There are many options to save for a child’s education including 529 and college savings plans, but many of these would most likely eliminate or reduce financial aid.  If you’re worried about financial aid impact, a  good way to approach the savings is to avoid savings and investment vehicles listed in college Expected Family Contribution (EFC) Calculation EFC Formula and on the FASFA form.  Some ideas include:

• A cash value insurance policy
• Roth IRA or other retirement savings
• House equity (though some private colleges take this into account)

Deal Specialist makes his own baby wipes. Not necessarily to save money (even though it does), but because he believes it is safer since he can control what goes into the wipes.  It’s much easier than you might think.  Here’s what you need to make the baby wipes:

• Roll of paper towels (something that stays sturdy when wet, we use Viva towels)
• Seal-able plastic container that will fit a roll of paper towels that has been cut in half
• 3 tbsp Light Olive Oil
• 3 tbsp Baby Shampoo (any will do, but we use Johnson’s baby shampoo)
• 3 cups of water

This is what you do:

1. Cut a roll of paper towels in half (perpendicular to where you pull the paper)
2. Remove the paper towel cores from both halves
3. Put one half in storage and the other half in the sealable plastic container (you will be pulling the baby wipes from the center of the half paper towel)
4. Mix olive oil, baby shampoo, and 3 cups of water in another container
5. Pour mixture on top of paper towel half
6. You’re Done!!!  Since no preservatives were added, I would use up the wipes within 3 weeks just to be safe.

Deal Specialist tip:  We use these at home, when going out, we do purchase baby wipes just for convenience.  You could put a few of these in a smaller container if you wanted to use these when going out.

Printable Paper

The Deal Specialist is always looking for ways of saving on everyday expenses.  My last endeavor was to to reduce my phone costs.  An obvious target to reduce cost was my home phone since I mostly use my cell phone.  I maybe used my home phone on average of 1-3 times a week and it was costing me about $30 a month, if you do the math that is $360/year or $2.50/call.

However, I was not ready to completely get rid of my home phone completely due to it being a good method for me to make long calls and receive calls.  Did a bit of research and found Ooma.  Buy the equipment and get free phone calls for life.  Sounded too good to be true, but the product had great reviews.

I took the plunge and ordered it from Amazon here.  I received it and I have to say I was impressed.  Once unpacked and briefly looking through the manual, I activated the Ooma device online at the Ooma website.  Setup was a breeze:

• I plugged the Ooma device into my router, phone, and power
• Waited for the Ooma device blue light to come on to indicate a connection
• Set up my voicemail and was good to go

Voice quality was comparable to a land line and was actually better than my office work line which uses VoIP as well.  I found the numerous reviews on Amazon were quite accurate and I am very happy with my purchase and savings.  Overall, thumbs up for Ooma!

An easy way of documenting is to use a photocopier.  Just lay out all your cards and other contents (no need to photocopy cash ) on the photocopy machine and print out a copy.  Keep this photocopy in a secure place.  Hopefully you will never need to use it, but you have it just in case.

Just use your camera phone:

• Take a picture of the outside of your luggage bag in case you need to give a description
• Take a picture of the contents of your bags as you are packing (or just one picture after you are done packing) in case you need to report it to insurance one day.

• Open a regular non-retirement investment account
• Leave the account open, with your referral money in there, for at least 6 months.
• Fund your account with at least $1,000 within 30 days of opening the account
• Make a minimum of one trade within 180 days of account opening

About 10-20 minutes of work for $50, not bad.  Deal Specialist does use Tradeking for his equity trading, but if you are only interested in the promotion, you can buy one share of penny stock and leave it there (SGRP and TCX are under .50 at the time of this post).

I disagree with many financial experts in that I believe that credit cards are a good thing to have if you are responsible with your money.  It’s all about tracking your spending.  In fact, I have a harder time controlling my spending when I use cash since I can’t track it in my Financial Aggregation Tool.  Here are my Fave 5 reasons that I have a credit card.

5. Float  your debt
I pay my balance in full every month so I don’t accrue any interest.  In essence, I am getting free interest on that money every month.  For example, if I pay a $100 electric bill every month with my credit card, I can keep an extra $100 in a Certificate of Deposit or Money Market account to earn interest.

4. Get gifts/rewards for signing up
From cash to free toasters many cards offer some sort of incentive to sign up.  As long as you don’t go crazy signing up for every card that has some kind of gift with it you can use this to your advantage.

3. Save on interest
May cards have special terms on interest.  0% or reduced interest rates… some are promotional and some cards have a fixed low interest rate.  Use this in conjunction with Reason 1 (float) and you can get some extra interest.  Just make sure you read all the fine print and have the money to pay in full when the promotion period ends.

2. Get a reward for making purchases
Get cash/points/rewards for spending.  If you’re going to make a purchase anyway why not get an instant 1% discount.  Just don’t go overboard with chasing points.

1. Build your credit for big purchases
And the NUMBER 1 reason for getting a credit card is to build your credit.  Some day you may need financing.  The deal specialist does not believe in financing for cars (unless you can get <3%), but someday you will want to buy a house.  Easiest way to build up credit is to get a credit card.

That’s what the Fave 5 concept is – short concise 5 item lists about all things Deal Specialist: Personal Finance,  Productivity, Technology

For all our Fave 5 Features Click Here.

All you need to do is:

1. Create an Xmark account (simple 5 minute registration)
2. Install the Xmark plugin
3. Login to your Xmark account from your browser.

Then manage your bookmarks as you have always been.  If you install the plugin on all your computers, all your bookmarks will be synchronized:

• Add a bookmark, it gets added to all computers
• Delete a bookmark, it gets deleted from all computers
• Organize once and it gets organized on all your computers

Xmarks is free for download here