Point, Click, and Save

I don’t have to tell you: We’ve been living through some seriously scary economic times, and we all could use some reassurance that we and our families will make it through OK. Even better, we want to know that we can do something to help ourselves make it through, that we can take steps to help reduce the impact of the down economy on ourselves and our family. So fight back with Point, Click, and Save! I will give you the strategies you need to both save and make money from home. I will share thoughts and stories from moms just like you who have made this work, and I will pass along ways to use online resources to mash up the right balance for your family, helping you survive tough economic times—and maybe even have some fun doing it.

As with anything else, the road to saving and making money from home starts by just taking the first step. Any little bit you save, and any little bit you earn, puts you that much closer to your goal. Think of it as being a lot like dieting (but easier). Just as when we try to lose weight, we tend to get overwhelmed when we focus on the big picture. Any of you who have tried to diet know what I mean: It’s so very easy to get discouraged before you even start. We think: “I have so much weight to lose” or “It’s impossible” or “I’ll never be able to do it” or “It will take forever.” So we have one more piece of cake, one more bowl of ice cream, one more bag of chips, figuring that it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things anyway.

This is just like our thinking about money. We think, “We’re living this much beyond our means each month” or “We have a pile of credit card debt to pay off” or “We’ll never be able to afford a house” or “We might as well buy whatever we want because we’re already in so deep that it doesn’t matter anyway.” When we get bogged down in this type of thinking, we never begin to take the steps that will eventually let us get ahead. As with dieting, learning how to save takes time and starts with the simple decision to move forward from this point.

Because this book focuses on using online resources to help us change our patterns and our thinking, let me tell you right now about one of my favorites: Get Rich Slowly (www.getrichslowly.org/blog). Let’s focus on one word in that title: slowly. We can look at saving and making money from home in the same way we look at losing weight: Slow and steady wins the race. We would all love to have that get-rich-quick (or get-thinquick) magic, but real life doesn’t work that way. It took time to get where we are, so it takes time to get ourselves out of it. It took time to build our bad shopping habits, so it will take time to re-pattern ourselves into using good ones. If you use the advice in the following chapters, though, you will begin to see savings almost immediately—and these savings will build faster as you gain confidence and learn the ropes.

Author: Rachel Singer Gordon
Bio:   Rachel Singer Gordon blogs on money-saving and money-making strategies on her popular deals blog, www.mashupmom.com. She speaks frequently at conferences for info pros, teaches coupon classes in the Chicagoland area, and has written for the Dollar Stretcher, a popular publication on saving money. She lives in Lombard, Illinois.

"Don't have hours to spend scouring the internet to find the best deal sites or legitimate work-from-home opportunities? Never fear! Mashup Mom has done all the legwork for you in this comprehensive volume. She'll not only save you hours of time and effort, but she'll show you how to significantly cut your budget and earn hundreds of dollars per month, too." - Crystal Paine, MoneySavingMom.com