The winner of The Great Blog Off 2.0 is Saving for Serenity (a.k.a Alan Schram).  In case you don’t know, The Great Blog Off is a blogging competition that I am a part of.  See the facebook group for more info.

Saving for Serenity is a blog about personal finance.  Alan writes at least three times per week on various topics relating to money.  His personal goal is to help you save money.  Isn’t that nice of him?  I recommend this blog because it has gotten me thinking about saving… so much so that I opened a Tax Free Savings Account a few days ago.

In light of this all, I’ve decided to show you my main strategies for personal finance.  Some may be obscure, but they work for me.

1) Pay off all dept before starting to save (do the math with the interest rates.  It makes sense)

2) Once dept free, start saving as early as possible

3) Find loopholes and jump through them (e.g. my checking account fees are waved if I have $2,000 in the bank.  I save more by waving the fees than I would by earning interest on a savings account.  All sorts of loopholes like that are out there)

4) Live frugally (some people call this cheap, but they tend to be worse off financially).   Here’s how to be frugal:

- Take transit
- Cut your own hair
- Accept hand-me-downs
- Shop at thrift stores
- Cook fresh food instead of pre-made and instead of going out
- Avoid fancy drinks at coffee shops – order coffee or tea
- Turn off all electrical devices (including lights) whenever they are not being used
- Take anything if it is free (maybe not anything, but you know what I mean)
- Socialize during free events, like going for a walk or sitting around
- Rent movies instead of going to the theater
- Pick up some beer rather than go to the pub
- Live with a roommate
- Mooch off your parents
- Learn to be content with what you have (there will always be the next “latest and greatest” and you can’t have it all)
- Hide your cheapness by calling it an ethical choice

Like I said before, these work for me.  At the age of 22, I’m dept free (with a BA degree and a full length recorded and printed album, both of which I paid for [accepting whatever help I could get of course]), I’m starting to save, and I live off of only a half time job (plus album sales).  This is not to brag or anything… I just want to show you that my financial strategies have worked for me.  Maybe they could work for you too.

Apart from this, I don’t have much to say on finances, so go subscribe to Saving for Serenity for more ideas about money.

There is, yet again, another page on my blog.  The Links page (see the tab at the top of this page) lists all of my official pages on the internet, as well as all of the bloggers in The Great Blog Off.  If you don’t know what The Great Blog Off is, join the facebook group, read the blogs, and vote for me at the end of the month!

Somehow I got roped into this blogging competition, The Great Blog Off, with three friends of mine: Adam Loewen, Alan Schram, and Tony Bookless.

I think that blog-off sounds like a British swear.  I can picture Gordon Ramsay yelling, “Blog off you bastard!” and then throwing someone out of his kitchen.

Anyway, if I understand it correctly, The Great Blog Off works like this: You join the facebook group and read as many articles as possible in all four blogs.  At the end of the month, comment on the facebook group saying, “I vote for Jeff” (you could say something else, but I suggest that one)

All three of my competitors have their own advantage:

- TONY is the comic threat (plus he makes friends as fast as Jamison Dick… if you don’t know either of them, it’s a bad sign)

- ADAM is the creative threat (he did all the photography and production for my album)

- ALAN is the intellegent threat (plus I think he’s a hacker… he’ll find some way to rig the vote)

- ME, well… I’ll probably just lose… :(  …vote for the underdog!

Here are the blog links:

http://jeffhawker.ca/blog/

http://alanschram.blogspot.com/

http://adamloewenphotography.wordpress.com/

http://tonynobooks.blogspot.com/