This week I have to send off a couple of mailings and of course that means marking all these envelopes with your return address and all. Kind of interesting as I never had the need to use an item that you could say pre-print your address on it and then simply stick it on. On top of that I usually send things digitally nowadays whenever possible.

I was then looking at some address stamps and couldn’t believe that some of simple ones were like $35+. This is one of those things where you have to wonder if paying that much money for the sheer convenience makes sense. $10 maybe considering I wouldn’t use it that often….but $35?

Makes you want to just get creative such as simply printing off a sheet that has a bunch of your address on it and then sticking them on the package with tape.

Over the past week I noticed that many of the business owners that I have spoken to run their operations from their house. As well, their employees telecommute from their homes too. Just a few years ago you could say this would not be an ideal situation as many times people go for things like the traditional office setting as that seems like the thing you are suppose to do when creating business.

Nowadays though, it just makes sense from a financial point of view and not to mention the productivity. Example, things like the travel time alone that you would save from working out of your own home can be extremely beneficial. You can use that time to earn more as well as cutting expenses associated with that travel.

Now obviously if you run some kind of traditional operation like a large retail store you aren’t exactly going to hold that at your house. The main challenge is discipline though as working out of your home can often cause people to get lazier.

Over the weekend my dad went on a small trip with some of his friends and he came back with a whole load of seafood that they caught themselves such as fish, oysters and muscles. Because he got so much, he wanted to give it to other members of the family as well.

My brother had an interesting comment about that as he was wondering whether or not it was safe to eat since they caught it themselves. That immediately made me think of the tap water story I wrote about yesterday where most people can’t help to think that if it doesn’t come in some kind of package or store it much be very dangerous to consume.

I bet if you really needed to save money doing things like this in terms of trying to acquire your own food the natural way can save a lot of money. I once saw a person who actually had his own garden where he grew some vegetables as a hobby. Similarly, he seemed very paranoid about consuming it since he grew it himself.

I always have the thought that what you are paying for when it comes to things like these are not necessarily better in terms of quality or safety, but rather you are paying for the convenience of having someone else doing the work for you.

I was talking to some people today that were talking about the thought of how much they would pay for a subscription service of some sort where someone else will do things such as cooking dinner and washing the dishes for them as sometimes you just don’t want to have to deal with things like that.

One person said $30/month plus the cost of food and I thought that was kind of a little too low. That sounded more like a fee for a diet program of some sort. I actually know one guy that just absolutely hates cooking and pays a lady to come in and cook dinner for about $20 each time to do it for him. Kind of high expense when you think about it too.

What I always think about when it comes to convenience is that while I’ll probably definitely save a lot of time in situations like these, I always debate whether or not it would benefit me skill wise in the long run. For example, would it enable me to do things faster afterwards? Is it a skill I could use to make money afterwards? There are always things like that which make me consider how much I would be really losing in the overall picture.

Of course, you can’t know everything so many times it makes sense to just pay for convenience.

For almost all of my billings I try to avoid the use of auto billing features even though on paper it sounds like a good thing to do to save time. I think it is easy to forget those small items and having recurring charges for items that you don’t really use anymore.

I was also just reading some examples of people who also subscribe to services which offer say a free trial and in the fine print they mention that after your trial period they will conveniently bill your credit card afterwards. It’s times like that where it is better to have manual billing options as more than likely the company will nag remind you to renew as oppose to nag remind you to cancel it.

I uses the number one reason I do it too is as mentioned in a previous post I try to charge my credit card after the billing cut off dates and this allows a lot more flexibility to do so. One way to make sure you are always in tune with your finances.