Personal Finance Class

Tonight our ward had a personal finance class and I learned some things that I should have done a long time ago. So if your like me and just didn't bother to think about it I'll help you do some stuff that is ridiculously obvious. First off I have never checked the temperature of our water heater, the guy who taught the class said that he puts his water heater on low and that gives him just enough warm water to do the little things he needs to do with it. Well tonight I went down and checked mine and it was on the highest setting possible I have no idea why it would be; but were kinda dumb and like to pay lots of money for years and years on heating water to the highest level especially when were sleeping and nobodies using it. So naturally I changed that and it made me feel better about life. CHECK YOURS! Another thing I did for the first time in our two and a half years of living here was change our furnaces air filter. When I went to walmart i found out that we were probably using the crappiest filter allowed in a furnace. So now i have a new efficient air filter without moths and years of dust stuck in it. If you cant figure out how to change it or where its located (it took us three tries to find where it was even was) call me and I can help you out. Next thing I learned about was the use of a periodical expense fund, kinda like a savings account but just for known expenses ie Christmas, car registration/ safety and emissions, vacations. What you do is add up what they all end up being (a close estimate will do) divide it by 12 and put that dollar amount into an account every month and suddenly you have those damn random but predictable things taken care of, the cool thing is its only like in the low one hundreds a month depending of course on how expensive you are but it sure beats coming up with that cash periodically. They also talked about savings being mostly a special "me" fund its for all the crap you see and you want but shouldn't go into debt for. Then there is the "rainy day" or emergency fund, this one I've had forever and things have to get pretty darn near impossible for me to break into it; but that's because I only had it and savings not the Periodical Expense fund and if I were to make it part of my budget it would grow to be a lot healthier than it currently is. He also suggested to put this emergency fund in a flexible CD which i didn't know that existed so I most certainly will check it out and move it out of my plain old boring savings account. The rest of the stuff taught wasn't new but I'm glad that i did learn something that will eventually ease up our pocket book, hopefully something i typed is new and might help you too.