In the past few months, I keep on hearing from various sources that credit cards are evil and my sources are happy and content to use money instead of credit cards.

I used to feel the same way few years ago before marriage. I didn’t have a single credit card even though the rewards were very attractive. Part of it was my nature of not wanting any kind of debt. After my marriage, I sometimes used to get angry to my husband for using credit card. I don’t want him to spend any of other people’s money (how naive I was?). Now, here I’m taking about good things of using credit card.

If you have a possibly, steady stream of income (a job, for example), you save at least 10% of your savings every month, and you pay your bills before the due dates, you can have a credit card and enjoy various rewards they provide.

We don’t use debt cards at home for most of our expenses. We have two credit cards and we check their reward programs quite often to see what are their special rewards of the month and how can we take advantage of them. Both the cards are quite different from each other. One will give good percentage of cash back for grocery spending and another will give nice cash back for gas/fuel spending.

So, it’s also important to choose the credit card company based on your family needs. One complaint I constantly hear from my friends is that, if we use credit cards we spend a lot. This triggered me to write a post about impulse buying. Don’t we all have to have a budget for each category of spending? We follow a budget system at home and I’d like to have a separate post on that to explain you our system.

But my point is, we cannot complain credit card is the one makes us spend more. It’s us who decide on what to buy and how much to spend.

However, here is an interesting article about late credit card payments from Yahoo! Money.

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Even though I give high importance to saving money, I’m still lacking skills on where to invest our hard earned money. Hence, I started reading quite a number of books related to investment. Last week I was reading “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” by Harv Eker. One non-investment thing that strike me in the book was what we learn from our parents and how our parents’ habits affect our behavior. I tried to connect it with my experience and found that to some extend this is true.

My father was a spendthrift. He used to spend lavishly for things that we didn’t need. He is a wonderful father and now after some bitter experiences he is slowly improving his spending habits. His sufferings due to money made a great impact in my life. I became the opposite of him when it comes to money. Even though I’m not thrifty, I give more importance to saving money than spending.

Another example is, my mother believes in one GOD. She always says that we have only one GOD in the world and people pray the GOD in different forms/ways. This made a strong impact in me and now I strongly believe in this philosophy too.

Even though the outcome of the above two examples are positive, some times we learn bad things too (like procrastination). If one of our parents lie unnecessarily, deep in our mind we’ll conclude that lying is not a deadly mistake. But sometimes it is.

I too have few bad habits that I inherited from my relatives and I gave some of my bad habits to them. Unless we  find out what are all those bad habits we got from them, we cannot change those bad habits.

Mind you, I love my parents unconditionally and I’m blessed to have such a wonderful parents. All I’m saying is each person has some bad habits and their kids may learn some of them from their parents and siblings.

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Even though I behave quite well outside, I’m short tempered within my circle. I show my anger or frustration only to my closed ones. It’s a good thing in a way as on the outside I’ll keep the good name. But in reality, people who are close to me get hurt.

My mom always tells me that I use sharp words when I’m angry. I mention here because it’s a public confession and I’m hoping that I’ll improve my temperament gradually.

Nowadays, If I’m angry I try to avoid talking to my closed ones and deviate myself from the situation. It helps me little. But I have a long way to go.

How about you? Who would you show your anger when you’re angry and how do you control your anger and frustration?

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Baked Farfalle

I’m a big foodie who loves to try anything vegetarian. And I also cannot be hungry (seriously!). So, I have this urge to eat out whenever I see my favorite restaurants. My main problem is to control my hunger and appetite when I go out. We have a monthly “restaurant budget” in our home and we cannot go out of that budget (I hate to lose control on something and feel ashamed after the short pleasure. It’s the reason I started this blog).

The things that cracks me up is, all of us in the family are foodie and none of them except me don’t hesitate to eat out (they couldn’t care less about budget). The only person who wants to spend within the budget is me. So, I have to control me before controlling everyone in the family.

Then I found this menu planning idea from the web and started implementing it in our family. Out menu planning is quite relaxed. We don’t include the recipes in menu planning. Instead, we plan using the groceries we bought that week from the grocery store.

How does it help?

Since we can go to the grocery store only once a week, I have to be creative in cooking even if we miss to buy one or two ingredients

I also have to plan my grocery shopping extensively to cover all the items I need the following week

Since my family already know that whatever we bought that week in grocery store is final, they’d let me know their wants the previous week itself. It helps me plan my week ahead of time

I get creative in recipes and come up with new recipes based on my family’s tastes. For example, my husband requested me to make pineapple pizza for dinner yesterday. I neither had pizza sauce nor pineapple.

Since I didn’t want to fully disappoint him, I decided to make something italian. All I had in hand was, Farfalle pasta and variety of cheese.

I cooked the paste, added olive oil, left-over pesto, pepper, feta cheese, parmesan cheese, mozzarella cheese and and olives in the paste, mix it well and baked at 400 C for 15 mins. A crispy, delicious dinner ready.

I served it with canned tomato soup. I should say, my family loved the meal.

How to plan the shopping:

I use my iPhone to enter the items that I’m going to buy the next week. I tried different iPhone apps previousy. But none of them worked as good as iPhone notes.

Rule: Buy whatever you enter in your notes. If an item is not in the list, don’t buy it.

Always have extra packs of basic essentials. For example, we always have enough stock of milk, curd (yogurt), and banana at home.

Hence, even if you miss some of the items, you don’t have to run to the store during the week.

How to menu plan:

I use pinterest to pin all my favorite recipes. I sometimes look for recipes based on ingredients on hand. But mostly, if I have enough vegetables and seasonings at home, I can come up with anything that my family likes (well, most of the time)

Wherever we live in the world, buying house is an important goal in many of our lives. Living in own house provides peace and happiness. But that’s not what i’m going to talk about.

The economy is bad and inflation is high. But our salary didn’t change with respect to inflation percentage. So we want to save the little money we have in the best way possible. Generally, we have two types of investment. 1. movable, and 2. immovable.

Immovable investments are mostly on either house or land. I’m sure all of us know these details. However, my question here is whether it’s an asset or a liability.

ASSET OR LIABILITY:

Well, it mainly depends on where you buy your property. If you buy a house in USA, for example, it’s mostly a liability.

If you bought a house in India few years ago when the prices were low, the house is definitely an asset. But now   property prices are high and they’re very likely to go down in metro cities.

Buying house in India now – ASSET

- We’ll get tax benefits from buying a house. So, that extra money is an additional saving.

-  Even though there is a speculation that property prices will go down due to economy, in metropolitan cities it’s less likely to happen. Actually, it’s the other way. property prices will go up in metro cities.

- Even if you don’t live in that house, you can rent it and at least use that money to pay your EMI.

- Living in your own house is the best feeling and living in somebody else’s house by paying a rent is money out of your pocket anyway.

Buying house in India now – LIABILITY

- If you’re investing your life long savings in one place and If there is a problem in it, your savings will be gone.

- If you have a house in a place, you’d prefer to stay there longer and sometimes you may have to miss opportunities by not able to move from there.

- Even if you move, you need to rely on some one to take care of the house.

- Don’t forget the maintenance cost that you have to spend every year.

My conclusion is, if you throw your life long savings in one house, the house is a liability as even the interest from that money cannot come near to the EMI.

But if you have enough money and buying a house is one of the investments, it’s definitely an asset as you’ll keep it longer.

If you’re planning to short sell your properly (selling it within one year of buying), you’ll have to short term capital gain tax. Keep that in mind if you’re planning for the short sale.

So, how is your exercise everyday challenge going on? By now, we’re done with day 2 and we have 20 days to go.

gosh! It’s damn hard to push myself to do one simple thing every day. I was too lazy to go to gym the first day. So, we went for a brisk walking.

Yesterday we played tennis even though the weather is kind of cold.

When I was surfing Pinterest, I came across this message. Thought of sharing it with you. You may find it motivating, like I did.

I’ll post the update on day 3 tomorrow. stay tuned.

It’s such as wonderful video that will let you think about. If you want to take some action on it, feel free to read the exercise everyday challenge.

Impulse Buying

I do almost all the shopping for my family. I go for shopping most of the weekend (it includes grocery shopping) and sometimes weekdays. One thing I keep resisting and some times failing is “impulse buying”. If it’s something more than 500 rupees, my inner eye will wake up and start analyse whether that product is necessary. But if it’s something that’s as small as 10 rupees, I don’t mind spending without even a second thought. The main reason being, “oh it’s very cheap. my family might need it”. But the truth is, it’s not a necessity for my family.

For instance, we went to grocery shopping in one of the health stores today. when we go to their bakery section (which happens every time), we unknowingly end up buying more baked goods than we need. All of us in our family love cookies and cakes. But if we don’t think twice before buying, we wouldn’t be able to finish all the things we bought before their expiry date.

One secret that works quite well in our family is, 10 seconds rule. Before we pick a product, that’s not necessary, in the store, we wait for 5-10 seconds, think whether it’s going to be useful and buy it. Even then we sometimes buy more than required. So, before going to the cashier, we recheck the shopping cart to make sure we have only things that are necessary.

Are you planning to participate in the exercise everyday challenge that starts today? then don’t forget to do any physical activity at least for half an hour.

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Even though this blog is for people who want to improve their lives, it doesn’t mean we want to utilize 100% of our time effectively. I’m a fun loving person and apart from working, I love to spend time with my family and continue my hobbies. I like the proverb “work while you work and play while you play”.

Do you think I’m a perfect person? hell no.  I have lots to improve and one of those things is “doing physical activities”. I work most of my time in my computer and rarely do any physical activity. So, I feel lazy even to walk a kilo meter. To keep ourselves active, we don’t have to slog in the gym every day. Even simple physical activities help us active and energetic. Hence, I introduce you THE EXERCISE EVERYDAY CHALLENGE this month.

I have already tried this “exercise everyday” challenge few months ago and it drastically improved my energy level. After a month of continuous exercise routine, I couldn’t sleep without sweating. I felt ashamed of myself if I didn’t do any physical activity in a day.

Last time my friends joined me in this challenge and this time I’m asking you if you’d like to join the challenge. The goal is not about losing weight. It’s mainly about doing some physical activity every day. Even 30 mins walking can be considered as a physical activity.

Would you like to join me? The challenge starts tomorrow (Monday, January 9th) and goes till the end of January. The only condition is, you have to do any physical activity every day and you should not miss even a day for any reasons.

One thing I do to make sure I don’t get bored in the challenge is, I make sure I have a list of physical activities I like and do each one every day in a week. For example, I like to play tennis, long/brisk walk, and do elliptical. I do each one every day in a week. I also reward myself a cup of ice cream if I did an activity every day that week.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding the challenge. I’d love to share more details about it.

Not sure about you. But I get extremely lazy during weekends. There were very few weekends in 2011 I was active. Even though I slept longer and stayed home more time, I don’t feel like I enjoyed my life during weekends.

Here comes the resolution for 2012. I take one simple resolution every year that I can keep up the whole year. Last year, I decided not to get caught for speeding by traffic cops. (i know!) and I did keep it the whole year.

This year my resolution is to plan for the weekends. I have already put together a plan for tomorrow. I make sure “people I’m closed to” know my resolution. It’s a public accountability that helps me keep up the things I have to do.

But, how about you? How do you keep your weekends active other than watching moving, grocery shopping, and sleeping?