Here are 9 small ways to save more money this year:

1. Quit costly habits: Smoking a pack a day costs over $1,600 a year. That’s not including the cost of dental work, general health, laundry service and replacement costs for cigarette burns. A Starbucks addiction can cost you around the same.
2. Consolidate bills: By finding the right deal and bundling your phone, internet and cable bills, you can save a few hundred dollars a year.
3. Cook your own meals: Even at a minimum of $5 a meal for fast food, twice a day, that amounts to over $3,500 a year. Buying your own groceries and taking your own lunches to work will allow you to use that money more wisely.
4. Double check your minutes: Are you using all of your cell phone minutes or consistently going over? Check your plan to see if you can save more money by changing your plan.
5. Keep away from cash: As discussed in Can You Break This Debit Card for a Dollar Please, carrying cash can burn a hole in your pocket. Plus all of that loose change quickly adds up.
6. Switch to compact bulbs: Energy Star qualified bulbs use about 75 percent less energy than standard incandescent bulbs and last up to 10 times longer. Each light bulb will save you $30 or more over the life of the bulb.
7. Reduce gas consumption: Gas prices are not going down. Try biking to work or planning your chores and travel routes more efficiently in order to burn less gas.
8. Plan ahead for vacations and other expenses: If you know you have major expenses ahead, start saving now a little at a time. Your vacation will be much more rewarding when it is money you can afford to spend.
9. Use Online Bill Paying: Set up your reoccurring bills for automatic bill payment in order to reduce postage, save checks and avoid late fees. Some companies even offer a discount on their service for arranging an automatic payment program.

Millionaire Money Habit: There are many ways to increase your cash flow. The most obvious and simplest is to reduce your expenses. Develop the habit to save a little today, which will slowly add up to an abundance of wealth tomorrow.

In addition to the discipline and willpower needed to become a millionaire, what may really be needed in order to achieve your long-term wealth accumulation goals is to develop a Millionaire Mindset.

Webster’s Dictionary defines a habit as, “An acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary.” It takes more or less 30 days to condition yourself to create (or break) a habit. Once it is created, those actions happen with little or no conscious processing.

Think about when you first started driving a car, and how you constantly had to think about each procedure. Put the belt on, check the mirrors, turn on the ignition, check your surroundings, apply the break, shift into gear, etc. As time went on you were driving places while talking on the phone, listening to music, drinking a coffee and not even consciously remembering how you got to your destination. It is habits like these that are either helping or preventing you from reaching your goals.

Wouldn’t it be Great to Create Millionaire Habits?

Knowing this, what money habits are there that you wish you had or didn’t have?

• Unconscious ability to save more money
• Unconscious ability to invest and make better investing decisions
• Unconscious ability to reduce taxes
• Unconscious ability to increase cash flow
• Unconscious ability to boost retirement income

The first 30 days of creating a habit can be tough because we are inheritably lazy and it is easier to talk ourselves out of doing something that requires even a slight amount of effort. The path of least resistance is comfortable.

To start creating your habit you will want to write down your goal, along with an explanation of why you want to achieve your goal. If you want to save more money, write down, “I want to stop wasting money and save $5 a day to contribute to my retirement fund and retire rich. I will save $5 a day by doing X.”

Be consistent for at least 30 days in your action, seek opportunities to act out the behavior, and be consciously aware of the behavior you are trying to create or destroy. Your tendency will at times be to do what is comfortable and what you are used to, but remind yourself of your ultimate goal and resist the urge take the easy way out. It’s all mind over matter.

Eventually this new behavior will seem so normal it will be hard to imagine that you used to act in any other way. Learn how you can increase the millionaire deep inside you and download a copy of the Millionaire Mindset.

Millionaire Money Habit: The personal finance habits you have can accelerate or impede your ability to accumulate wealth. The good news is you can train your mind to unconsciously and automatically perform millionaire money habits. Develop the millionaire within you and you will reach your goals almost effortlessly. - RT

First off, I would like to apologize for the unavailability of this site for the past 12 hours. Traffic on this website picked up quite a bit, and as a result it reached its bandwidth quota. So that’s the good news. Things are better than expected and we’re back!

The downtime could have been avoided if the upgrade request was handled appropriately by my previous host, Globe Domain. But, it wouldn’t have given me the opportunity to learn and a valuable lesson. The old adage, “you get what you pay for” is particularly true when it comes to web hosting.

There are certain things in life that I always believed in paying top dollar for because it will save you money, make you more money, or avoid major headaches. This list includes:

• Legal assistance and advice
• Certified public accountants
• Insurance
• Financial advising

And now I’m adding web hosting to that list.

Choosing Globe Domain for their cheap web hosting packages was a major mistake. They are low in price, but the service and quality is shameful. As a result of being a Globe Domain customer, I experienced numerous outages for long periods of time, at one point lost all RSS subscribers, and received the absolute poorest support I have ever received.

If you choose a cheap web hosting company like Globe Domain, here is what you can expect:

• They boast 99.8% uptime, which is not accurate. They regularly reset their servers without notifying their customers about the maintenance outages and constantly have connectivity issues for 30 minutes at a time. Worse, when your site is down it is generally because their servers are down, which means you can’t even access their trouble ticket system. Which brings up another point . . .
• Their 24×7 support does not exist. There is no phone number to reach them and no email address, only their trouble ticket system, which is only accessible when their site is actually up and running. But, then there is another problem because . . .
• The turnaround time to respond to issues is days, not minutes. From what I can tell, Globe Domain is a two person operation that regularly takes vacations. When they do get around to responding to you, they are unable to help because . . .
• They have poor accounting systems. Once I placed an order to upgrade to a bigger hosting package, 10 days before the outage occurred, I immediately paid the service charge and noticed the charge on my American Express online bill statement. However, I was informed that they didn’t receive my payment and my account was actually past due.
• If that didn’t confuse me enough, when I sent them a copy of the confirmation email for my payment and an image of my AMEX bill, I was told they received my payment but I do not have any services with them and they did not have any records of my domain name. So, how did they resolve the problem?
• They closed the ticket. They didn’t have any answers so they were done dealing with the issue. They received their money, never upgraded my account, days later Millionaire Money Habits exceeded its bandwidth limit as anticipated, and they no longer respond to my inquiries.
• I have opened trouble tickets to get their attention since that is the only way to contact them, but all they do is close them with no resolution. My latest trouble ticket insisted a refund within 24-hours, as they have been unable to hold their end of the service agreement. I have yet to receive a response and have now turned over the issue to American Express, along with a copy of all of the trouble tickets that shows their clear negligence, and notified the Better Business Bureau.

I certainly learned a lesson here. Web hosting is one of those things you don’t want to skimp on, and all things are not created equal. All in all, things seemed to have turned out for the better.

I spent a good five hours researching the best web hosting companies and landed on Host Gator, which I already have been very impressed with. You can reach their support immediately any time, any day by chat, phone or email. I already chatted with a representative who I reached in moments and was extremely helpful, knowledgeable and courteous.

I spent a great deal of time on message boards and reviewed many web hosting companies, and Host Gator by far and away had the best feedback from current customers on reliability, value and offerings, and top-notch support. It also seems many IT people recommend them to their corporate customers. They have over 700,000 customers, so that goes to show something. Millionaire Money Habits is loading much faster as well.

I found a coupon code (MUSICA) that applies a $9.94 discount to the total, so you can try a month out for just a $0.01.

Millionaire Money Habit: When paying for services and advice, remember you get what you pay for. If the service is so poor that you need a second opinion or the job has to be done again, your money would have been better well spent with the more expensive alternative. In some cases, such as legal and tax advice, you will recoup the expense many times over. While having a frugal mentality can have its place in building wealth, there are times you are better off setting aside your frugal tendencies.