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Home › Articles › General Family Finance › Beating the W-2 Blues

Beating the W-2 Blues

8 (Surprisingly Painless) Ways to Achieve Financial Sanity This Year

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Figure out what you can cut without causing too much pain.
It's amazing how much money people spend almost unconsciously. For instance, it's not hard at all to spend $50 a week or more on lunches. If both you and your spouse buy your lunch daily, that adds up to $400 a month – or $4,800 a year! What if you both carried your lunches instead? You could probably get by with spending half of that if you took dinner leftovers to work most days or simply brown-bagged it with a sandwich and a piece of fruit.

"There are all kinds of places to cut corners," McCurdy says. "Most people have gym memberships they don't use, subscriptions to magazines they don't have time to read, 100 cable channels they don't watch. Maybe you could dramatically reduce your gasoline bill by carpooling, or by trading in your expensive gas guzzler for a more modest pre-owned economy car. Believe me, most people have no idea how much money they waste until they sit down and make out a budget."

Stop neglecting the retirement issue.
It's true that retirement is a complicated subject and everyone's needs are different. Certainly, helping you figure out how much you're going to need is far beyond the scope of this article. But do make this the year you tackle the dreaded subject and start saving for tomorrow, McCurdy urges. "It's pretty easy to procrastinate on getting a handle on retirement," she says. "Most people have a touchof the Scarlett O'Hara mentality. They prefer to think about it tomorrow. But crunching the numbers is the only way to know if your current savings will get you there."

By the way, there's another benefit to focusing on retirement right now: With April 15th looming, you might enjoy putting Uncle Sam on a diet by fattening up your 401(k) or IRA. "It's best to contribute the maximum to your retirement accounts," McCurdy says. "But even if you don't have enough money to sock away a big chunk right now, you can at least start planning to do it before tax time 2008 rolls around."


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