Savings Evaluation - HELP REALLY NEEDED!!

**klhmc729** · 03-08-2009, 10:11 PM

.} WARM-UP: Greetings, student @ GCC conducting evaluation for my advertising course.
2.} DEMOGRAPHICS:
A) Approx Age: ___26____
B) Highest Level of Education: ___B.A._______
C) Employment: _____Self-employed, student________
D) Household Size: _____2 including myself__________
3} LIFESTYLE:
A) Currently involved in any hobbies? _Skiing, mountain biking, brewing beer______________________________________________
B) What are your interests? ___Microbiology, politics, pets, having fun
C) When you think of shopping and your needs what comes to mind? _Groceries, home goods (laundry, cleaning, organization, etc), pet care and personal care products____
D) When you think of the expenses of shopping how do you feel? __I hate the rising expense of groceries, since it cuts into our budget for the things in life that we actually enjoy like going out with friends, skiing, green fees, etc

______________________
4} GENERAL DISCUSSION REGUARGING SAVING STRATIGIES & SAVING MONEY:
A) How important is saving money to you? It is very important ________________________________________
B) Why is saving money important to you? We have a large mortgage on our first home, I am a student now which cuts into the time in which I can see client for work, and we still like to have enough money left over to entertain ourselves after the bills get paid. ________________________________________
C) How has the importance of saving money changed for you in today’s economy? _Very much. We've seen several friends laid off, and less money is coming in the door with my business. Add school and rising costs of goods to the equation and we've noticed that we had begun to dip into our savings. We've changed our ways now to account for the rising prices and so that we can continue to have a cushion in case something should happen to our income. __________
D) How do you save money? __Budgeting- we use cash envelopes for variable expenses like buying groceries, entertainment, and shopping for ourselves (like buying clothes, gadgets, gifts and stuff that isn't always necessary). It keeps us honest and helps us to prioritize because if there's no cash left in the envelope, we're not going out to dinner for the rest of the month. We also clip coupons for groceries and personal care and pet items. We wait for something that we want to go on sale before we make a purchase, and we shop around for the best prices on the things that we intend to purchase. We also utilize a credit union that has a free interest-bearing checking account. We use a money market for our savings because it has a higher APY than a savings account at the same savings tier, and we will put some money away in CDs for big ticket items in the future (like vacations, etc). __
E) What influences the way you save money? __The recent changes in the economy have made us put a stronger emphasis on saving. We have also learned from experience that if we put things on debit and credit cards, it is too easy to overspend and too difficult to stick to a budget. Therefore we've learned to self-police using the envelope method. ___
F) What strategies do you use to save money? __Budgeting- we use cash envelopes for variable expenses like buying groceries, entertainment, and shopping for ourselves (like buying clothes, gadgets, gifts and stuff that isn't always necessary). It keeps us honest and helps us to prioritize because if there's no cash left in the envelope, we're not going out to dinner for the rest of the month. We also clip coupons for groceries and personal care and pet items. We wait for something that we want to go on sale before we make a purchase, and we shop around for the best prices on the things that we intend to purchase. We also utilize a credit union that has a free interest-bearing checking account. We use a money market for our savings because it has a higher APY than a savings account at the same savings tier, and we will put some money away in CDs for big ticket items in the future (like vacations, etc). Retirement accounts are set to withhold money from our paychecks at a high percentage (but one that still allows us to keep some savings liquid in case there was an emergency of some sort) and are put into diversified securities. ______________
5} SAVINGS AWARENESS:
*IN REFERENCE TO YOUR LAST SHOPPING EXPERIENCE/EVENT*
A) How often do you need to save money? _______Every day. It's silly to pay full price for an item if you can get it cheaper!__
B) How did you select strategies for saving money? ____Asking advice of friends, relatives, financial planners. I also used to work at a bank, so I was familiar with both the fees that banks usually charge (as opposed to credit unions) as well as the different savings and deposit products available. We also realized that some budgeting ideas that we had started out with (such as putting everything on a credit card to maximize the number of frequent flyer miles we could earn) were too easy to lose track of over the course of the month. So we knew we would have to change to something more concrete for our budgeting-- hence the envelopes.____
C) How do you find savings strategies to use? __Coupons available online, financial information available online, talking to friends, family, financial advisors_
D) How do you select which savings to utilize? __We diversify our savings the same way you would diversify stocks. We keep money in our checking account for bills (some of which are automatically withdrawn from our account in order to save money on transaction fees the companies would otherwise charge), and then we only touch our money market account when necessary. The money market has the highest APY available for a completely liquid account that we have found at our credit union (and the credit union offers the highest APY for the area). We also make use of CDs when the APY offered is high enough for it to make sense to tie up our money for a specific period of time.___
E) How do you feel savings strategies could be improved? More money coming in-- we have an appointment to speak with a mortgage broker at our credit union about refinancing options for our mortgage (this would eliminate mortgage insurance and we would be refinancing to a much lower interest rate for a fixed loan and would save us about $1100/month). We also still like to go out with friends, and we are slowly but surely cutting down on how much we spend on entertainment.__
F) Which savings strategies did you use? _Speak with financial planners, cut the amount that we pull from our checking to put in the "entertainment" envelope___
G) How happy where you with your savings strategies of choice? ____We're pretty happy so far. ______________
H) How happy were you with your savings? ____The savings from cutting coupons and looking for sales has been really great. I save about $150/month on groceries alone. The envelopes have definitely worked to our advantage, since we can tell exactly what we are spending our money on and at what rate. It's easier to budget when your monthly funds for a particular kind of expenditure are staring you right in the face.
6} I thank you for your time and feedback regarding this evaluation

**Bluestreak** · 03-08-2009, 10:32 PM

I live below my means. I buy what I need, I buy things on sale. There is no strategy involved, just common sense. Those are my price saving realities. That's truth and makes for a good article these days.

Savings Evaluation - HELP REALLY NEEDED!!