My wife started her first semester of classes this fall on her way towards a Ph.D. One of the best things about a Ph.D., besides the degree, is that candidates are paid to go to school. The salary isn’t something you can retire on but with the cost of education, anytime you can get college education for free (or less than free, in this case!), you jump on it.

With the start of classes comes the need for college textbooks. As I remembered years ago, college textbooks are not cheap. In fact, the prices seems exorbitant to me but that’s what happens when there’s a small market forced into buying a product. Fortunately, there are some techniques you can use to defray the costs.

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When you think of prepaid cell phones, what do you think of? If you’ve watched The Wire on HBO, a gritty drama about life in Baltimore, you associate them with drug dealers. If you were a fan of the Sopranos, you knew they were good for avoiding wiretaps. If you haven’t seen either, chances are you don’t associate them with anything. Most people don’t use prepaid cell phones because we naturally think to a nice buffet-type minute plan with a major carrier.

For our vacation to Europe, we used a pay as you go phone. We couldn’t use our own phones since we didn’t have compatible technology but our friend lent us her old phone. We went to a local Orange store (a pay as you go service company, bought a Sim card, and loaded it up with some minutes.

The cost of the chip? £0.

We put £5 on the phone and we now had cell service without a commitment, without any huge up front payments, and we only pay for the minutes we needed.

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Calling family and friends overseas is very affordable and very easy, if done correctly. In this article I am going to reveal three affordable international long distance calling options to the old expensive standby, direct dialing. I’ve been doing a lot of research in this for my own needs so I hope you find this article valuable. Each option has the potential to save you more and more money, though sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit of convenience. Naturally, it’s always easiest to pick up the phone can call directly, instead of using a phone card, but only one of those two options is used by millions of people every week at a savings of up to 95% on every international phone call.

Why is this post focused on international long distance calls? Today, very few people have to pay extra for a domestic long distance call that there really is no incremental cost for a domestic long distance phone call. Cell phones charge by the minute, with no consideration of local or long distance. For that reason, we’ve ignored the domestic long distance calls.

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As the sugar-fueled, much anticipated mischievous holiday of Halloween draws near, frugal families are trying to figure out how they can save money on Halloween candy. Unfortunately for the money conscious, this year’s Halloween falls on the worst possible day, a Saturday. A Saturday Halloween means trick or treaters will be out earlier and longer than if it were on a workday and that means there will be more ghosts, pumpkins, and football player zombies wandering up to your door asking for candy.

However, if you’re smart about how you approach Halloween, you can save yourself some a little bit of money and every little bit counts.

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Every year I make my ritual visit to my local dentist for a routine cleaning, and every year I get the “you should really be using mouth-wash” speech. And every year I get sent home with my bag of dental goodies, including a little bottle of Crest mouthwash.

OK, I get it.

Mouth-wash is an important part of my teeth-cleaning-routine. After four years in braces and becoming a mother (something about the hormones affecting teeth enamel). As the EcoDiva, and the champion of all things organic, natural and non-toxic, I have to do what I know it right – “read the label”.

How many fixed expenses do you have each month? We have about half a dozen – mortgage, utilities, cable & internet, Netflix, insurance, and the gym. Of those, three are mostly non-negotiable (mortgage, utilities, insurance). For cable & internet, Netflix, and the gym, we’ve considered downgrading our services to reduce their expense.

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This is a guest post from Vic Magary of GymJunkies.com. Vic helps everyday people like you to build muscle and lose fat with short, but intense circuit training and strength training workouts

Eating on a budget is no easy task. You could eat at Mcdonald’s 3 times a day and probably stay under $10 but is that really want you want to do? You’d feel awful, your productivity would go way down and chances are you medical bills would go up.

The best way to eat on a budget, at $10 or so per day per person, is to employ a few of the “sneaky” strategies I use when picking up my own groceries. Here’s a few of my favorite ways to eat healthy on a budget.

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I’m not a pessimist but I know enough of them to know that being a pessimist can save you a lot of money. A pessimist is someone who sees a glass filled halfway with water as being half empty. In a beautiful blue sky, they see the clouds in the distance and ready their umbrella. They see insurance not as a protection against the unknown but as an investment in the future.

As much as society may frown on being such a negative Nancy (sorry in advance to all the Nancy’s out there), I think sometimes being pessimistic can save you money.

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I bet you work hard for the dollars in your wallet, I know I do. You don’t spend hours away from your family or your favorite pursuits because you like work more than them, you do it because works pays you money so that you can support yourself and yours and do the things you want to do with your free time. I’m the same way. That’s why whenever I do the paying, I make sure I get the most out of the purchase. I believe there is always a deal to be made and those deals have saved me many hours of work in the process.

I believe that whenever you make a purchase of any kind, there is always a deal to be made or found.

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Today’s Your Take will be simple… do you budget? If so, what tools do you use?

If you don’t, why not?

I no longer budget in the strict sense. When I first started working, I budgeted and tracked all my expenses down to the penny in an Excel spreadsheet. This was before the days of tools like Mint or Quicken Online where you could use a free tool and get instant data aggregation (that would’ve been nice!), so I just entered things into a simple Excel spreadsheet. Then, perhaps a year or so later, I abandoned it because the benefits had started to wane.

Once you get to a certain point, when your expenses are stable and you’ve “optimized” your budget as much as you can, the effort no longer justify the benefits. Today, I do “after-action” type budgeting where I look at my expenses to see if anything is extraordinary or if a certain category has been creeping up (usually it’s the dining out vs. grocery bill categories constantly battling one another). Other than that, I don’t.

How about you?

(Photo by kevincortopassi)