Benefits enrollment season is fast approaching, and if you work for a large company chances are you'll have the opportunity to sign up for a Flexible Savings Account (FSA). As reported in the Chicago Tribune, FSAs enable you to use pre-tax dollars for everything from doctor co-pays to aspirin, which can add up to hundreds of dollars in savings per year. More than 80 percent of large employers offer FSAs (as do about one-third of small employers), and yet just 20 percent of eligible employees participate. While time-consuming reimbursement procedures turned many people off from FSAs when they were first introduced, the article noted that the programs have become much easier to use.
Matt's View
Does your employer offer a FSA? Call your HR or benefits department to find out. And if so, sign up. Healthcare is too expensive to leave some easy savings on the table. For a good overview of FSAs, read the full Tribune article
.
The high cost of owning a vehicle (the average household spends over $8,000 per year on transportation) is one reason why car-sharing companies are growing in popularity. The idea, which started in Europe in the late 1980's, allows people to rent vehicles by the hour, and it's gaining momentum in the U.S. Car-sharing companies now operate in over 40 U.S. cities.
As described in a SmartMoney.com article, after paying an application fee of about $25 and an annual membership fee of around $35, members gain access to a car-sharing company's fleet of cars that can be rented for $3-$10 per hour (including gas, insurance, and maintenance). The vehicles are kept in designated parking spots throughout a given city and can be reserved with as little as an hour's notice. Renters enter the cars by holding their membership cards over the car's card reader. The keys are inside. To see if your city has a car-sharing program, go here
.
Matt's View
And now car-sharing is headed to campus. According to a Wall Street Journal article, one of the bigger players, Zipcar, plans to be on 40 campuses this year.
For anyone who's really serious about going car-less, check out the book How to Live Well Without Owning a Car
. If instead of going completely car-less you're simply interested in using your car less, check out Walk Score
. On the site you can type in your address and get a listing of businesses, libraries and more that are a short walk from your home. I found the site on a great car-sharing blog
.
Is the sippy cup stage too early to start teaching kids about money? Absolutely not. That's the message of a recent MSN.com article, which offered several helpful ideas for teaching pre-schoolers about money. The article suggested teaching little ones that there are three things you can do with money: spend, save, and give. To make the concepts more real, give them some money (the article's author started giving her daughter an allowance when she was three-and-a-half), and then teach them to give a portion of all they receive to charity and save a portion. Spending provides opportunities to learn about making trade-offs.
Matt's View
A couple of good sources for ideas on teaching tots about money are the Credit Union National Association
and the National Endowment for Financial Education
(click on "Simple Steps to Raising a Money-Smart Child").
One of my favorite ideas for teaching kids about giving is to sponsor a child through Compassion International
. Showing our three-year-old a picture of the child we sponsor (a boy named Aziz who lives in Burkina Faso), writing letters to him, and reading aloud the ones we get back make the impact of our giving more real. Now when I ask our little guy what we can do with money, he often says, "Spend it, save it, or give it to Aziz." Well, it's a start.
Businesses put a lot of time, effort, and money into building brand recognition, and it seems that their efforts are paying off. Time magazine reported on a study in which people were asked to taste peanut butter from three different jars. The jars contained the same peanut butter but had different labels. By far, people preferred the peanut butter in the jar with a recognized brand's label. In another experiment children ages 3 to 5 were asked to taste French fries in different packaging. Even though each package contained the same French fries, the kids overwhelmingly preferred those in a popular fast-food chain's wrapper.
Matt's View
What often scares people away from discount stores such as Aldi and their less expensive products is that they don't recognize the brands, which are mostly private label brands. If you're in the habit of buying only certain brands, give some unfamiliar brands a try. You're likely to find that many are just as good as the recognized brands--without the marketing surcharge.
