For those of us who are already quite frugal, what does this change in the average American mean for us? Surely it will have an impact on retailers and how they gear their offerings to their believed client base, but will it be all good? I tend to think it will have a variety of impacts on our lives, both positive and negative. Right now, I’m thinking about grocery stores, since I just finished perusing our weekly store ads for sales…

For one, I anticipate a rise in the number of sales and depth of product stock on lower priced or generic items. As people become more price concious, stores will no longer be able to bank on providing small quanities of “loss leaders” to get people in the door, because those people very well may end up just leaving because the items they wanted are sold out. It also brings up the potential increase in rainchecks.

Do you get rainchecks when a sale item is out of stock? I do and I love them. Sometimes I look for things that are currently on sale for a great price, even though we don’t them need right then, in the hope they will be out of stock so we can get a raincheck. A good use of rainchecks can keep you from the dreaded “poop, that’s a great price, but we don’t need any right now” scenario. Note: You’re normally more likely to find the sale items out of stock in the end of a sale, so I try to plan accordingly.

I would also expect us to see a rise in manufacturer coupon disbursements. Stores will only discount their prices so much and if manufacturers start seeing too much of a hit to their top line sales, they will more than likely being to push their ad/coupon campaigns harder. Stores should see an increase in coupon redemptions, which will in turn slow down checkout times at the register.

Have you ever been behind someone with 20 coupons to redeem? It doesn’t bother me, because I applaud the use of coupons, but how will I feel when every person in line is holding $5.00 of savings split up into 20 scannable chunks? I don’t know… We may also see an increase in people scrutinizing the “ring up” process to ensure they are being charged the right amount. That would be another contributing factor to a slow-down in the check out process.

Now it is more important than ever that we step up and take notice of the pricing on the items we buy. I’ve discussed this in part 1 of my series on stretching out your food budget and Passive over at PFI recently saw just how important it is to know what really is a good deal when you see one.

I anticipate that grocery stores will really focus on finding new ways of enticing us to spend more than we should by making prices appear to be a good discount when they really are not. They’ve been doing it for years and I only expect it to get more creative as food prices continue to rise.

It’s hard to resist prepared foods. The pizza is already made and frozen. The chicken is already “rotisseried” and ready to serve. The fish filets are already breaded and frozen. The additional preparation and handling costs that come with foods that are already partially or even fully prepared may spike an uptrend in buying non-prepared foods. Finding good prices on raw meats may get more difficult and in turn, the use of freezers for stockpiling becomes all that more rewarding.

Wow, I am one opinionated guy. I guess that’s why I enjoy making momentum plays in the market. At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see how things play out. We can’t control the prices, but we can control what we buy and how we spend our money. We’ll definitely see changes in more arenas than grocery and I’m interested to see what you think about this.

If you have a blog and decide to post your opinions on upcoming changes that we may see in grocery stores or any retail avenue, please let me know and I will add a link to your post here. It’d be neat to have a compiled list of the similar discussions.

This is the first time since starting the blog that I have gone this long without posting. Granted “this long” is only 4 days, but it feels like a long time considering I usually write a post about every day. Unfortunately, I was just too tired in the evenings to post and what little free time I did have was spent reading. This series of events leads me to why I’m writing tonight. When confronted with a shortened free timespan decision of whether to read other blogs and financial related sites or post to my blog, I chose to read.

I can’t tell you why I made that decision with any real certainty, but I tend to hope it is because I feel the need to quench my own thirst for knowledge before devoting time to talking about it. On the contrary, every night I felt an urge to post. I also felt a little guilty for not posting. I imagine that these feelings came from instinct. Once something becomes a habit, we are compelled to continue even when we have no pressure to do so.

So, I’d like to pose these questions to all of you…

1. Do you feel compelled to post to your blog even when you feel like there is something else that you would enjoy doing more?
2. Do you treat your blog like a job that comes with its’ own set of responsibilities?
3. Do you ever feel guilty for not posting every day? If so, do you worry that your posts will become “watered down” as you will inevitably end up struggling to find compelling things to discuss?

As a full time web developer and part time, hobby, blogger it interests me that I feel the urge to treat the blog as another responsibility. I don’t know why this is, but I look forward to hearing about your thoughts and experiences on the topic if you don’t mind commenting on it.

Anyway, I got to thinking about what to put in that sidebar spot and I decided to start linking the top referring blogs for the previous month. They are the blogs that sent the most traffic this way during the month. Since the blogs that link here will almost always be of a similar topic to mine, I think it’s a good fit. I also like the fact that I can thank those bloggers by letting others know about their blogs like they have done for me.

With that in mind, here are the few guidelines that I have chosen for the Top Referrer linkage:

1. The blog must be in the Top (currently 3, maybe more later) referrers for the previous month.
2. The referrals can not come from a carnival listing. I decided this because if I’m submitting my own article to a carnival, it’s not the same as a blog owner choosing to call out my blog on their own.

   Reader Update: Ken emailed about this post to let me know that it would probably be worthwhile to actually explain what a blog carnival is, so there would be no confusion here. I think it’s a good example of how easy it is to forget that not everyone is a blogger who is going to understand the “lingo”. So, for anyone who hasn’t heard of a blog carnival before or don’t know what it is, please check out the Wikipedia information about them.

3. The blog does not have to be in my blogroll or have me in theirs. However, blogs that link to mine in their blogroll are, of course, more likely to be in the top referrer list.

That’s really the only guidelines I can think of right now that I think would be worthwhile. I’m hoping this turns out to be a win/win all the way around.

Do you have any other suggestions for Top Referrer guidelines?

• Article Link: CNNMoney.com - They cut out their credit cards

The Glitches: When Matt tried to buy a $5,700 PC online with a debit card, he ran into his $2,000-a-day spending limit. Because he has good credit, his bank lifted it.

Uhm…. OMG?!?!?! He’s got me speaking in internet chat-acronyms. Why in the sam hellmans mayonnaise did he need a $5,700 pc?

The Method: They closed their accounts, drew up their first budget and spent the next four years erasing the debt. “If we want something, we pay for it in cash,” says Suzi. “If we can’t afford it, we do without or wait.”

I would be leary of this. Even if you aren’t planning to use the cards, keeping them helps you keep a longer credit history. A shorter age will hurt your FICO score which will still have a negative effect on your finances even if you don’t want to use credit cards. Higher mortgage rates, car insurance rates, etc…

I guess I’ve always considered having credit cards a blessing because of the rewards. I’ve never even considered carrying a balance and I don’t have a spending “problem”. So, for me to say that these people’s decisions are wrong, just isn’t fair. However, I just hope that they are able to fix the root of the problem and not the byproduct, which is the overspending.

What do you think? Is it the ease of using a credit card that gives people trouble or some other issue surfacing in the form of overspending?

I want to preface this post by saying that what Paul teaches is not a diet. It’s not a “quick weight loss” plan. It is quite simply just retraining yourself to eat in a much better way.

The foundation of Paul’s system, which is the part that we decided to try, has four rules. I am listing them below with links to Paul’s web site where you can read more about them if you like.

Four Golden Rules:

1. When You Are Hungry, Eat
2. Eat What You Want, Not What You Think You Should
3. Eat Consciously And Enjoy Every Mouthful
4. When You Think You Are Full, Stop Eating

Now, I know the rules sound very “self helpy”. We are all accustomed to hearing things like that when we hear or read about diets. In fact, you might even be thinking right now…

Sure, there are these rules, but what am I not allowed to eat? - Or - Ok, those rules are too easy, what is the catch?

There is no catch. There is nothing to buy, there are no pills to take, there isn’t even special food you have to add to your normal diet. However, I want to elaborate a little bit on each of the rules, because the rules themselves don’t really explain how you will benefit from them.

So, here goes…

It sounds so simple. I used to think that’s what I always did. I would go get some food when I was hungry. However, I have since come to realize that I wasn’t truly hungry. I thought I was hungry because I was bored or because it was “that time of day”. Truly eating when you are hungry means that your body is telling you to eat, not your emotions.

Real hunger is slow to surface. You’ll go from being a little peckish to thinking of eating soon to being actually hungry. Emotional hunger is instant. I’ve found that now that I am able to easily distinguish between the two types of hunger that emotional hunger is more like an epiphany. “Hey, I want some potato chips!!!”. That groundbreaking thought comes from emotional hunger. The type of hunger that is normally brought on by watching TV or reading a book and it’s the emotional eating that adds on those extra pounds.

This is a classic no-no in the diet world. More often than not you are given types of foods or even specific foods that you should eat. Well, that can end up being why you don’t stay on the diet. If you are really eating what you want, then you won’t be left feeling like you have deprived yourself of something. That feeling of depravity is what can, and often does, lead to binge eating.

If you have ever dieted, you may have had this thought before “Well, I did good today and didn’t eat any sweets. So, now I’ll treat myself to some cake”. It’s that kind of thinking that can easily turn into you eating half the cake and totally negating any benefits you gained from the day of avoiding the sweets.

This was one that my wife and I were both guilty of; We were shovelers. We would eat very fast. Neither of us knows why it happened, but that’s the habit we had and we formed that habit long before we ever met each other. Subconciously, our minds had decided that eating was like racing and the first to finish wins. The problem with this is that you aren’t giving your stomach time to give you the signal that you are full and by the time you get that signal, you aren’t full, you are stuffed.

Eating conciously also means; don’t eat in front of the TV, don’t eat in front of the computer, don’t eat and focus on anything other than eating. It’s that focus that allows us to savor our food. Since, we’re eating what we want, it should be rewarding to take time to chew each bite and taste all of the flavor. It should also not be a problem to put the knife and fork down between bites. This will help you to focus more on your current bite and not have you chewing while loading up your fork for another “throw down”.

The whole idea behind this rule to help you enjoy your food more and to help you slow down while you eat, thus allowing yourself to pick up on the signal that you are full.

It’s amazing how easy it sounds and it really is easy, but it takes using rule #3 to get there. If you are eating conciously and savoring each bite, you will quickly notice that your stomach is telling you that you are full much earlier than before. I am still amazed at how a man of my size (6′3 and 294 pounds) can eat less than a whole plate of food and be satisfied. This is after years of always having seconds.

The other part of this rule is to recognize the difference between being full and being stuffed. Being full means that you and your body are satisfied. Being stuffed means that you actually feel like you’re bulging and you may even feel a little sick. It’s the classic “Thanksgiving Meal” stuffed feeling that is important to avoid and if you are eating when you’re hungry, eating what you want, and eating conciously it is very easy to stop well before that feeling would hit you.

That is all we have done. We haven’t made drastic changes to our lives. We haven’t taken up extreme jogging, started eating only lettuce, or began taking questionable diet pills. We simply decided to stick to the four gold rules and here are my results:

When we first saw Paul’s show on TLC, my wife and I were intrigued for different reasons. She really wanted to lose some weight and I thought it’d be great if we ate less, because eating costs money. Little did I know that I would be telling people here that I have lost:

I’m down to the last hole on my “good belt” before I will have to go buy another one. I also wouldn’t be able to keep my pants up anymore without that belt. We have tons of leftovers that we never used to have and my work lunches are now always really good leftovers and not just sandwiches or something I could throw together quickly.

However, the single most exciting part of the whole experience to me has been how I am enjoying food so much more. No more shoveling and feeling bloated, no more late night “snack attacks” where a bag of chips seems to never last long, and no more wondering when I will finally have to start shopping at Big and Tall stores. It’s just a wonderful feeling and I’m sure you can tell by the overly jovial tone of this almost “infomercial-like” post of mine.

In closing here, I would just like to say that if you are currently trying Paul’s rules or you are interested, please feel free to post a comment about it. I would love to hear from you. It has been a great experience for my wife and I and we really hope that the habits we have formed will stick with us for years to come.

Check out these other PF bloggers who have written about Paul’s program

• NCNBlog.com - “A New Weight Loss Program - And A Quick Stroll Through My Blogroll”
• FiveCentNickel.com - “Midweek Roundup - Start of Soccer Edition”

Case in point:
The first series that I decided to do for the blog was my Food Budget Tight? Stretch - it - out series parts 1 and 2. In the series, I go into details about ways that my wife and I try to counter the high cost of feeding ourselves. You’ll find that I typically only try to do “self help” types of posts where I can offer pieces of advice that aren’t so common. I tend to think that reiterating the same ideas that are repeated elsewhere doesn’t serve as much of a purpose for my time and yours. I also could, and do, just link to those other bloggers articles to give them the credit for the ideas.

At any rate, I got an email today from PassiveFamilyIncome.com regarding how he had created a post about my food budget series. I was truly flattered and excited that the normal ideals that my wife and I use all the time could really help him and his family do a better job of being educated shoppers.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I get great ideas from other blogs all the time, but this is the first time that I’ve had someone say the same about something I have written. It’s just a really cool feeling. It’s the feeling that you never get when you’re the guy in the group that never wants to go to lunch and the one who thinks birthdays are still a time to be frugal.

So, I’ll keep living, thinking, frugaling? (new word?), and posting about it and I hope you’ll keep staring bewildered at your monitor while reading the rambled musings of a frugal engineer.

Today’s Task:
Today I wanted to customize my theme a bit more by redoing the code that handles the
<title> of the pages. Prior to my changes, my titles appeared like this:

Home Page: Enginero.com
Post (single) Page: Enginero.com >> Blog Archive >> Post Title
Category Page: Enginero.com >> CategoryName

… and so on.

I didn’t really care for the “»” spacing characters and I wanted to change the output a bit.

Making the changes:
If you are not at all familiar with HTML or PHP, I will try to make this explanation make some sense to you, but if you need help, feel free to post a comment. Keep in mind that HTML codes are encased in less than < and greater than > symbols. So, when I say “title tag”, you are looking for <title>Title Here</title>.

1. You’ll need to locate your header.php file. You can do this by using the Wordpress theme editor or as I do it, by downloading the file itself from your web server and editing it locally.
2. Next, you need to find the place in the file where the titles of your posts are being set. The exisitng code will be placed between two <title> tags. ex: <title>bloginfo(’name’)</title>
3. Now you are ready to make your changes. For my changes, I wanted to use a colon “:” as my spacing character and I also wanted to make some wording changes.

   &nbsp

   Examples (I wanted my new titles to look like this:):

   • Home Page: Enginero.com : My Blog Description
   • Post (single) Page: Enginero.com : Post Title
   • Category Page: Enginero.com : Category : CategoryName

   To accomplish this, I replced the old code that was building my titles and wrote this new code:

   <title>
   <?php 
   bloginfo(’name’);
   if (is_home()) { 
   	echo ": ";
   	bloginfo(’description’);
   }
   elseif (is_single() || is_page()) {
   	echo ": ";
   	single_post_title();
   }
   elseif (is_category()) { 
   	echo ": ";
   	echo "Category : ";
   	single_cat_title(); 
   }
   elseif (is_search()) { 
   	echo "Search Results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s);
   }
   else { 
   	wp_title(’:',true);
   }
   ?>
   </title>
   

I would imagine that you can study the code above for a minute and guess how it works. Since WordPress uses a pretty good naming convention for its’ native functions, the code “reads” pretty easily. I hope you get some use out of the code I wrote above and if you need help making changes and adding your own personal touch, feel free to post your question in a comment.

Last WebDev Tip: WebDev Tip: Hide your email address in a link

Yahoo’s Money and Happiness Expert Laura Rawley gives us the breakdown of how events brought the mortgage industry to where it is today. Unlike many other articles on the topic, she has chosen to use prose and I think it is a very creative and entertaining way to describe the chronology.

Excerpt from the Expert:

“Once upon a time there was a greedy young man with shiny wingtips and important degrees. His father, an advisor to the king, had paid the young man’s way through an Ivy League college and got him a job managing the village’s pension investments.

The greedy young man went to his magic mirror and said, “Mirror, mirror, I’m at the top of my field, I’m entitled to a higher yield. I’d like to earn that yield today, so I get a bonus with my pay. Tell me now, because here’s the thing — I’m really entitled to earn more than the king.”

The mirror replied, “Call Wall Street please, and invest in mortgage-backed securities. Don’t worry whether the yield will last, this way you’ll get your bonus fast.”

And the greedy young man went on television, where the media declared him a genius.”

So, what’s a guy to do?
As I see it, I have a few different options here:

1. I can continue to not post net worth info. I guess this would be the easy thing to do. There’s no rule book for personal finance blogs, so there’s no rule saying that a PF blog stinks because it doesn’t have monthly net worth updates. On the contrary, I simply think it would be neat to add it.
2. I can add the net worth information. This will require some pretty lengthy discussions with my wife on how I can be reasonably sure that having the information online doesn’t make us any more vulnerable to fraud or identity theft than we already are. However, at the end of the day, if she just isn’t comfortable with it, then I definitely won’t be adding it.
3. I can develop a more general net worth update process. Using a more generalized set of criteria and information outlay, I could still pass along topical information without actually talking numbers. My initial thoughts were that I could post the percentages of net worth change and then wax poetic on why that change happened and what could be done to correct or continue that event.

In the end, I just keep coming back to thinking how it would be a nice addition to the blog and how it could certainly prove beneficial. What do you think?

Are net worth updates on a blog all they’re cracked up to be? Do you enjoy seeing the info and reading about it or is it just a post you tend to skip while strolling through the blogosphere?

So, how are they doing it?

Homeowners are able to pull off this gambit — which some lenders and real-estate agents call mortgage fraud — taking advantage of mortgage-lending practices that allow them to buy a new primary residence before their existing residence has been sold. And with the lending industry in disarray as it tries to restructure millions of mortgages, some boast they are able to pull off the strategy with ease.

Basically through short sales or simply foreclosure, people are getting out of their old home and into a new primary residence. They simply state to their lender that they plan to rent out their first home to cover the second mortgage payment. Once the approval comes from the lender they bail on the first home.

There are some drawbacks…

To be sure, walking away from a mortgage, even if legal, has plenty of drawbacks: Borrowers lose the ability to take out unsecured loans, since foreclosures can stay on a credit report for seven years. In some states, lenders can sue for assets, including a new house. Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage underwriter, recently revised the amount of time borrowers with a foreclosure must wait to receive a home loan to five years from four. Proposed Fannie Mae guidelines, which could take effect later this month, also would require those borrowers to make a 10% down payment and meet a minimum credit score after the five-year period.

Personal Commentary
Ok, so you bought too high and now your home is worth less, and in some cases, considerably less, so that’s the banks fault? Are you also entitled to getting all new furniture from a rent to own store and then using that as leverage to get more furniture and get out of paying for the old when the first set has dropped in value?

I don’t have enough storage space on my web site server to write about how much this irks me. The sense of entitlement in this country is completely out of control and this is just another sign of it. “It’s not my fault I live beyond my means”. I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. Pardon my french.