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.

7 Ways to Manage Your Debts in a Historical Way!

Written by Debbie Brown

No matter how big the economic depression might be, living frugal must be your sole aim. If you want, you can make your life debt free and breathe with a sense of relief. If we turn back the pages of history, we will remember how during the Great Depression everyone followed the motto: “Use it up, wear it out, and make it do or do without.” Though these words are old but they will show us a path to a debt free life.

Here are 7 simple yet handy tips scooped out from the pages of history that can help you to cope up with your financial stress:

The basic level is to start pulling the reigns of your finances from home. It could be like cooking easy and affordable meals instead of gorging on expensive meals outside. Learn more on home repairing, surf the web for easier yet innovative recipes and many such household works. So the lesson is “do it yourself”.

Have you thought about raising your buying power? This means getting something at a cheap rate. For instance, you can buy food items in bulk at a lower price. It will be like ‘more for less money’. Read the rest of this entry

For most of my life when I was growing up I heard four main words repeated many times: “I have no money”. My mother was a single mom taking care of three rambunctious kids. As you can imagine money was always tight and any amount of debt wouldn’t help the situation. There were many things I wanted and wished I could have but my mothers problems with debt always made my wants an unlikely dream. Because I was just a child, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t give me the world or why our birthday presents were handmade or why we would sometimes ‘skip’ lunch. Obviously today I understand what she went through. Sadly her situation is not an uncommon one.

Through the help from some very good friends and plenty of work from myself I have begun to educate myself on how to manage money. I have also done my best to teach my mother everything I know and she too is learning and her debt is slowly dissolving. I don’t look back at my childhood with regret because I know she did her best. At the same time, I don’t want my children to have to worry about getting three square meals a day.

Right now I am working four jobs and sticking to a budget. I have applied all of the principles that I have read on this blog and it has helped me a great deal. I dream of the life I’ll have after this “work-time” is over. The way I see it is if you dream of how you want to live, work at it until Read the rest of this entry