Why saving is better than a raise.

Ben Franklin once said "A penny saved is a penny earned". Now he's dead, guess he wasn't so smart after all. The fact of the matter is that a penny saved is BETTER than a penny earned. Why? Taxes, duh. P enny erned is olny .6-.7 pennies after Uncle Sam steals his portion under threat of jailtime. The fact of the matter is that you are better off striving to shave an extra few percent off of your expendetures than bust your hump and hope for a meager raise in the following year. Here are a few tips that I use to cut back.

1. Track your spending. - This has been a staple of every list of financial tips since the beginning of time but it's always been a pain in the ass until very, very recently. Even my copy of "Personal Finance for Dummies" which is only a handful of years out of date claims that categorizing and tracking your everyday spending is more trouble than it's worth. What happened between now and then? Mint.com! Seriously this tool has to be the best thing I can imagine for keeping track of expenses. It links to your bank accounts and credit cards and automatically catagorizes purchaces (with very decent accuracy) , displaying your spending habbits with awesome graphs. If you don't use it, you are missing out big time.
2. Sell your old crap. - Books and video games are your best bet here. If you've got a book or a game that you haven't used in a year or more, you need to sell it. Half.com is a great place to do this. I recently sold several Nintendo DS games for about twice what gamestop would have paid for them, making myself an extra 150 bucks. Technical, and Text books are another way to go if you're newly out of colege like me. If you have a technical book you don't use, sell it now before it loses its value (prices on these drop like stones). If you have a text book, and you didn't get ripped off by selling back to your book store, or other book buyers, you can fetch much more competetive prices selling without a middleman online.
3. Buy used, especially the afforementioned books and video games. Movies too... if you buy movies. You should look into a lobrary if you like books too, although I admit I like to buy my books for 4 or 5 bucks each instead.
   
4. Ditch Comcast. A lot of you won't do this, you wan't to be able to watch your tv when you want. I've gone without subscription television for years now, never willing to spend money on it during college. I continued that tradition into adulthood and I couldn't be happier. I flirted with the idea of getting cable installed, but when i heard what they were going to charge me for installation alone, a procedure even a monkey could do, i decided against it out of principle. This act of righteous indignation now saves me 70 bucks a month, or $110 in pre-tax income. NetFlix and the Internet (yeah i have DSL from Sonic.net, not cable) is all you really need.