Tag Archives: Saving

The Choice Is Yours: Being A “Lava Lamp Kid” Or A “Tootsie Roll Kid”

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Of the awards and trophies I earned over the years, this lamp, in some ways, is the sweetest.

As a child of the 90’s, there is no question that my life was devoid of certain luxuries that are all but universal in certain parts of the world today.  A tablet was something Indiana Jones might have dug out of the ground, Fortnite was a vocabulary word from Charles Dickens in English class, and Tik Tok was a sound made by my uncle’s creepy clock that kept me awake when I visited his house.  Still, there is at least one thing that most kids today will never get to experience in the same way that we 90’s kids did: Arcades.

Nothing quite beat a warm summer day at the beach with my mother and grandmother.  The sun, the fried dough, the cool water, and the rides came together nicely with our first stop: the arcade. My brother and I would receive $10 in quarters to split evenly and play games for as long as the money lasted us. 

We would invariably start with an exciting match or two of with my grandmother of Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat.  Nothing gets the summer adrenaline going like the threat of being hit with a devastating “Hadoken” attack by a fierce button-mashing relative!

Trust me, you haven’t learned humility until a 75-year-old beats you at this… repeatedly

Most of our quarters, however, were spent on games that generated tickets rather than pay-til-you-lose classic video games.  Wikipedia even has an article for Redemption Games like this.  Redemption games were games of skill that rewarded the player for achieving a certain score or outcome, and in our case, the reward was tickets. 

Arcades today have cards or even apps for storing tickets, but back in the day, we collected physical tickets.  Eventually, the arcade upgraded to allow for tickets to be redeemed in bulk for larger tickets (100’s) or even slips of paper, but these tickets were bone fide gold.  They represented hours of work and pure arcade game mastery!

Went to Dave & Busters and got this self-stacking pile of tickets
I hope the future generations get to experience the euphoria of hitting the jackpot and seeing this

A little-known secret was that the arcade would let you trade in your tickets for higher value tickets to help you save up.  100 individual tickets could be redeemed for a larger ticket worth 100 make storage a bit easier.

Incredibly, my mother managed to find a few of these lying around the house.  Guess I could buy a hundred Tootsie Rolls for Halloween this year!

My brother and I weren’t your average arcade goers though.  We had a system, a system to generate as many tickets as possible for as few quarters as possible.  This took dozens of trips to the arcade to master a variety of games, but the true secret often involved teamwork, a bit of math, and knowing the behavior of the arcade employees. 

Here were some of our favorites, as well as some of the most ticket-profitable.

Wacky Gator

“I’m gonna get you!”

Teamwork was a must to whack as many of these gators as you could in the limited time you have.  Two boys have four arms and quick reflexes, and the tickets came pouring out.

Feed Big Bertha

“Feed me another one!”

No, this isn’t something out of a Stephen King movie.  Big Bertha was “hungry, hungry, hungry,” but so were we.  With two people throwing plastic balls into her mouth, we could double our ticket output per quarter.  Talk about efficiency!

Pokerino

You were supposed to roll the ball to try to get different winning poker hands, but imagine the possibilities if you had long skinny arms and the arcade employee wasn’t always the most attentive… a four of a kind or a royal flush just might happen to show up and generate tons of tickets.  Is this cheating, or just using biology and oversight to your advantage?  Only time will tell!

Ski Ball

“WOW! 5,000 points!”

Ski Ball was a win-win.  My mother and grandmother loved playing and would often provide some extra quarters to play as a family.  The added bonus?  The family’s tickets were split between the two of us.

Our system did not stop with just maximizing the number of tickets earned per game.  We wanted value for our hard work when it came to the prizes!

The arcade assumes that most children will redeem their tickets on the day they are earned.  Ten dollars’ worth of games might generate 100 tickets to the average kid, so most of the inexpensive prizes were showcased in a glass display in the rear of the arcade.  These prizes would range from a Tootsie Rolls for 2 tickets all the way up to a cheap plastic toy for maybe 200 tickets.

My brother and I had our eyes on something bigger: one of the “shelf prizes.” 

These prizes were on display high above the glass counter on large shelves with huge tags representing the number of tickets needed to earn them: A skateboard for 3,000 tickets, a video game for 5,000, a new TV for 40,000.  The arcade no doubt used these prizes to get kids to spend more money per visit with the illusion that they might hit a jackpot and take one home.  The reality, of course, was that most kids aren’t great at saving would just redeem their tickets that day and never save up enough for a shelf prize.

Among the shelf prize treasures was the object we desired most: the lava lamp. 

This decorative lamp consists of a special-colored wax mixture inside a glass vessel.  When the wax is heated by a special light bulb, the warmed wax rises through the surrounding liquid, cools, loses its buoyancy, and falls back to the bottom of the vessel.  Lava lamps were among the coolest objects a kid in grade school could display in his or her room, but we needed 4,000 tickets for this must-have.

The two of us pooled our tickets together and saved up for several years to earn our lava lamps.  Even when we had enough tickets for one, we held off until we had enough tickets for two – one for each of us.  It wouldn’t surprise me if we made 20+ trips to the arcade over the course of 6-7 years, but we were finally able to obtain our prizes one day.  I don’t remember much about the purchase itself, other than the employee needing to give us one from the back and the one on display, saying something about how “people never actually buy prizes like this.”

If you’re wondering, yes, I still have it, and it’s picture at the top of this post.

I’ll leave the parenting advice to the bloggers who are parents.  However, in the light of this being a personal finance and happiness blog, I did want to share this story in that light (pun somewhat intended).  If you see your kids developing potentially good personal finances habits, like delaying gratification by saving up tickets at the arcade, consider doing everything in your means to foster those habits.  My mother and grandmother could have just as easily made us use our tickets each visit to avoid the hassle of storing them until the next time. Instead, they helped us accumulate tickets over many years and thereby achieve this “financial” goal of ours at a young age.  I found it helped me learn about the value of planning ahead, saving up for something you want, appreciating trade-offs, and exploring how to satisfy my needs given constraints in their resources.

They helped me become a “Lava Lamp Kid,” and other kids have the opportunity to become one too.

No Joke. Here’s how To Save 98% On Your Cell Phone Bill.

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They say that the only thing that men lie about more than their height is the size of their… cell phone bill!  (This is a family-friendly blog, folks!)  As much as I’d love to write an article about the secrets turning you into the next Tacko Fall, we’ll have to stick to the surprisingly-not-so-boring topic of saving you over $200 per month on your cell phone bill.

My cell phone story goes back to when I was 16.  I know this will shock our younger readers, but many of us did survive with nothing more than a Tamagotchi in our hands at all times.  My parents had just divorced, so between that, after school clubs, and learning to drive, it made sense to have a way for either parent to contact me.  We decided on the classic Nokia phone that I would share with my younger brother for an extra $40 per month on our family plan.  You read that right; my brother and I shared a cell phone.  It can be done!  I can literally feel the look of disbelief through some of your screens, but this was the way of the early 2000’s.

(Laugh if you want, but these things were indestructible and had a battery life measured in weeks, not hours)

Sharing wasn’t an option once I went off to college, so I got my own phone for the next few years at the small cost of another $40 per month.  We also switched to Verizon since the coverage was better in the areas where our split family were living.  When I graduated from school, I began paying for my potion of the cell phone plan along with rent for the period of time that I lived at home.  Avoiding the temptation to switch to a smart phone, I stayed on this family plan after I moved out and the cost remained about the same, maybe creeping up to $50 per month with the occasional two hundred dollars for a new flip phone.

The bill began to change a bit when I moved in with Lady Centsei.  She had a smartphone on a family plan with her mother and brother, and it made sense for me to bring my measly flip phone to that plan, despite not using the data.  However, I switched jobs in 2015 and they offered me $50 per month if I upgraded to a smartphone and agreed to have work e-mail on the phone.  Coincidentally, this was less than the cost of adding another “smartphone line” to our plan, so when a promotion came around for Lady Centsei and I to get “free” new phones by changing carriers to Sprint and signing for two years for about $120 for the four lines, we jumped.  TheCentsei had joined the smartphone generation.

It won’t surprise you to hear that our bill crept up and up over the years, with a notable spike coming again in 2018 when Lady Centsei’s mother and brother wanted to upgrade their phones too.  The plan was in their name, and they agreed to cover the extra charges.  Those extra charges soon became EXTRA CHARGES ($210 per month).  It all came to a shocking climax in July 2019 when our bill came to $277.46 between the four of us.  Trust me, here is a screenshot of the transaction that I use in my tracking and budgeting tool, Mint!

$277 was my metaphorical cellular rock-bottom.  While it was true that Lady Centsei and I were responsible for less than half of the bill, there was no question that something had to change.

Enter, Xfinity Mobile.  I’d learned about this service on another financial blogger’s website, as it starts at just $12 per month, though the “catch” is that you have to be subscribed to one of Xfinity’s internet packages.  However, as luck would have it, Xfinity’s is the only high-speed internet provider in our area, so we’d already met the criteria.  Furthermore, our 2-year contract was a month or two from expiring, meaning this might be the perfect time to strike a deal with them to bundle the services.

And so, I did.  After spending just 5 minutes on the phone with them and committing to a new 2-year internet contract, they agreed to lower our internet bill from $75 per month (which is what it was set to go up to at the end of our agreement) to $50 per month if we bundled the $30 per month Xfinity Mobile “3 shared gig” service and agreed to a 2-year term for the internet (the mobile service has no contract).  What’s more, the internet service had peak speeds 3x as fast as my old service, and Xfinity Mobile runs on Verizon’s towers which has much better coverage than Sprint in some areas near me.

The math wizards among you will see how this works out.  I was set to pay $75 per month for internet alone.  After the phone call, I’d be paying $80 per month for faster internet and better coverage cell phone service.  In effect, my cell phone service costs me just $5 per month.

This $5 per month new plan with Xfinity Mobile compared to my $277 per month old plan entirely with Sprint means a savings of over 98%: $272 per month.

Rare is the day when life hands you a financial opportunity like this.  Saving $270 per month could represent over $300,000 in retirement, compounded for 30 years at a standard 7% return.

The savings could, perhaps, be even greater, taking into account the rate of increase that I expected with Sprint compared to Xfinity Mobile.  Sprint had already increased our bill to over double from what we were paying originally.  I don’t expect such drastic increases with Xfinity.  However, even if they did increase the price to an unacceptable level, all plans are month-to-month, so I’d have the flexibility to leave without incurring termination fees.

Here are the many “pros” with Xfinity Mobile:

1) Cost.  Xfinity Mobile has the lowest cost cell phone service by a landslide.  Like me, you could literally save 90% by switching.

2) Coverage.  The service runs on Verizon’s towers, which has the best service in just about every part of the United States (Verizon itself is the most expensive).

3) Data Speed and Call Quality.  Faster data in most locations.  Better call quality (clarity and low call drops) than any other provider I’ve used.  More reliable.

4) Month-To-Month Contract.  Switching is low risk because you won’t be locked-in for years.

5) Customer Service.  Customer service has been quick to answer my calls with a live person and work to resolve issues.

6) Number Of Devices.  You can have 1 to 5 devices (cell phones) on the plan for the same cost; there is no “per line” cost and no cost to add a device!

There are a few important “possible cons” to consider as well:

1) You need to retain an Xfinity internet service for the duration of the mobile service.  Personally, I think this is how Xfinity is able to offer such a low rate on the service; it makes customers like me “sticky” and less likely to leave.  This wasn’t an issue for me because I was using the service anyway, but it might be more difficult if you are locked into a contract with your ISP.  Note that most, but not all, Xfinity internet plans do require a contract as well.

2) You may incur an early termination fee with your existing cell carrier.  Your phone must be “unlocked” which most carriers won’t do if you still have time on you contract.  Admittedly, I did pay to get out of my contract, so my 98% savings only reflects my “going forward” savings.  I believe the fee was $600 for our two phones, but given that I’m saving $250 per month, this fee was offset within 3 months of switching.

3) The phones with which it is compatible is a bit more limited than some other providers.  This fact, too, was no burden for us, since my 5-year old iPhone 6 and my wife’s 3-year old iPhone 7 are indeed compatible.  To name a few brands, iPhone’s 6 or higher, Galaxy 8 or higher, and Pixel 4 and higher should work.  The phone must be fully unlocked (GSM unlocked won’t work). You can easily check on their website.  Xfinity also has phones for sale at market price.

4) Not ideal for large families who each use tons of data and need new phones every year.  The lowest cost plans do not come with unlimited data, only unlimited calling and texting, so if you are a high data user, your savings will be lower.  We chose the 3GB data plan for $30 per month, since we’d only been averaging about 2 GB per month over the last two years.  There are currently plans of 1 GB per month for $12, 3 GB for $30, and 10 GB for $60, and you can switch at any time.  Extra gigs are $12, so it’s best to just be a bit conservative in your estimates.  You can switch your data allotment each month if you’re consistently over or under.  Data you use on WiFi doesn’t count, so just keep your phones connected to any home or secure WiFi, and your usage will be low.  After all, you don’t really need to be streaming cat videos on YouTube in the middle of the woods anyway!  The unlimited data plan is $45 per line per month, but you can “mix and match” if you have one person who uses a lot of data, so everyone else can rely on shared data.  If you have 6 family members who each “need” unlimited non-WiFi data and who get new phones every year, there may be lower cost plans elsewhere.

5) Switching is always a pain, no matter what.  There’s no easy way to switch carriers, especially if you have multiple lines in a complex agreement, as we did with Sprint.  My mother-in-law had to pay off her phone; we had to pay the termination fee; Sprint did not “unlock” our phones as promptly as they promised; the sales rep that assisted us made a keying error that was hard to correct; it was around the holidays… the list goes on.  Much of this wasn’t Xfinity’s fault, but be prepared to spend a few hours on the phone with your old carrier and Xfinity if you have a complex setup.

In short, I highly recommend this service.  And no, they’re not paying me to say this. 

NOTE: “Centsable” products and services, like Xfinity Mobile, are those that I recommend from time to time to help you on your journey to financial independence and lifelong happiness. You can trust that any recommendations are things that I can (or do) use myself. I will always disclose pros, cons, and any paid endorsements (of which I currently have none).

If everyone in your family needs a new phone every year and uses a mountain of non-WiFi data, Xfinity Mobile might not be for you.  Nonetheless, it could be a financial life saver for anyone who’s currently paying too much for their cell service.

To my readers: Stay safe, stay Healthy, and stay Centsable!

The difference between Saving and “SAVING”

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To break up the hours sitting in an office chair and looking at a computer screen, I generally try to walk for a half hour during my lunch break on a local public rail trail.  The path is shady, the view is stunning, and lack of distractions is spectacular!

During my walk the other day, I stopped to talk to a middle-aged man who was drilling some wooden planks into a broken part of the railroad that connects the woods over a small lake.  I’d observed that these planks had been decaying one-by-one for months, and the damage was getting to the point where the missing boards were posing a legitimate danger to inattentive walkers.  The man had apparently noticed the same thing and was spending a portion of his afternoon repairing the broken sections with his own tools and expertise.

I was genuinely touched by his compassion and asked him what inspired him to take on this work. Most people would have done nothing or just called the city to complain (same result).

“Well,” he replied, “to tell you the truth, I won 100 bucks today on a scratchie. Since I knew I was probably just going to blow the money on more scratchies, I decided to take the cash down to Lowes, buy some planks, and fix this darn path.  I ain’t exactly the ‘savings type’ so thought I should spend the money on something useful.”

This quick interaction with “Mr. Scratchie” got me thinking (again) about how little we teach people about saving money.  We teach children how to write in cursive, dissect owl pellets, make paper snowflakes, play Hot Cross Buns on the recorder, and even forge a river on the Oregon Trail without dying of dysentery, yet we spend no time teaching them how to manage even a modest amount of money.  Indeed, there is no greater failure of our school systems than the lack of financial literacy.

Nonetheless, every adult is faced with countless financial decisions every day. For example:

“What percentage of my income should I prioritize to paying off my debt, vs. investing in stocks/bonds/businesses, vs. additions to my 401k/IRA to save for retirement?”

Whoa, slow down, Centsei!  Way too deep for your 5th post! We’ll tackle this in the next post.  Let’s break this down.

What percentage of my income should I devote to paying off my debt vs saving for retirement?

This, too, is an important concept, but let simplify further.

What should I devote to saving for retirement?

Now we’re getting closer…

What is saving?

Much better! Let’s first distinguish between (genuine) saving and (fake) “SAVING” since advertisers even use this term in a deceptive manner to separate you from your money.

“Saving” will refer to money that you put away for future use.  In other words, the time-shifting of your financial lifeblood.   Saving is essential to building your long-term wealth, and it is important to save as early and often as you can, regardless of your age and salary.  You can look at saving as the difference between you income and your expenditures.  The greater percentage of your income you save and the better you prioritize these savings, the more financially successful you will be. 

“SAVING” will refer to the deceiving term used by advertisers to deceive you into spending more money, not saving it.  You know the lines

• SAVE 25% off MSRP with this coupon! 
• Special SAVINGS when you shop today! 
• Buy one get one free!  That’s $35 in SAVINGS! 
• Choose between 0.9% financing or SAVE $2,500 when you purchase directly from our dealership this weekend!

Ironically, ads even have terms that involve spending money: “Retail Price…” “Shop today…” “Buy one…” “Purchase directly…” Yet, we fall into the trap and convince ourselves that we are saving, not spending.  This is no coincidence.

You cannot save money if you spend money. A discount at checkout is not at all the same as an investment in your future. The latter gives you choices, the former takes them away. The concept seems so simple but is lost on so many. Knowingly or not, we turn a blind eye to our self interest as we salivate about “spending less,” “getting a deal” and “coming out ahead” for a particular purchase.

Spending less than what? Getting a deal from where? Coming out ahead of whom?

Advertisements are designed to turn up our short-term impulses and turn off our long-term judgment completely.

The point is hardly profound: You cannot save money if you spend money. Saving is not the same thing as SAVINGS, as tirelessly as advertisers work to convince you otherwise. Every unnecessary dollar that you spend today is one step farther from financial freedom and one choice fewer that you’ll be able to make tomorrow. $1 saved today is $10 more that you could have in retirement, assuming 35 years and a 7% return. There is no better “deal” than that.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t fix a broken path every once in a while, but no person should be resigned to the label of not being “the savings type” just because they never learned how. And certainly no person should be tricked into spending money under the guise of getting a discount.

You can, you should, and you will learn how… but only if you subscribe, leave a comment below, or SAVE this blog to your favorites!

Oh, and if you’re curious how Mr. Scratchie’s work turned out, I took a picture of it today.