This is a guest post from DebtFree-Revolution. I encourage you to subscribe to her RSS feed.

Lazy Man and I disagree on the whole debt idea. This surprises me, since as I have eliminated all but one debt (and that last one will go away very soon) I have discovered that debt elimination is the ultimate in lazy financial management.

When I started with the Dave Ramsey debt elimination plan back in January of 2007, we had two vehicle notes (payments for non-Southerners), one credit union loan, and three credit cards. Nothing unmanageable, right? Especially since we got onto a real working budget in January.

The first to die was the car note as I made a double payment to pay it off completely in January. The next dominoes to fall were the credit union loan and the Chase MasterCard in February. It was a bit more work to stomp out the American Express in June thanks to their annoying “double cycle billing” practice. Then I looked up in July and noticed I could pay off the Star Card (a military credit card for the AAFES PX/BX) with one killer payment.

It actually wasn’t until August that I began to realize just how much easier it was to make the monthly budget and pay the bills when there were FIVE less bills to pay! Fewer payments to schedule. Fewer due dates to bother with. Fewer lines on the budget board (yes I use the high-tech dry erase board to do my budget LOL). Fewer things to subtract from the income side of the equation. I’ve become a very lazy budgeteer!

Of course my goal is to become the MOST lazy budgeteer by only having utilities and insurance and investments in my monthly budget someday soon…once the truck is sold and the mortgage is paid off I will be there, at which point making up the budget should take all of five minutes each month. That will leave me more time to do fun stuff … like actually learning more Spanish than just the Mexican cuss words I picked up when I worked in the factory.

[Editor’s note: You’d have a hard time being a lazier budgeteer than me. I have no budget at all. I just ask myself if I need to buy the new crap, and most of the time the answer is no. The other key is that I had a great income in the past. On a different note, it would seem to me that with online banking the number of bills largely becomes irrelevant.]

This is a guest post from I’ve Paid For This Twice Already – . I encourage you to subscribe to her RSS feed.

First, just let me say that I believe in the Lazy Man philosophy as espoused by this blog. I would love to make my money work so I don’t have to. But in the past, being lazy for me was basically equal to not taking the time to do much about anything. And as you can guess, it wasn’t the best idea I ever had. These are 5 ways that being lazy about my money contributed to my spiral into significant debt. Hopefully someone out there can learn from my mistakes and save themselves the pain of making them!

1. Not paying attention to where my money was actually going.

This was a big one. I was making money, and spending money, and as long as there was still some money in my bank account, I wasn’t really paying too much attention to what I was spending it on. And if there wasn’t any money in my account… well, there were always credit cards. Right? I could just pay them off when I got some more money….

2. Not reading the fine print… of anything… ever.

My parents swear I started reading at age 3, but for how little fine print I read in the past, I must never have graduated from the big print books with pictures. From credit card agreements to bank account statements, I couldn’t be bothered to read the details. You can imagine how much money this cost me, from fees I wasn’t aware of to interest rates that were variable not fixed to charges for services I actually didn’t need to have. I can’t even imagine how much money I wasted through not taking the time to be an educated and informed consumer.

3. Not being organized.

I shudder to think how many late fees I’ve paid in my life through sheer laziness. I’d lose track of what day it was, or I’d forget about one bill or another, and then… wham. Late fee. I never paid anything significantly late, but a few days here or there was not an uncommon occurrence for a large portion of my adult life.

4. Using credit card convenience checks.

They’re… convenient? Right? Not sure how much money I might have left for bill paying, since I was too lazy to pay attention to where my money was going and had no idea what I’d spent already? Write a credit card convenience check! I can always pay the credit card next month….

5. I want it now

When I wanted something, I bought it. No bothering to check around for the best price, no waiting until I saved up the money, just do it now. Who wants to have to come back later? Who wants to wait around for prices to drop? Not me. Instant gratification was simpler than figuring out what I really needed, not just desired.

I’m happy to say that I’ve overcome these habits and treat my money with much more respect now, and in return, it treats me better too. I’m successfully working my way out of debt and am on a path to the best financial health I have ever been in. There’s lazy that works, and lazy that doesn’t. I definitely was the doesn’t. Someday, once my financial house is completely in order, I may be able to learn to be the kind that does.

This is a guest post from Plonkee Money. She is a UK based financial blogger, so you’ll minor differences to what you may be used to (like using the Pound rather than American dollar).  The concepts are universal, so I encourage you to subscribe to her RSS feed.

I’m not the most organized person in the world, and this is not a good trait when combined with my penchant for putting off till later what doesn’t strictly have to be done right now. In some respects this is comical. I can get ready for work including taking a shower within 10 minutes if I really try – I know this because I’ve put off getting out of bed until 10 minutes before I really, really, really have to leave for work. But when it comes to my finances, its not had such great outcomes. Here are seven ways in which I could have saved money if I’d got my act together quicker, in order from bad to worst.

1. Updating my address
   When I moved house a couple of years ago, I had my post forwarded for six months by Royal Mail giving me plenty of time to change my address with the relevant parties. After the six months came to an end and I still hadn’t updated them, I had to fork out for another six months at about £36 to avoid having my post sent to my old address.
2. Switching Electricity Provider
   In the UK, electricity is an open albeit somewhat regulated market. When I first moved into my old flat I think that I wasted about £50 by not getting round to switching to the cheapest green provider.
3. Buying Train Tickets
   Train tickets are definitely cheaper if bought in advance. On a recent trip to London, I could have saved £16 by booking as soon as I knew I was going to go. I’d have also been able to go on the quicker route and this would have saved my more than an hours traveling time as there were engineering works on the slow route. This is not exactly an uncommon occurrence in my life. I estimate that it happens at least 4 times a year.
4. Changing House Insurance Provider
   The cheapest deals for house insurance require the house to be occupied, have window locks and smoke alarms as well as premiums to be paid annually. For this reason it was better for me to go with a more expensive company for the first month of my new purchase as I wasn’t actually living there. Not switching to a cheaper deal as soon as possible cost me around £120.
5. Going Grocery Shopping
   When I actually go shopping, I’m quite good. I make a list and a budget and stick to both. Of course all this is only beneficial if I can actually be bothered to go. I often don’t go until several days after I’ve run out of food and in the mean time I pick up a few things from a small supermarket every day on the way home from work. Not very cost effective and I estimate that this has wasted about £20-£30 a month for several months.
6. Paying Credit Card Bills
   I have to admit to opening a SonyCard to get the some bonus points which I’ll be using to buy Christmas presents. I put off paying the bill until closer to the due date, and was then very late. I’ve paid about £14 in late fees and I’ve made a dent in my credit score.
7. Claiming Expenses
   In the last year I’ve run up work expenses totaling approximately £750 which remain unclaimed because I didn’t get round to filling in the (relatively simple) form and sending them off. I have established to my satisfaction that at some point I threw away the receipts – I’m not getting this money back.

Today I have a couple of seemingly unrelated money stories, but I hope to tie them together in the end.

I have mentioned a few times that my wife is the breadwinner in our family. A couple of weeks ago, she had found that she had a fair amount of extra money at the end of the month, despite some of her spending habits. After dinner one evening she told me about this surprise money and that she transferred it to our new house account. Since it was a fair amount of money, I was quite excited. In a seemingly unrelated note, she mentioned how she needed a watch battery and a pair of running shoes. She then asked me for permission to a gift certificate that we got our wedding to buy new shoes at Sears. I explained that it’s perfectly fine and a bit of a silly question after transferring so much money into our house fund.

Last week, I came upon a small windfall. A windfall is probably overstating it. I immediately thought of what I might spend it on. We’ve had our eye on a replacement TV for the bedroom. It been partially broken for about 6 months. The case is cracked pretty bad from dropping it in a move, but the picture is fine. I’ve been thinking about how nice a LCD flat panel would look in place of the old tube.

I didn’t end up buying the fancy television though. Instead, I flashed back to my wife’s thought about the shoes at Sears. She rationalized the shoe purchase as a reward for saving money for the new home – even though I didn’t intentionally try to draw that connection. Taking her lead, I used the extra bonus to pay off about half the amount remaining on my home equity line of credit. As for my “shoes”, I think I’m going to pick up a wine decanter funnel, so that my Two Buck Chuck, will taste better. I like to think that Plonkee would be proud of that decision.