We answered this question in our personal finance feature today:

Question: I am one of the thousands of people who live in Quezon City but work in Makati City. That means I drive some 20 kilometers to work every day, and that’s just one way. I tried commuting but it’s impossible during rush hour. With the price of gasoline going up, travel to and from work makes a huge dent in my budget. Is there any relief in sight for us? – Josephine P.

We all will have to deal with the rising cost of gas, whether or not we are from Quezon City, Bulacan, Cavite, Cebu or Davao. The most terrible forecast I have heard so far is for a full tank to cost P30,000. That’s almost the take-home pay of senior call center agents.
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(This piece is written by Bianca, one of the readers of MoneySmarts who has been chosen for the one-year Money Makeover challenge by INQUIRER.net. Bianca’s real identity is confidential, so that MoneySmarts can share her family’s financials and the lessons she has learned with the rest of the world. Read more about Money Makeover here.)

A financial planner (not Joe Ferreria) told us: sell your timeshare. My husband and I communicated silently the way old lovers do – with a look (or a glare, but that is another story) – and made a decision.

We will not.
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a. SM/Hypermarket
b. Landmark
c. Rustan’s
d. Puregold
e. Shopwise
f. Ever Gotesco
g. Cherry Foodarama
h. Metro Gaisano
i. Robinson’s
j. Metro Stop
k. Santis
l. Waltermart
m. Makro
n. PriceSmart

1. Too busy to check the lowest or highest shelves.

Heinz Bulos, editor-in-chief of MoneySense magazine, says the most expensive items in the grocery are mostly at eye level. If you want to find bargains, you have to stoop down or look up. “This may not be true all the time, but I did find that it was true in some of the grocery stores I went to,” Heinz says.

We had a good laugh at the fact that I’m only all of 4 feet and 9 inches.

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I bought my Canon G6 in SM’s Cyberzone in 2005. Since I was drooling over the EOS 350D at that time, I thought the G6 for P45,000 was already a money-smart compromise. It has video capability too, the rationalizing part of me said. When we took our new digital baby home, we took pictures of even the most ordinary things like doorknobs, light fixtures and fingernails ☺. My 10-year old kid, especially. It felt like a really good buy.

Boy, was I dead wrong. I learned last week that this camera shop called 24K on Hidalgo sold the little rugrat for P17,000 that same year! Original. With warranties and all. I wanted to weep! Rod, the friendly attendant who was referred to me by Edwin Redrino, a really talented professional photographer, was actually concerned for me.

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(Photo from Agence France-Presse)

No self-flagellation here in MoneySmarts this Holy Week break! Let’s list down all our favorite painless ways to increase savings. I’ll go first:

1. Take advantage of SM Advantage (and other store cards). They hardly cost any money and carrying them in your wallet won’t give you even a slight kink in your shoulder. The other week, I bought several grocery items and replacement parts for toilet flush and paid for them with my SM Advantage card. Not bad at all.
2. Don’t forget your rebates and freebies. I learned this the hard way. I forgot all about my expiring Mabuhay Miles and found out I was eligible for a free trip to a Visayas destination only when it was too late. Be careful, though. Rebates, rewards and freebies need to be managed carefully. For example, if Casa Armas is giving you 20% discount on a meal, don’t go just for the discount but go because you would have eaten out anyway. If you went out because “hey, we have a discount, cool!” you wouldn’t have enjoyed 20%, you would have spent 80% of the cost of the meal. [Read the rest of this entry »]

Guys, we have a Frugal Week hangover =). Here is another post on more frugal living tips, courtesy of our editorial partner MoneySense, the first and only personal finance magazine in the country.

As I said in a previous post, there are expensive things that help save money in the long-term. A good education, books, health care, vacations (even simple ones when money is tight) should be in our budget even if they are expensive.

Our article from MoneySense this week written by Ruth Floresca adds some more to the list:

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(My dream house has this morning view. Can you guess where it is?)

I thought I would blog about this separately as I’ve been getting a lot of emails asking for tips on buying real estate.

I found these list of questions very helpful for those who are house or condo hunting. I’m sharing this from Noet Ravalo’s column “Alternatives to low interest-bearing deposits”.

1. Is your expected income sufficient to cover the amortization?
2. How much of an increase in the amortization can your income tolerate?
3. At what loan rate can your income stream handle at the maximum?
4. If rates do go down, can you advance payments?
5. Will there be a penalty?
6. How about pre-termination of the outstanding loan amount?
7. If currency conversions are involved, by how much will the cost-benefit analysis be sensitive to exchange rate movements?
8. What does this mean for the timing of the conversion of the funding as against the timing of the revenue stream?

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The INQUIRER.net special feature today for personal finance is How to buy jewelry. It has the usual tips on karat for gold, the three Cs for diamond – color, clarity, cut and carat — and what makes good silver and pearl jewelry.

Whether or not jewelry is a good investment, however, is still a debatable point. For Efren Cruz, author of Pwede Na: The Pinoy Guide to Personal Finance (full public disclosure: I co-edited this book), buying jewelry for “showing off” should not be confused with investing in jewelry for future profit. Consumption and investments are not peas in a pod.

“The moment you part with money or time in the hope of enjoying more of it in the future, then you are investing. Investments will differ in potential returns, amount required and time to harvest. With jewelry, it takes longer. It is still, nonetheless, investing, unless you buy jewelry just to show off,” he said.
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Here are my estimates rounded off to the nearest thousands for the costs of having my youngest child:

1. It starts with pre-natal expenses, ultrasound and other laboratory costs and vitamins (P15,000)
2. Maternal wear for a working mommy, already with Divisoria shopping (P10,000)
3. Normal delivery (P70,000)
4. Baby furniture - foldable playpen-crib, stroller and car seat, high chair (P20,000)
5. Baby clothes, excluding gifts from titos and titas *thank you po!* (P8,000)
6. Avent bottles, pacifiers, breastpump, baby bags, etc. (P25,000)

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