9 Cash Conservation Tips For Those With the Entrepreneurial Spirit (Part III)
9 Cash Conservation Tips For Those With the Entrepreneurial Spirit (Part III)
In our final chapter on cash conservation for the free-spirited biz types – we’ll touching on the wonders of outsourcing, going electronic, and freebie / low-cost software. Smart, creative & renegade business financial planning – that’s what we’re all about.
Outsourcing / Virtual Assistants
I love outsourcing. You may hate me for it. But It lets me hire cheap help in Asia when I have very little income, but can give someone a job learning something they didn’t know previously and I get a good rate. I can train them to do the stuff I don’t want to do, or replicate myself for very little cost. Be warned though, there are different qualities of workers and you must screen hard to find a reliable worker. My favorite VA is from the Philippines. If you have something against people from foreign lands, then you can still get a better rate from a house-bound mother who needs to work from home and watch over her kids. It’s all win-win to me, and anyone who knocks outsourcing, well, will be outsourced eventually – I just see everything going more global everyday.
Get Rid of All that Paper
Since pretty much everything can be stored in file formats these days, the less paper the better. You don’t have to buy paper, as many cartridges for your printer or worry about storage space. PDF, Excel and Word are the standards, and will cover most of what you need. Just make sure you have a great backup scheme, that includes local backups and off-site backups with the likes of iDrive or some vaulting software.
Use Free Software All You Can
If you really don’t want to pay for Microsoft Office, there’s OpenOffice. For photo editing there’s Paint.NET. Free backups offline up to 2 gigabytes with iDrive, and I’m sure there’s even better deals out there. Google Docs is amazing for document collaboration I have entire work flows built around it, as I’m sure many of you do. Box.net is great for transfer and store video/audio files. And if you really wanna bootleg storage, you can always FTP stuff up to your unlimited & cheap hosting account (OK, not free, but close to it), but don’t over do it – they can catch you.
In Final
I hope those money savings ideas for those with an entrepreneurial spirit were useful to you. Those are only a few of the key money saving ideas I’ve used personally, feel free to comment and add to the discussion below and best of luck!
FPT Guy is a writer, the owner and managing editor of Financial Planning Tips – Turning the boring topic of personal financial planning on its head and helping guide you on the financial path that makes sense for you.

