some strategies you can use to help improve your financial situation in this week’s top picks:

The best sites for saving money

Bargaineering. Jim Wang’s blog offers plenty of good personal-finance content along with reviews of banks, credit card offers, books and products.

Consumerism Commentary. Track blogger Flexo’s net worth as he and partner Smithee write about saving money on everything from banking to travel.

The Dollar Stretcher. If this site has had a major redesign since its launch in 1996, I missed it. But you don’t need fancy graphics when you have a huge library of articles and tips about saving money. Even black-belt frugality experts will find new information here.

Are You Due For A Financial Tuneup?: Here is How To Do Your Own!

Last year, Ron Lieber of the New York Times devoted one entire weekday to tackling activities on his   financial checklist, like signing up for a higher-yield savings account and upgrading a cash-back credit  card. But I am advocating a set in stone one day a week solely dedicated to one financial matters, The Money Day!!

This day, preferably one outside your busy routine would serve to catch up on personal finances, maintenance, research, education, and more.  Mr. Lieber just introduced a new concept called Your Money: A Financial Tuneup, it contains a number of articles with practical advice for putting (and keeping) your financial life in order. (See all the articles here).

In “Take a Few Hours and Unlock Some Cash,” Mr. Lieber explains the basic idea of taking a financial health day, shares what he accomplished during his own financial tuneup this year and offers advice for how you might go about planning your own.

To help with the planning, they’ve created an interactive checklist, “31 Steps to a Financial Tuneup,” with a number of activities to consider. They range from saving another percentage point of your pay and automating your savings to finding a better bank.

You can customize the list based on your own needs and print it out as a guide for your own financial tuneup. The tool also includes video tips as well as a calculator showing how saving one more percentage point can impact your savings.

Other articles in the section cover topics including how to self-diagnose your financial health, why it’s important to review legal documents about your estate, new high-tech ways to track your spending to the penny, how a line-by-line scrutiny of your last tax return can help you formulate a better personal finance strategy and why you might want to switch banks.

For those who have lost jobs, homes, and saw their dreams turn into nightmares will never look at all things financial the same way again. And for the rest of us, the recession, Wall Street greed and vanishing investment portfolios have but awaken/created financial wizards.

So there is not better time than now to create a Money Day as boring as it sounds. The peace of mind, the knowledge and control of one personal financial matters are crucial to one overall well-being. Would’t you agree?

Marriage and money: What’s working for you?

Couples argue more about money than about sex, but not as much as they fight about the kids or taking out the garbage. 84% of our respondents note that money causes tension in their marriages, and 13% say they fight about money several times a month. The leading cause of dissension is disagreement about financial priorities.

Husbands and wives divvy up money-related tasks along very traditional lines. Men still tend to do most of the big-picture, long-term planning while women manage the household’s day-to-day finances. The gender divide seems to conform to some of our hardest-to-shake stereotypes. Man hunt food; woman make cave pretty.

In the poll’s most eye-opening findings, men and women had dramatically different ideas about who does what with the family money, and what their partners care about. Husbands were especially clueless, tending to underestimate how much women care about almost every financial issue, from saving for retirement to paying off debt. A hundred years after Freud, and men still don’t know what women want.

The gap between the financial issues that people care about most and what their spouses think they hold important may not be the Grand Canyon. But some couples will need an awfully big bridge to get across it. Women come much closer in gauging what matters to men. If anything, they tend to give guys too much credit, believing their husbands care more about paying off debt and saving for big purchases than men actually do.

PHOTOS: KATHERINE LEDNER

To truly become rich, you need to stop acting like it

• 86% of all luxury vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.
• $16 what most millionaires pay for a haircut (including tip)

There are many words to describe how so many people end up in financial trouble, but one stands out.

Pretenders.

Sure, sometimes bad things happen, and it’s not your fault. But many of you — and you know who you are — are experiencing economic problems because you were pretending to be rich.

Thomas J. Stanley has been examining the truly rich for years. A former university professor, he’s the co-author of one of my all-time favorite personal finance books, “The Millionaire Next Door.” It should have a permanent spot in your home library.

Just before year’s end, Stanley released “Stop Acting Rich . . . and Start Living Like a Real Millionaire” (Wiley, $26.95). I’m recommending this book as the February selection for the Color of Money Book Club.

The credit crisis and recession, Stanley says, have presented us with the opportunity to treat and cure the pretenders.

“But for the treatment to work, you must take a cold hard look at your balance sheet and at your life, and determine if you would be wealthier if you would stop acting rich,” he writes.

In Stanley’s new book, a millionaire is defined as someone with net-value investments of $1 million or more. The investments include cash, stocks, bonds, mutual funds and equity shares in a private business. The author said he eschewed the traditional way people calculate wealth, particularly as it relates to the value of a home. If your net worth was $1.5 million with 85 percent of that from your home, and the value of your home depreciated by 50 percent — which it has for too many people — then your wealth wasn’t real.

Stanley’s research does a great job of proving there’s a big difference between income and net worth. Many pretenders have become very good at generating income and enjoying a high standard of living. But take this Stanley gem to the bank: “Those who are among the least productive in transforming their incomes into wealth are in the higher-status occupations.”

What do we often tell a child who expresses an interest in teaching? “You won’t get rich as a teacher.”

Yet, there are more than 350,000 millionaire educators, working or retired teachers or professors, according to Stanley’s research.

Stanley has one major purpose for this latest installment in examining the lifestyles of the truly rich. He wants to make the case that if people stop acting rich, they can achieve the kind of happiness money can’t buy.

Here are just a few things Stanley found in his research on the wealthy:

– Eighty-six percent of all prestige or luxury makes of motor vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.

– Typically, millionaires pay about $16 (including tip) for a haircut.

– Nearly four in 10 millionaires buy wine that costs about $10.

– In the United States, there are nearly three times as many millionaires living in homes with a market value of less than $300,000 than there are living in homes valued at $1 million or more.

– Forget the Manolo Blahnik high-priced shoes. The No. 1 shoe brand worn by millionaire women is Nine West. Their favorite clothing store is Ann Taylor.

Will the recession motivate pretenders to hit the reset button and not just act rich but live modestly like many real millionaires?

Stanley isn’t so sure.

“Time will tell if society and people have really changed,” he says. “My research indicates that people, for generations, have become so accustomed to consuming that it is second nature. And I am fairly certain that they will resume their spendthrift ways once outward symptoms of the financial flu have passed.”

This book reminds me of a wonderful Scripture.

Proverbs 13:7 in the Today’s New International Version Bible reads, “One person pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth.”

Don’t be a great pretender, pretending you’re doing well when you only look the part. Read this book and find out how to emulate real-deal millionaires.

By Michelle Singletary