Ramit Sethi lays out a 30-day challenge to save $1,000 using three moves: cut one spending habit, earn extra cash through freelance work or selling stuff, and negotiate lower rates on insurance and bills. The first half he gives tips, the second half the community shares what actually worked.
October 31, 2008.
November 1st.
C = Cut costs; E = Earn more; O = Optimize spending.
Hey guys, it's Ramit Sethi from iwillteachyberich.com, the blog on personal finance and entrepreneurship. No, it's not a scam. Today I want to talk to you about a new challenge I'm launching. It's called the Save $1,000 in 30 days challenge. And from talking to a lot of my friends and reading a bunch of news articles, it's pretty clear that people these days are not that interested in talking about asset allocation, diversification, long term horizons. A lot of us just want to know how we can save some money. So what we're going to do is for 30 days, we're going to give tips on how to save money. These are real tips. Not stupid tips that actually don't work, but real tips that do save money. And the way we're going to do it is we're going to follow a CEO model. The C part is actually cutting costs. This is very tough for us as Americans because we love to spend, spend and spend some more. So what we're going to do here is take one of our habits and cut it cold turkey. We may not be able to go out and eat out as much. For some of my friends, you may not be able to go and drink four nights a week. So that's the cutting cost part. That's going to be the toughest part. The second part is the E part and that's earning more. This is actually pretty fun. The first thing we're going to do here is take something from our house and sell it on ebay. It actually doesn't even matter how much you earn from it. It's just symbolic to show you that yes, you can earn more than your take home salary. And after that, we'll look at other ways, whether it's babysitting or freelancing, that you can earn fairly significant amounts of money. The final part is the O part. This is my favorite part because you can optimize your spending. So we're going to take your spending and really optimize it by negotiating and using some other techniques. For example, you'll be able to negotiate your insurance rates, negotiate your cell phone rates, maybe your cable rates. All of these ways to take your current spending in these tough times and really optimize them. The twist to this challenge is that for the first 15 days, I'm going to offer you the tips to save money. And for the last 15 days, I'm going to ask you the community on iwillteachyou to be rich.com to offer your tips that have really worked to save you money. So join me starting November 1st for the Save $1,000 in 30 Days challenge on iwillteachyberich.com.
