I was talking to a person today that was saying how she prefers doing a certain job over a volunteer position as for the job she actually gets paid for it. I guess it’s true too as for many people in many cases if they make a lot of money doings something they generally enjoy it more as I guess everyone feels that it is worth it while being a good accomplishment.

While I think the ideal answer would be that doing what you love is the way to go, you can’t argue that people have to make a living too. Hence, people usually opt to do the things in life that bring in the most money. I always find the best way to try and balance this is to do what brings in the money and at the same time you can try and use some of the money towards building whatever it is you are passionate about where it is self sustainable.

So for example, if you like donating food to charity to help the less fortunate it wouldn’t just be taking the money you earn, buy some canned food and donate them. Instead, you would try and use the money to say build a donation box machine of some sort where it is placed in strategic locations such as where there are wealthier people. Then, the hope is your donation box will continually generate money and then you can use that to buy the can food to donate. Hence, you don’t really need to sacrifice one or the other really as you are trying to leverage your time and money better.

Of course this type of approach will take more thought and energy in the beginning, but in the end it would be worth it I’d say. Just because you volunteer to do things doesn’t mean you have to kill yourself financially too.

Today I went to a restaurant for a family outing and as usual people fight over in wanting to try and pay for the bill. The bill was about $100 which wasn’t too bad considering the amount of people. The interesting thing was that the person that snagged the bill was not currently working as she was semi retired. A comment was then made that the bill is only not much if you had money coming in.

I tend to always look at bills that way too in determining if something is “not much” to buy something. Example, I know dining out is usually a major money killer for many people. So while say a $5 meal for lunch may not be “much” I would rather look at it from your entire income point of view. For example, some people only make say $12/hour. When you look at it from that perspective that $5 can seem a lot.

Examples like that is why I’d say it is better to always look at how much you actually have when you are spending versus price comparing the costs from different vendors.

I know. Most people would be the complete opposite where they dread having to get the bills in the mail to have to pay off. As you all know I recently decided to get the second credit card and now I have two card bills to take care of. I just want to pay it all off so that I don’t have to worry about it later since I am getting crammed up in terms of time for this month.

Some may say that I should just deposit the amount of money into the card right now to pay it off. I usually hold off as I would rather earn more interest from the funds in my savings account. Basically, wait till the very last moment as much as possible to get the monthly savings interest gain and then use it to pay for the monthly bill.

A person was telling me today that she was so shocked and proud that her hydro bill for the month of December turned out to be a little over three dollars. Yes, three dollars. Apparently this was a result of the company’s payment plan option where they bill the customers based on an “estimate of consumption”. As you may have guess, winter is usually a time where people use less electricity and more gas. So, as a result the estimate of usage was really low.

Kind of an interesting yet confusing scenario. That makes me wonder if in the summer time the bill would be higher than your actual usage since the assumption is that you will use more electricity during that time. So in reality your savings might be minimal in the big picture.

Yesterday I went to watch a movie with a friend and the thing was he pre-purchased the tickets ahead of time and got a cheaper deal since there were a few of us. For myself I usually always want to use the credit card and was anticipating in purchasing it through those machines that are in the theatres now. As a result of this though, I had to pay him back in cash.

Unfortunately, all I had was $20 bills and the ticket was only about $7. So at fist I told him to just keep the twenty dollars since no one had any change. His reaction was interesting as he said if it was $10 that would be different but there is no way he is taking $20 as that is way too much. Therefore, he scrambled for some change in his pocket to give back to me. It wasn’t even still, but he definitely didn’t want to take so much.

This happens a lot and usually in this situation everyone simply remembers the times where the person spent more than necessary so that if a situation comes up in the future where there is a bill again then you can factor that difference into it. Of course, the other way around would have been for me to simply not give anything until I got some change and saw him another time. But then I would have to be the one to remember it right? lol