SparkDad

Insurance. The industry we all love to hate. No let me preface this by letting you know that I am a licenses insurance agent and can sell both property insurance and life and health insurance. I have worked for State Farm, Allstate and Farmers.

During this time, I have only been insured by State Farm, even when I worked for Allstate and Farmers. But this year my rates went up by about $600 per year on our homeowners policy! Wow! That was a crazy high increase. Of course State Farm sited the recent hurricane Ike damage and expenses as the reason for the rate increase. I understand from a insurance industry stand point. I know what I would be telling my customers if they were calling me asking why their rates went up so much.

But as a consumer I have to wonder if I am making the right decision by keeping loyal to State Farm. Now there are reasons that I stick with them. First of all they have always paid claims on time and paid them properly. Never making me feel like I got short changed.

The other reason is that our State Farm policy includes wind and hurricane coverage which is rare in the Texas Gulf Coast.

So because of the price I sent shopping for insurance. I began by typing in Google, " car insurance ". It brought me to a great site called Net Quote that allowed me to enter my information once and get several quotes for insurance for several companies. It worked great and I was happy with the response.

I found some companies that were a little cheaper, but in the end my loyalty to State Farm because of my treatment during hurricane Ike and previous claims won.

But if you are ever in need of insurance be sure to use a site like Net Quote to help you find competing quotes.

-Spark Dad

I have been following this blog for a year or so now. Do not get me wrong I screw up money on a daily basis, but this post is fantastic.

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/07/08/learning-to-budget-with-the-jars-system/

Let me know what you think about his blog!

I am going to a funeral : ( I will post about that later.

C YA

Spark Dad

Since “retirement” I am always looking for ways to save money. Here is a quick money saving tip!

At meals switch to using cloth napkins. We have changed to a stain resistant nylon napkin. They are not as absorbent as a paper towel but they do the job at the dinner table.

In addition the microwave food cover prevents us from using paper towels to cover food in the microwave. This accomplishes two things. First of all it saves money and trees and secondly it prevents me from cleaning the microwave every week and that is a good thing!

Also you save a considerable amount of money, consider this:

If you buy only 8 rolls of paper towels per month at $14.99 for an average brand such as Bounty then you save almost $100 per year.

The 12 cloth / nylon napkins cost us $24.00 and the microwave cover cost $5.99 So in the first year you save about $60.00 and the savings will accumulate from there!

Now don’t get me wrong we still use some paper towels but our consumption is down from 12 rolls per month to about 2. What a deal!

Just a little savings, but in this economy every little bit means a lot!

Well we made it through yesterday’s Swine Flu scare unscathed. Luckily Princess did not have the flu only a simple cold. The doctor swabbed her mouth and had it tested, therefore Pork Chop is back at his pre-kindergarten program today and I am back at work : ( This weekend will be jam packed with events! Baseball, Craw Fish Boil and now Lemonade Day!

Mama heard about Lemonade Day yesterday on the radio and put me on the trail to find out about it.  Skeeter has always wanted to open a lemonade stand so this is a perfect opportunity.  I love that Skeeter is interested in working hard to earn money. He is definitely a future entrepreneur. Right now he is striving to buy more Lego Star Wars ships and a WII Fit! You can find out more about Lemonade Day at www.lemonadeday.org.

Here is LemonadeDay.org’s mission per their website: "Lemonade Day is a community event created by Prepared 4 Life (P4L) and designed to reach the many youth that we cannot reach through our after-school programming.  It transforms not only the youth who participate, but the entire community. Our ambitious goal this year is to register 25,000 lemonade stands. In the wake of Hurricane Ike, P4L is committed to ensuring that this school year is not one characterized by devastation but one marked by hope for as many youth as possible."

During lunch I went and picked up a Lemonade Day Entrepreneur Workbook. This workbook is very neat and has a great series of questions for the kids to work through. It covers budgeting, pricing, investors, marketing and stand locations. It is a great book. I am really looking forward to exploring this with Skeeter.

So here is the plan at the moment:

• Sit down with Skeeter and Pork Chop and discuss the plans for the stand. We picked up a packet for Lemonade Day and it has great tips on marketing, set-up, etc. Too bad that we did not know about it until yesterday.
• Build the lemonade stand out of spare wood in the garage. A good plan that I found at This Old House’s website can be found at the This Old House website
• Discuss Marketing – emails, signs, word of mouth
• Research lemonade recipes and determine cost and price of lemonade
• Have Skeeter solicit investors to help pay for food costs and issue stock certificates for their investments
• Purchase ingredients for the stand
• Follow through on marketing plan
• Open up and sell, sell, sell! I think that it is very interesting that the Lemonade workbook discusses investors.   I have attempted to explain what the stock market is to Skeeter once before. After a lengthy ten minute explanation Skeeter looked at me, cocked his head and said "Dad, I don’t get it." Maybe after going through all of this he will finally "get it".

I will let everyone know how it turns out!