Archive for the 'Money' Category
June 19th, 2008 - Budget for a recession
Gather Little by Little talks today about increasing budget categories beyond what’s actually needed. I’ve just done this with Auto: Fuel. His reasoning and mine are the same: If you are pushing up against the amount you’ve budgeted and you’ve already taken steps to reduce your usage but prices are rising, you have to increase the amount you put in that category. But if you put in only a little bit, in another few months, you’ll have to adjust the budget again. And again. On the other hand, if you pad it by increasing it by 25% right away, you have more time before you have to adjust again. And having money set aside makes it easier to keep paying all the bills.
We’ve been doing quite well on Auto: Fuel. I was so proud of myself. And then, in the last three months, including one in which we took a 2-week trip and all gas was paid out of the travel budget, we went over budget. I was surprised, until I read that gas prices had DOUBLED since I last adjusted the Fuel category. We had definitely decreased our driving; for instance we used to take weekly trips to Neenah and probably 1-2x up to Appleton (not counting church). Now we go less than once/month (not counting church). (And due to illness and bad weather, we didn’t attend church much this winter, either.)
Since we are losing the car loan category, I decided to put the amount previously used for service into the fuel category, which increased it 50%. We’ll use the car payment to save for another car AND to pay for service. Tightens that category a bit, but I still think we can save enough for a major down payment on a new car in 5 years, even if we have something major go wrong with the current car.
I probably don’t even need to say that we will not be increasing out car usage simply because there’s more money in the account. We’ll continue to be careful. If there’s more than we need at the end of the year, it will be used to counterbalance other categories that weren’t properly budgeted.
January 25th, 2008 - How will you spend your tax rebate?
Economic Sustainablog recommends something other than typical spending (invest in local and sustainable products so that you actually are stimulating the US economy instead of other countries). Us? We’ll probably give a little bit to ourselves for personal spending (as we typically do with extra money) and the majority will go towards paying off the HEL early or straight to the adoption fund (depending on when it arrives).
Sorry for being so quiet. While I’m nearly all better, I’m still struggling to catch up at work after being sick. I have a lot to prepare for the new semester (starts Feb 4) including the podcast initiative, my hybrid seminar about teaching hybrid and online courses, and my fully online course. Not to mention my regular ongoing work duties!
August 2nd, 2007 - HEL money, update 7 July
For a variety of reasons including family visit and teaching, no extra money came in this month and a lot of extra money went out. But that’s why we were spending less other months. Since we’ve saved a lot of the extra money, we had plenty to cover overages this month!
July’s totals:
Total: $0
Running total: $1331
Concurrently with bringing a bit extra in, we are also focusing on keeping our household and grocery spending in check.
Groceries: -$100 or so
Household: $
July 25th, 2007 - Sometimes it costs less to pay the fee
Last week, I paid our annual car registration. I started writing the check as usual, when I noticed on the form that I could pay online for a $1 service fee. Usually, I scoff at these fees. Until I realized that I would actually save money by paying the $1! Our registration fee is $70. By paying online, I could use a credit card that gives us 1% back, 70 cents. Stamps are now 41 cents. So paying online saved me 11 cents.
And it was faster than writing a check, finding an envelope and stamps, and addressing it.
June 29th, 2007 - HEL money update 6 (June)
June’s totals:
Chase rewards: $25
Testing: $124
DealBarbiePays: $128
Rebates: $2
Amazon: $14
Total: $293
Running total: $1331
Concurrently with bringing a bit extra in, we are also focusing on keeping our household and grocery spending in check.
Groceries: $88
Household: $55
May 30th, 2007 - HEL money, update 5
May’s totals:
Chase rewards: $25
AutoVantage: $15
Testing: $52
DealBarbiePays: $200
Rebates: $1
Total: $293
Running total: $1038
Concurrently with bringing a bit extra in, we are also focusing on keeping our household and grocery spending in check.
Groceries: $3
Household: $0 (last month wasn’t as great as I thought, either. Found a $43 charge on a little used credit card that I’d not noticed so it went on this month. We also spent over $110 on bark mulch for the yard. And $60 to temporarily fix the lawnmower. On the good side, the full fix costs $125. Eric was willing to just get it fixed good enough, meaning no more electric start. We’ve had to have it serviced most springs, and we’re tired of that. We might buy a new one at the end of the season sales.)
May 1st, 2007 - HEL money, update 4 April
April’s totals:
Chase rewards: $25
E*Rewards: $25
AutoVantage: $10 (one of the trials I did through DealBarbie. When I called to cancel, they offered me another free month and sent out coupons for rebates on gas and oil changes. I hope to get another $10 rebate before the trial ends! Hope to also get money back on the oil change being done today.)
DealBarbiePays: $153.20
Total: $223
Running total: $745
New policy: If we get in over $50/month, Eric and I split the difference. This is after taxes are taken out, of course.
Concurrently with bringing a bit extra in, we are also focusing on keeping our household and grocery spending in check.
Groceries: $65
Household: $0 (wonderful as we bought diapers, wipes, and laundry detergent in bulk this month)
Another new policy: As another incentive to keep these two under budget, overages will…
1) go to the other budget area (for instance, we were -$3 in household originally)
2) $15 will go towards the snowblower
3) the rest will be split 3 ways: 1/3rd will remain for future overages, 2/3rds will either go to the date fund or to our personal spending money (to be decided each month).
This month, we did 1 & 2, the first part of 3, $7 to the date fund, and the rest is going towards the snowblower.
Confusing? Yes. But at the moment it’s working for us and is much simply in practice than it appears written out.
I’ll write about the snowblower later.
April 2nd, 2007 - HEL money, update 3
March’s totals:
Deal Barbie Pays: $80
Chase: $15 (one of those “cash this check” to try the credit protection service for a month, cancel before the time is up and it costs nothing)
Chase: $25 BP rewards
Friend: $32 (last winter, we mailed a package for a friend. She repaid us via Eric’s PayPal. Unfortunately, it has forgotten our bank account info, and won’t let us re-add it, even though we know that account used it before. It took me a month to think of another resolution: Eric could send the money to my PayPal, which is still working correctly with our other bank account. Then I forgot about it. We finally did this over the weekend. Since the original out-go was in Quicken last year (I included it just in case we weren’t paid back, always a good idea!), it’s an unexpected in-flow this month!).
Testing Feb: $29
Testing Mar: $28
MyPoints: $25 gift card for Walgreens
Total: $234
Running total: $522 (Wow! Almost to the $600 I’d for the entire year!)
Concurrently with bringing a bit extra in, we are also focusing on keeping our household and grocery spending in check.
Groceries: $2 (we resisted buying any groceries but Maggie’s milk in the last 4 days due to the dwindling amount)
Household: $60 (but we’re giving it to the Oshkosh Area Humane Society for food. They had to throw out 90% of their on-hand canned food due to the recall. We intended to give our leftover food budget but that couldn’t be done this month!)
February 27th, 2007 - HEL money, update 2
February’s totals:
FusionCash: $25
Amazon: $29
Deal Barbie Pays: $37
Rebate: $1
Total: $92
Running total: $288
Concurrently with bringing a bit extra in, we are also focusing on keeping our household and grocery spending in check:
Groceries: $122
Household*: $21 [and this is where all the extras for the month went. We’re not doing well here.]
*Household spending includes tp, paper towels, soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, diapers, wipes, maintenance (like plumbers, furnace checkup, and electricians), gardening supplies, yard supplies, printer supplies, and miscellanaeous–basically anything that doesn’t fit anywhere else or that we can’t account for. Some of it is rare–like printer supplies. Some of it is expensive and frequent, like diapers. (Cannot WAIT for her to be toilet trained.)
February 2nd, 2007 - HEL money, update 1b
Now that it’s the end of the month, here’s the final tally
January
Motley Fool credit card reward: $6
Mattel stock dividend: $7.80
BP credit card reward: $25
Amazon Marketplace: $48
Anchor Bank: $40
Testing: $60 [updated]
Memolink reward: $10
Total: $196.80 [updated]
Which is a really good thing, because we blew the household budget. With these additions and not paying the plumber bill next Feb, we had $10 left (the Memolink reward which came right at the end of the month).
Update: I have no idea where I came up with $10. Even before I found out that I’d neglected to put the $60 from testing into the household category in the budget, we had over $40 left. We ended up $103 under budget.
January 26th, 2007 - HEL money, update 1a
So that I don’t have to keep track of the notepaper I wrote this on, here’s where I’m hoping the money will come from over the year:
Test supervising: $300, 6 at $50/each (F, M, A, J, S, N)
ERewards GC for Mother’s day: $25 (May)
My Points reward: $25
Memolink reward: $10 (Feb)
FusionCash: $25 (Feb?)
DBP: $20 (Feb)
BP credit card rewards: $125 minimum (have been getting $25 about every other month)
Target: $60 gift cards in hand. Oddly, we’ve spent nothing at Target this month!
Motley Fool credit card reward: $9 (Jan)
Amazon: $26 (Jan)
Global Test Market surveys: $50 (May?)
Total: $650
I will also work on some additional rewards throughout the year from survey/reward sites, and I will try to sell more at Amazon (listed a dozen books this morning, so we’ll see). On the other hand, I might not be able to get all the test supervising gigs.
January 25th, 2007 - HEL money, update 1
As discussed previously, we’re trying to pay off our home equity loan early. As part of the plan, we reduced our household and grocery budgets. As these have been chronically difficult to keep within budget, I made a concurrent goal of bringing in an additional $50/month to put towards these areas.
Some of the ways we’ll bring in extra money include test supervising, credit card rewards, points/survey rewards, rebates, and who knows what else. I want to keep track of how well I do with this. Here’s my first update.
January [updated again]
Motley Fool credit card reward: $6
Mattel stock dividend: $7.80
BP credit card reward: $25
Amazon Marketplace: $28
Anchor Bank: $40
Total: $104.80
Amazon: I decided to try posting some of the DVDs we’d put aside for charity. I sold 6 of them in 2 days already. The money is being split 25% Eric (their mostly his), 25% me (since I did the work), and 50% house. This is split after Amazon fees (which are frankly, high, but the process is so easy), shipping, and packaging. After selling 5 immediately, I went through the boxes looking for more. Unfortunately, we didn’t have more DVDs, put I tried the CDs. Only 4 or 5 were worth putting up and one sold already! I’m going to go through the books next. [As of Friday afternoon, we’ve sold 7 DVDs and 1 CD.]
Anchor Bank: We got an offer in the mail just after the new year for $50 free if you open a checking account and keep $100 in it for six months. I usually ignore these offers, but it’s actually a good deal. $50 interest on $100 for 6 months? Only $40 is listed above because Eric is getting $10 for doing the work of opening and closing the account. That might seem like a lot, but we aren’t in dire straits and we want to encourage each other to continue to earn extra money this year. There’s a number of free trials I could do…except I hate calling to request account closings. Maybe I should extend this split the money deal to myself as well…. I just wish you could close these things via email or webforms. I just don’t like talking on the phone. But I can do things in person, like return items, which Eric hates doing. He’s better on the phone than I am. (Hmmm, maybe I get him to close them?)
I’m thinking about doing some new credit card offers as well (I’ve read of a few that give $100). Our credit rating is quite high right now, and if we just do one or two it shouldn’t be a problem.
January 2nd, 2007 - House update
Much of the work has been done on the house in the last weeks. Everything’s painted and the windows are in. They came again today (as far as I know) to being working on the front porch. The cool, original (to the porch being build–don’t know when that was) windows are being removed and they are framing in 3 widows per area. Before, it was a big window that foled in three to open. Very cool windows, although awkward. Plus, only the front two were openable. Now, we’ll have 12 windows, all of which can open top or bottom. This will save our screens from the dogs!
I have been nervous about having all our home equity back in hock. So we have committed to paying off the loan ($18000) in three years instead of 6. Aside: My credit union is awesome–they had the best rate anywhere, only 7%, and gave me my choice of terms. I chose 6 because that payment was at the high end of the range I’d been looking for. And for only 6 years instead of the 15 I found elsewhere (at higher interest rates, too). But 6 years was an awfully long time, especially since our first mortgage is an ARM, due to increase in 3.5 years. Our original plan was to use the extra money from refinancing it to an ARM to pay off the original second mortgage, then to use that money to pay down the first mortgage. That got derailed last spring with the house we didn’t buy, and then completely shot with the need for a new HEL. I would love to have the HEL paid off in time to prepare for an increase in the monthly payment on the first mortgage.
We found ways to get an average of $250 extra on the HEL, which puts us neatly at 36 months. Since we’re starting a month late, that might actually be 37 or 38. It includes some from of our Roth IRAs, which saddens me. But I hate the idea of this debt and want to pay it off as soon as we can. Hopefully, I will actually get a semi-decent raise this year and then we can push the IRAs back up. (I recently discovered that I’ve averaged about 1.5% raise per year. That’s not much. And it’d doesn’t account for the increases in health insurance, either.)
Other ways: reduce groceries, household, and personal spending money. [We’d already committed to reductions elsewhere for the original payment.] Pickle jar fund (about $1200 is all; we didn’t put in nearly as much this year). Splitting testing money (I supervise tests like the ACT about 5 times a year; the pay used to be split between us adults for spending money. Now 50% will go towards debt. We still need the spending money portion–it’s not exactly a fun job.). Money from rewards sites will towards household instead of in our pockets (not much currently, but I might do a bit more on this vein). Christmas money goes towards household (we had a giftcard to Target; it was easy to do).
January 26th, 2006 - My personal savings
Also back in March, I wrote about saving half of my personal spending money (with an update a few days later). I decided to save the money and see if I decded on somethhing later in the year. I never did, although I have come up with a dozen things to spend it on, most of which required waiting until the end of the year or even two years to have enough money for it.
I’m proud to say that I saved all of the money, plus at least half of the money I got from test proctoring, except once. At the end of the year, I had $585. One month, I miscalcuated some other personal spending, so I used the month’s savings amount to cover that in order to not be indebted to the house. However, as already noted, I also put in half the money from proctoring, something I wasn’t initially requiring myself to do, which made up for the lapse. (This month, I also spent the money on a discounted outdoor fire pit, something I’d been eyeing for a while. Seeing them on year-end discount, I picked one up. One of my ideas is patio furniture, which I didn’t end up buying because we got two outdoor captain’s chairs and have a card table from the CR-V. The fire pit is a nice addition to this setup.) Actually, that amount doesn’t sound right, I’m missing another month–perhaps I didn’t send December’s portion off to the savings account.
January 26th, 2006 - Pickle jar, part II
Last March, I wrote about my pickle jar savings. By Christmas, the jar wasn’t only about 2/3rds full but was so heavy I worried about it causing stress on the table where it sits. (Michael: It’s the old bedside table/cupboard from childhood. Yes, I’ve had the exact same bedside table all of my life except when I lived at college and in KY. I love it!) So I decided to count the money (something else I’ve loved since childhood. It was always a treat when Dad got out his small change box and I got to count and roll the coins with him!) and put it in a safer place (a giant plastic Eagles coin container that sits on the floor).
Before finding back the first post about the jar, I thought I’d had since before Maggie, but apparently we started it in January, about a year ago. (Initial funding, however, was from a small blue bottle that had been collecting for a while, probably less than $20). Into the jar has gone
* change (from household spending, my personal spending money, and occasionally from Eric)
* rebates (ranging from 99cents to tax filing rebates of $20 or so)
* Discover cash back ($20 about every 6 weeks)
* interest from savings accounts
* change found on the ground
* budget roundings (this one’s hard to explain–I track my budget in Quicken then transfer the amount over/under for the month into a spreadsheet. For the spreadsheet, I round everything. So if we had $42.55 left in an area, it’s written as $42. If we were over $42.55, I wrote down -$43. This small amounts of rounding add up to about $100 each year.)
We had over $800 in the pickle jar!!!!! Since that was all in just one year, we really could save up for an Alaska trip in 10 years! woohoo!!!!
Financial experts say that this method of saving is a bad idea, because you should be discplined and have savings as part of your budget. Depending on the person, however, I believe it can be a good idea. For us it works because I budget every dollar I can. If we didn’t put this money in the pickle jar, it would be budgeted monthly into other categories. I know because (except for the change) we used to budget it. The money went towards the DRiP accounts, the mortgage or other stuff. We simply wouldn’t consciously save $800/year towards a trip to Alaska; it’s too frivolous. But we can save penny by penny by unexpected amount.
January 19th, 2006 - Sahadi: 5 signs you have too much money - Jan. 17, 2006
I was going to say “Some people have to much money” but I realized the real problem is some people just don’t know how to spend their money appropriately. I know, definitions of appropriate vary. But surely spending $38 on a bottle of water is not appropriate. And imagine the good you could do for [insert your favorite charitable organization] with $47,000 instead of a posh bed for a little kid?
December 23rd, 2005 - Savings
Earlier this year, I wrote about saving half of my spending money.I’m happy to say that now that the year is over, I’ve saved $585. I saved over half my monthly spending money every month but one, but also supplemented it with gift or other money (I do some work for the testing center and sometimes spend that money and sometimes save it).
Haven’t decided what to do with it yet (the Dyson and the patio furniture are still on my mind). So I’ve opened another ING Direct savings account and put it there to earn a little interest (currently, over 3%, which is nearly 3x my local credit union).
December 19th, 2005 - Happy dance!
On Saturday, I mailed the check that will pay off our second mortgage–a 15 year mortgage paid in 4.5 years!!! It’s in the budget to be paid off next month, but I realized that if I sent next month’s payments with this month’s principal payment, I wouldn’t have to worry about remembering for taxes the little bit of interest I’d pay. Since we always have a slush amount in our accounts, I could easily pay the amount a few weeks early.
We’ve been paying extra on this from a couple of things. One, I snowballed first my educational loans then when they were paid off (18 months ago I think), that money went to the mortgage. Our tax refund last year went to it. And the amount we didn’t have to pay anymore in taxes due to having a child also went towards it! And next, it will be snowballed into paying off the primary mortgage. Woohoo! I think we can pay it off in another 10 years (10’s a lot, but that’s 15 years early!).
We now feel like we actually have equity in our house!!! It’s not a lot of equity, but with the recent reassessment, it might actually be approaching $20,000. (if someone would actually pay what the city thinks it’s worth. If not, we might have maybe $15,000. Which is still a nice number when a year ago we had about $5000!)
(Happy dance is what we do on my Motley Fool message boards whenever someone pays off a debt, or does something else equally happy and exciting.)
December 6th, 2005 - Property taxes
Saturday morning, our newspaper said that most city tax bills would come in the mail that day. I bet I was the only person who was excited by this news! See, over the past two years, the city has been doing reassessments. Most homeowners are not terribly happy about this because it happens only once every 10 years. Some people saw their assessed values triple. Ours went up 30%. (A small handful of folks did see theirs decrease, as well.) This has been well covered in the papers, particularly folks complaining about how unfair it was.
I sat back peacefully. When we bought the house 5 years ago, I knew we had paid $30,000 more than the assessed value. Not knowing how reassessments were done, I figured that we’d be reassessed shortly and immediately began saving extra money towards the property taxes. Until last year, I didn’t know that they are done only every 10 years. I’ve been anticipating the reassessed value (finally arrived during the summer, a year after the assessor came) and then the new tax bill to see what the impact would be. I was delighted to learn that we have continued to save plenty, and have saved $120 extra this year.
I will continue to save extra each year–it’s much easier than getting a tax bill that’s higher than what you’ve saved. So far, we’ve upped the savings 10% a year. I will continue to do so for the next 10 years so that I will again be happy to get my tax bill!
(We do not escrow our taxes with our mortgage company. I have no need to let someone else earn the interest on my money. In addition, if they fail to pay the bill properly, they are not penalized–I am. We self-escrow by saving every month. In some states, you do earn the interest on your money, but it’s surely below market rate. In WI, interest is not earned but luckily the law is that they cannot require you to escrow. It is completely up to the homeowner, thankfully for us!)
November 23rd, 2005 - But Nothing Day
Even if you can’t participate in Buy Nothing Christmas, don’t forget to observe Buy Nothing Day the day after Thanksgiving.