By turning your thermostat down three degrees, you can save around 3% on your heating bills.  Make sure it is off when you are at work and turn it down even lower when you are sleeping to save even more money.  Shut the doors to any rooms that aren’t being used to conserve energy.  Weatherstripping doors and windows can amount to using less heat.  An insulated attic can also reduce the cost of your heating bills.  The refrigerator, hot water heater and the heating system are three of the biggest energy consumers in your home.  To improve the efficiency of your appliances, Make sure you give your furnace a tune-up once a year.  Wrapping the water heater will insulate it and cleaning the refrigerator coils twice a year will also help improve their efficiency.  It is also possible that your utility company offers a reduced rate for certain times of the day.  If your schedule allows it, timing these devices to cycle during this period could greatly reduce the amount of energy being used.  A lower water bill can be obtainable if water leaks are fixed and water saving shower heads are installed.  By placing a heavy object in the toilet tank such as a brick, you will also be conserving the amount of water used.  Filling up the dishwasher and washing machine halfway and than running it costs the average American household $700 to $900 dollars in added utility fees each year.  Do full loads of dishes and laundry. Also when drying your clothes in groups one after another, your dryer saves energy because it is already hot.  Using e-mail and calling friends and family at night and on weekends can significantly lower your long distance phone bill.  See if there is a cheaper long distance package available.

These are just a few tips to help you save money on your utility expenses.  Feel free to share any other stories, ideas or practices you go about in your home.

People who know exactly how much they spend each month on groceries are twenty times less likely to be deep in debt than those who don’t know how much they have spent.  When we include dining out, vending machines and fast food into the list of food related purchases, we realize how much we are spending.  Prepackaged and ready to eat meals also end up costing a lot of money.  Eating is a necessity but there are many ways to noticeably reduce your food budget.

First of all, stop going out to eat.  Eating out is much more expensive than a meal that could have been prepared at home.  Do not buy frozen meals.  When you buy frozen food, you are spending way too much for way too little.  Try preparing your meals from scratch when you have some free time for the rest of the week.  Don’t buy meats that are already cut.  You are paying the supermarket to cut up the meat for you.  You can save a dollar per pound of meat by cutting it yourself.  You should of course make sure to compare supermarkets. One supermarkets may price items $1.00 $2.00 more or less than another supermarket.  Buy the generic brand products which are usually processed at the same plants as the name brand products.  When you buy a name brand product, much of the cost goes to the expensive of the product.  This can save you over $500.00 dollars in a year!  Buy fruits and vegetables when they are in season because the price will be significantly less.  Eating vegetarian meals once a week can save a family of four about $15.00 a week.  Use Coupons wisely. A lot of people use coupons just because they have one.

Americans have a long, sordid history with borrowed money. In Collateral Damaged: The Marketing of Consumer Debt to America, Charles Geisst, a professor of finance at Manhattan College, takes us through the centuries to explain how we wound up at our most recent — and spectacular — credit bubble. TIME’s Barbara Kiviat spoke with him

Which makes our most recent downturn worse?
Yes, absolutely. We’re out of proportion with our amount of personal debt. A good number of people are in debt to the point where they may not ever be able to pay their way out.

Why didn’t lenders better capitalize on our speculative bent sooner?
Our banking system was never national. In fact, it wasn’t even retail in the 19th or early 20th century. The banks that were capable of doing the most lending to individuals didn’t actually do it. We had to wait until Bank of America, for instance, got into business and a lot of the companies like Household Finance that started making consumer loans for this thing to actually warm up.

So going forward, how do we strike the right balance between the “democratization of credit” and the overextension of debt?
We have to go back to the notion of credit basics. In other words, to buy a house, you can’t borrow more than, let’s say, 2½ times your gross salary. We know the financial institutions are retrenching themselves right now. The question is, Has the consuming public learned anything from this? That’s the more difficult issue.

How do you think the new regulations for credit-card companies will change things?
Well, they’re going to tighten up some of the shoddy practices the credit-card companies have pulled off in the past. They seem to be taking notice of the GAO’s periodic reports about the credit-card companies’ practices — you know, misleading statements, using different font types, billing practices, hidden fees. It’s going to address most of those issues. My problem with it is it still doesn’t address the matter of interest rates. There’s got to be a cap, as far as I’m concerned.

You actually assign a lot of blame for our recent troubles on a lack of interest-rate caps — that is, on the absence of strict usury laws. Why?
Almost every state had usury laws in the 1920s, and they were circumvented one by one. Prohibitions against excessive interest started to disappear [South Dakota, for instance, loosened its laws in 1980], and once they did, the credit-card companies recognized a wonderful opportunity. They could charge as much as the market would bear, claiming that they had to charge more for bad credit risks. You can argue that’s the democratization of credit, but it’s in the interest of credit-card companies to keep people under the yoke. We’ve just swapped loan sharks for legitimate loan sharks.

So maybe there are some people who just shouldn’t have access to credit?
I think everyone should have access to credit in a very strict proportion to their income — not a future projection of their income, which is what we’ve been doing. It’s been, “I’m now making $50,000, but in a few years I’ll be making $150,000, so no big deal, let’s go buy an expensive house now.” This whole business of giving more credit than a person can service is not only foolish, but if you tried to do that 200 or 300 years ago, it would have been considered immoral as well. We don’t think that way anymore, but essentially it is, because that person is going to be in debt forever.

You talk about the need for a financial-products safety commission. What do you think of the proposal the Obama Administration has put out there?
In the outline form we’ve seen so far, it looks like a good idea. But as I say in the book, if the thing is created, it’s going to be barraged by new financial products from up above on Wall Street. They won’t know what hit them. So I think unless there is some sort of regulatory body that is going to play chess with Wall Street, a complimentary body that filters this stuff on the wholesale level before it becomes the consumer stuff, whoever is on that consumer-safety commission is going to get completely swamped.

A lot of your book is about the history of borrowing money. Any favorite episodes?
Well, it’s been a long road. During the Roman Empire, the first anti-usury law — and I think this says it all — was found in the Council of Nicea in the 4th century. It states that no clergyman could practice usury, so you can get a pretty good idea of what was going on then — lending to the flock. The odd part is, the Council of Nicea was also the council that confirmed the concept of the Trinity. Those are probably two of the most unlikely pieces of legislation you could find in the same piece of canon law.

Article from http://www.time.com

Let’s take a look at how we have ended up so heavily in debt as a nation of consumers.

Easy credit

In the past, it was simply too easy for consumers to obtain credit.  Because credit was so easy to get, consumers figured out how to leverage their credit card rewards and balance transfer cards in order to make money. Many tried to perform credit card arbitrage by taking out cash advances and balance transfers from these cards, then investing the amounts into a rising stock market. This was one of those things you’d consider to be a “sign of the times.” Of course, things are different today, but the 2000s was a decade during which our debt ballooned due to these types of products. Subprime loans, jumbo mortgages and other forms of costly debt are inventions of our capitalistic society; these are high-risk financial tools which countless consumers have gambled with, often with dire results.

Need for instant gratification

As a society, we’re impatient. It’s ingrained in us to be able to get immediate access to the things we covet, even if we can’t really afford these things at the moment. We live in a highly consumerist society that encourages materialism and is not ashamed of excess. Have you seen just how huge the portions are served in most American restaurants? It’s all about more, more, more right now! So it’s often the case that funds that should wisely be funneled into highest interest savings account or into high yield savings are instead being used to keep up with the Joneses, a syndrome that many of us harbor, and which has caused many a household to fall into debt.

Lack of financial education

Personal finance isn’t given importance in schools. A lot of us don’t learn about finance while in school and instead are picking it up through experience and trial and error. Unfortunately, this lack of understanding and awareness about money management can make us vulnerable to making many financial mistakes, particularly those that land us in debt.

Lack of accountability

It’s too easy to procrastinate about our finances, go in denial or sweep things under the rug when we get into trouble. But also detrimental is when we can’t take responsibility for our own actions and mistakes. We blame the government or the financial industry for causing the rifts in our economy, but we’re just as guilty about causing the crisis as they are. Both lenders and borrowers contributed to the subprime lending boom, subsequent bust and credit crisis, but guess who’s getting the lion’s share of the blame?

Debt as a cultural phenomenon

In other cultures, debt is heavily frowned upon and is only gingerly used by households. But in America, debt is socially acceptable and ingrained in our culture; it carries no stigma. If bankruptcy, foreclosure, debt and being broke are things we easily accept in our culture and way of life, then these aren’t things we’d readily condemn (or worry about) until too late or until we’re forced to face the painful consequences.

When the economy blew up last year, it prompted the government to start making some changes; they’ve since introduced policies that help regulate the financial industry to some degree (e.g. credit card rules) but in many respects, it’s still pretty much “business as usual.” Instead of worrying about what the Fed or Obama is going to do next, we should focus on the things we have control over, and take responsibility for our own financial predicaments.

Before a new law of reforms becomes effective in February of 2010, Credit card companies are raising interest rates, penalties and fees. As of July, interest rates spiked an average of 20% across the board from December 2008 with some issuers raising the interest rates 30 and even 50 percent. When the Pew Health Group examined credit cards offered by the twelve largest banks, they found :

99.7 percent of bank cards allowed the issuer to raise interest rates on outstanding balances by changing the account agreement unilaterally – up from 93 percent in December 2008.

95 percent of bank cards allowed issuers to apply payments in a manner that the Federal Reserve found likely to cause substantial monetary injury to consumers.

90 percent of bank cards had penalty interest rates that could be triggered by late payments or overlimit transactions. All but 10 percent of these cards had penalty repricing terms that would qualify as “hair trigger” under Federal Reserve guidelines – triggers of one or two late payments in 12 months

99 percent of bank cards included a late fee – median $39.

80 percent of bank cards included an overlimit fee – median $39.

The median bank penalty interest rate was 28.99 percent. Most – 90 percent – penalty rate increases could continue indefinitely even if the cardholder resumes.

You pay your credit card off every month, but happened to miss an auto loan or an electric bill payment.  A single late payment on your credit report can trigger a rate increase.  It is called Universal Default.

0% APR is great, but if you miss a payment, it can revert to a default APR of up to 35%.  There is no going back to 0% after that.

Even when you think you made a payment on your due date, the deadline might be in the morning or afternoon, payments made by 2pm on the due date may still be considered late.

The highest fixed late fee charge is currently $39 but percentage based late fees can cost hundreds of dollars per charge depending on the balance.

Variable rates can change without notice, and even fixed rates can change with 15 days notice.  Your rates and fees can be changed for any reason at any time.

Two cycle billing will ensure your finance charges are much higher if you don’t pay your bill in full every month.

Out of the country?  Be prepared to add a 1%-3% fee to all purchases in addition to a 1% exchange rate fee.

Taking our a cash advance?  Be prepared for a high APR as well as a percentage fee.  Payments made will apply to the lowest APR first.  You will have to pay off the entire balance before paying off the high APR cash advance.

Low minimum payments may sound like a convenience, but the lower the payment, the longer you will have to pay, finance charges piling up every month.

If you transfer a balance to a new card, the limit on the new card may be changed so it’s actually lower than the balance transfer.  This results in a new card that is already maxed out.  The first time you use it, you go over your limit and fees are charged.

Once your credit starts turning south, you will get offers for cards with starting fees.  A card with a $300 limit may come loaded with a Program Fee of $96, an Annual Fee of $48, an account Set-up fee of $56, and a monthly Participation Fee of $8, but charged annualized at $96.  All of a sudden your $300 card has $296 already charged on it.  If you make a purchase over $4 you will be hit with a late fee and possible rate change.

So you have cut up your cards, great, but be prepared to be hit with an inactivity fee.

Now you are up to your eyeballs in debt.  Your cards are maxed out, the APRs are high, and the only new credit you can get is tiny and expensive!

A Lifetime of Debt .

The total liabilities of the United States government, including future social security and medicare payments that the U.S. government is already committed to pay out, now exceed 65 trillion dollars, which is more than the entire GDP of the whole world.

According to the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government, an official United States government report, the U.S. actually had a budget deficit of 5.1 trillion dollars in 2008.

So why did the Congressional Budget Office report that the federal budget deficit was only 455 billion dollars (which is certainly a total disaster) in 2008?

The difference lies in accounting. The CBO’s figures are based on cash accounting, while the 2008 Financial Report of the United States Government is based on GAAP accounting. GAAP accounting is what is used by all the major firms on Wall Street and it is regarded as a much more accurate reflection of financial reality.

So why is there such a big difference?

Well, what the Congressional Budget Office does is some really bad accounting. When you pay social security taxes, the federal government takes that money and instead of putting it away to pay your social security benefits in the future, it takes that money and spends it however it wants.

So what about the future social security and medicare benefits that the government owes you?

There is no money there for those payments.

The government is using that money right now to make the budget look better.

That’s right, you have been conned.

And as bad as the numbers from 2008 look, they do not reflect any significant money from the monstrous financial bailouts that Congress has passed.

So 2009 is going to look MUCH worse.

Pretty picture, eh?

The reality is the the United States of America is a total financial disaster.

Already, 13 banks have already failed in 2009. All of the bailouts certainly don’t seem to be helping much yet.

But that doesn’t mean that the federal government is going to give up trying to help. It seems a new “bailout” or a new “stimulus” is being passed almost weekly now.

Instead of accepting the fact that we must adopt a lower standard of living and deal with the reality of our massive debt, the politicians are trying to crank up the debt spiral one more time.

All of this government spending will help the economy in the short term, but it will make the long term problems of the U.S. government far worse.

Who is going to buy all of this new government debt? China has doubts about who is going to buy all of America’s new debt. The reality is that the only way that the government can “bailout” anyone or pay for any “stimulus” bill is to borrow.

America borrows and borrows and borrows.

If your personal finances were like that, how do you think it would end?

Ah, you are starting to get the picture…..

The “American Dream” is becoming the “American Nightmare” and the politicians don’t have a clue.

What are you going to do when the economy collapses and everything you ever worked for starts coming apart?

It’s time for all of us to start thinking about what is truly important…..

Here’s a statistic that should give us all pause: The average credit card debt of seniors grew by 26% between 2005 and 2008, CreditCards.com reports. For the rest of us, the increase was a comparatively modest 3%.

Also, according to a study released in July 2009 by New York City-based Demos, a public policy group, consumers 65 and older carried $10,235 in average card debt last year. That is a lot.

that’s very troubling now that so many retirees are living on Social Security and no other savings, and face medical expenses despite government-run Medicare. The dreaded “doughnut hole” is just a drop in the bucket compared with the other potential health care-related demands on their money.

Many older folks are stretched thin. That’s true in better times, but now, because retirement savings for lots of people have shrunk, they’re turning to credit.

Medical expenses are a burden. The Demos study says, “Older households, those 65 and over, reported the highest amount of credit card debt due to medical expenses: $3,988.”
They’re victimized. Consider how vulnerable people who didn’t grow up in the computer age are to phishing and other forms of identity theft. Scammers love seniors. And then there’s all the “free” stuff that’s advertised as a way for unscrupulous companies to start billing your credit card.
What to do? Be on the lookout for signs that seniors you know are struggling. Yes, this is difficult. If you don’t have a close relationship that allows discussion of such things, you’re going to have to be very observant.

Are your parents suddenly living beyond their means?
Are their bills piling up on the kitchen table — unopened?
Are they using a credit card to purchase things they used to pay for with cash, like groceries?
How to proceed? If you can have a frank, respectful discussion, do so. If the topic would be unwelcome, enlist help from other family members or friends.