- @fcn Yahoo Pipes into GReader. 50 news sites filtered to max 50 items/day–all on topic. in reply to fcn #
- @fcn You can filter on keywords, so only the topics you care about come through. in reply to fcn #
- It's a sad day when you find out that your 3 year old can access anything in the house. Sadder when she maces herself with hairspray. #
- 5 sets of 15 pushups to start my day. Only 85 to go! Last 5 weren't as good as first 5. #30DayProject #
- What happens to your leftover money in your flex-spending account? http://su.pr/9xDs6q #
- Enter to Win iPod Touch from @DoughRoller http://tinyurl.com/y8rpyns #DRiPodTouch #
- Arrrgh! 3 year old covered in nail polish. And clothes. And carpet. And sister. #
- Crap. 5 sets of 5 pushups. #30dayproject #
- Woo! My son just got his first pin in a wrestling meet! #
- RT @Doughroller: Check out this site that gives your free credit report AND score without asking for a cc# or social… http://bit.ly/bRhlMz #
- Breaking news! Penicillin cures syphilis, not debt. https://liverealnow.net/KIzE #
- Win a $25 Amazon GC via @suburbandollar RT + Fllw to enter #sd1Yrgvwy Rules -> http://bit.ly/sd1Yrgvwy2 #
- This won't be coming to our house. RT @FMFblog: Wow! Check out the new Monopoly: http://tinyurl.com/ygf2say #
- @ChristianPF is giving away a Flip UltraHD Camcorder – RT to enter to win… http://su.pr/2ZvBZL #
Free Tivo
- Image by Marcin Wichary via Flickr
TV is causing problems in my life.
We watch too much TV. Often, we’re only watching because there’s a crappy show in between two shows we do want to watch. In the winter–during the new seasons–my son has wrestling practice 4 or 5 nights per week, which means I miss the new shows I like. We recently downgraded our service provider, so there’s no functional guide button in the house.
That all makes me sad.
Then I found out that Tivo’s lifetime service is attached to the unit. If you sell a unit with lifetime service, you can transfer the service to the buyer. You can’t, however, transfer the service to a new box. That means that everyone who upgrades and sells their old box is selling the lifetime service with it. If you don’t mind having older equipment, you can pick up a used box with full lifetime service for less than the cost of a new box.
After reading Erica’s method of finding 750 extra hours per year, we decided to give it a shot. We are taking back control of our TV. No more rushing home to catch a new episode. No more mindlessly channel-surfing to kill time between good shows. No more commercials. And a guide! I like having a guide button.
I started shopping. My goal was to get a Series 2 Tivo with full lifetime service for about $100 before shipping. I came close a few times, but always lost the auction, in the end. I wasn’t in a hurry, and I didn’t actually have the money budgeted, so it was good to lose.
Then, a friend found himself in a situation that didn’t work with a Tivo and decided to sell his heavily upgraded, heavily accessorized Tivo HD for $100 + shipping. A quick call to my wife resulted in just one objection: Where were we getting the money? We don’t have an opportunity fund, yet and I needed to take advantage of this quick if we were going to get it.
I decided to make it free.
When I automated all of our bills, I rounded up. If a bill was for $63.50, I paid $64. If a bill wasn’t exactly consistent, I paid enough to cover the higher amount. For example, I didn’t have a text messaging plan on my cell phone until December. Before that, I’d get about a dozen texts each month, so I budgeted for paying for the texts. If I didn’t get the texts, I’d get a credit on my bill. I never lowered the automated payment. All of my bills were set up like that. My insurance company dropped my rates, but I left the payment alone. I slowly started accumulating a credit on a number of bills. My intention was to skip a month when the billed amount got to $0, and apply the money to debt. It was just a mind-game to play with myself to make the debt easier to pay.
I flipped through the bills, looking at the credits. I adjusted the payments to match the bills this month and found more than enough to buy the Tivo. This is a purchase that doesn’t influence my budget in any way. Almost. This unit doesn’t have lifetime service, so I will be paying for the monthly fee, but that’s been more than balanced out by reducing our television service.
This is a recently-high-end model for free, as far as my budget is concerned. I used money that wasn’t even on the table before I went looking for it. It’s like searching the couch cushions for money to catch a movie.
Now, I’ll have control of my TV–with a strong measure of convenience to boot–for $13 per month. The time savings is yet-to-be-determined.
A free Tivo simply because I rounded my bills up when I automated last year. That’s a pain-free opportunity fund.
Update: After I wrote this, I found out that I dropped the ball in budgeting for child-care now that summer is here and my oldest won’t be in school. These costs are going up $350 per month. I spent an hour scavenging the couch cushions of my budget this week. I had to adjust some savings and repayment goals, but I’ve effectively paid for a summer worth of care for my boy the same way. Free.
Saturday Roundup
I’ve spend the last 10 days at home with my two youngest kids. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s amazing watching them interact with each other and seeing how their imaginations works. It’s also been a helpful reminder that, if I don’t turn on the TV, they will happily find something else to do.
30 Day Project Update
This month, I am trying to establish the Slow Carb Diet as a habit. At the end of the month, I’ll see what the results were and decide if it’s worth continuing. For those who don’t know, the Slow Carb Diet involves cutting out potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, and dairy in all their forms. My meals consist of 40% proteins, 30% vegetables, and 30% legumes(beans or lentils). There is no calorie counting, just some specific rules, accompanied by a timed supplement regimen and some timed exercises to manipulate my metabolism. The supplements are NOT effedrin-based diet pills, or, in fact, uppers of any kind. There is also a weekly cheat day, to cut the impulse to cheat and to avoid letting my body go into famine mode.
I’m measuring two metrics, my weight and the total inches of my belly, waist, biceps, and thighs. Between the two, I should have an accurate assessment of my progress.
Weight: I have lost 11 pounds since January 2nd. This is crazy. At least part of this has to be due to the natural swing of up to 5 pounds from day to day, and part of it is due to the fact that I was wearing jeans when I weighed in the first time and cotton pajamas this morning. From now on, this is going to be the first thing I do on Saturday mornings, so everything is as consistent as possible. Another factor is that I’ve cut most of the crap out of my diet for a week. My body has been flushing garbage. But dang! 11 pounds in a week. I’m a bit excited.
Total Inches: I have lost 5.5 inches in the same time frame. This is proof that it’s not just water that I lost, which is where first, dramatic losses usually originate in a diet.
The loss seems a little bit nuts. Here’s hoping it stays consistent.
Best Posts
Your retirement account shouldn’t be an optional investment. Do you know how to maximize retirement savings?
I’m a big fan of making extra money. Money Crashers lists 6 sites to help you rake in the cash, without needing any special skills.
Unclutterer is giving away three Fujitsu Scansnaps. I want one of these is a way that isn’t quite right.
I’ve been moving to LED lights instead of CFLs for a few years. CFLs make lousy security lights in Minnesota in the winter. They take 5 minutes to get to full brightness when it’s cold. LEDs last forever.
LRN Timewarp
This is where I review the posts I wrote one year ago.
I posted about the difference between bribes and rewards and the problems inherent in trying to buy good behavior.
Lesson 2 of my budget series went live, detailing my monthly bills.
We made some changes to our budget plans that haven’t worked very well. Over the course of the last year, every one of these ideas has either been partially or totally abandoned, but it’s working for us.
Carnivals I’ve Rocked
How to Complain – The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.
3 Things You Need to Know About Homeowner’s Insurance was included in the Festival of Frugality.
Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.
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That’s all for today. Have a great weekend!
Debt Burnout
You’ve got a budget. You’ve got a debt repayment plan. You’ve been paying off your debt. You’ve even paid off a few of your smaller debts. Now you’re staring down the barrel of your big debts: your mortgage, a $30,000 credit card, maybe a car payment. You’re looking at months of payments with no quick wins; no more watching your debts die every few months. You’re in the middle of a very long slog.
All of the easy milestones have been reached and the next one is a year or more away. This is when debt repayment gets hard. How can you avoid getting burnt out doing the same thing, month after month, with no major visible progress?
1. Keep your eye on the prize. Try focusing on the end result, while ignoring the time it takes to get there. Do you have a reward planned for when you pay off your debt? If not, consider that to be your new shining goal-post. My wife and I plan on taking an Alaskan cruise when our debt is repaid.
2. Ignore the prize. If #1 doesn’t work for you, try focusing on just the current month’s progress. How much did you pay off this month? Was it more than last month?
3. Make micro-goals. Try breaking the long slog into bite-sized pieces. How fast can you pay off the next $1000? How many months will it take to pay off that TV you bought last year? Sometimes, meeting a smaller goal can make the whole works feel like it’s going by faster.
4. Take a snowball vacation. For just one month, take every dollar you would normally apply to your debt–except your required payments–and have some fun with it. Take a weekend trip, have a fancy dinner, or pick up that video game system you’ve been eying. Something. Anything to take your mind off of your repayment plan for a while. Be careful not to make this a habit or you will never get out of debt.
5. Start a blog to share your pain.
A debt snowball is a long, intense process. If you’re not careful, you can burn out and let the whole thing collapse. How do you avoid burnout?
Brown Bagging Your Way to Savings
Today’s post is written by Mike Collins of http://savingmoneytoday.net as part of the Yakezie Blog Swap in which bloggers were asked to share their best day to day money saving tip.
Do you buy lunch at work every day? Have you ever actually sat down and added up how much money you’re spending?
I did once…and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw how much I was spending!
Back in the day I used to buy lunch at the office almost every single day. It certainly didn’t seem like I was spending much. A chef salad here, a cheese steak and fries there. But every day I was spending about 7 dollars and change. That’s $35 a week, which adds up to a whopping $1820 over the course of a year!
I started thinking about all the things I could do with that extra $1820, like paying off some of our debt, increasing my 401k contributions(ed: but staying with your 401k contribution limits, of course!), picking out a new big-screen tv, or enjoying an extended family vacation at Walley World.
I immediately starting bringing my lunch to work 4 days a week (I do treat myself once a week) and I’ve been saving money ever since.
Now I know what you’re thinking. It costs money to bring lunch from home too right?
Yes, of course it does…but nowhere near as much as eating out every day. Let’s do some basic math to prove the point. Say you swing by the grocery store to buy some ham and cheese so you can make sandwiches for the week. You pick up a half pound of ham for $3 and a half pound of cheese for $2. A loaf of bread on sale runs you another $2. That means you just spent $7 for a week’s worth of lunches. Even if you only bring lunch 4 days a week you’ve still saved yourself $21. That’s over $1000 a year!
And here’s a tip to save even more: If you have extra food from dinner, just bring the leftovers for lunch the next day. We always try to make just a little bit extra so I can have free lunch the next day.
So the next time you’re sitting around complaining that you don’t have enough money for so and so, think about how much money you are spending every day on lunch, or coffee, or cigarettes, etc. You might just find that you have plenty of money after all if you just shift your priorities a bit.
5 Reasons Your Wealth Isn’t Growing
Wealth is an elusive goal for many people. Everybody wants it, but for many, it’s impossible to reach. Every time they get a bit ahead, something always seems to come up, forcing them to live paycheck-to-paycheck.
What’s happening? Why can’t you gather enough wealth to know where next month’s rent payment is coming from?
1. You spend more than you earn. This is the mystical and magical Golden Rule of personal finance. Every system, every plan, every gimmick boils down to this. If you spend more than you earn, you are digging a hole that keeps getting harder to get out of. Don’t do it. The amount you earn needs to be bigger than the amount you spend.
2. You aren’t investing. If you invest $200 per month at 5% in your 20s, then stop and let interest do the rest,you’ll have as much after 30 years than if you started at 30 and continues to invest every month. Compound interest is very much your friend. The earlier you can start investing, the better.
3. You are investing in the wrong things. Some things are bad investments. Uncle Bob’s annual get-rich-quick scheme is going to be a bad idea every year. That’s not an investment, it’s pity. Another example is gold. Over the last year or so, that seems like a stupid thing to say, but it’s true long-term. Gold isn’t an investment, it’s an inflation hedge. Generally speaking, a given amount of gold represents the same amount of purchasing power all through time. To put it in simpler terms: 100 years ago, an ounce of gold could get you a nice suit and a good dinner. Today, that’s still true.
4. You aren’t saving. If you are spending less than you earn, what are you doing with the excess? Hopefully, you’re investing it, but keeping a stock of cash is a zero-risk savings account is a smart plan. It’s been said that when you don’t have an emergency fund, everything is an emergency. Have a cash reserve gives you the ability to not only deal with all of life’s little kicks to the crotch, but also lets you take advantage of the opportunities that may cross your path. A coworker needs to unload that big screen TV for 10% of what she bought it for? On it. Find a great deal on airfare to your dream destination? Bon voyage. Savings means security and opportunity.
5. You keep your debt. Debt is the biggest drain on wealth. Every penny you have to spend to service your debt(interest) is a penny you can’t save, invest, or otherwise enjoy. Carrying a balance is a fast way to immediately raise the price of everything you purchase, by 5%, 10%, or more. Debt and interest will hold you back financially like nothing else.
When you’ve been able to acquire a bit of wealth, you are better able to weather life’s bumps, dips, and face-flung poo. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of knowing that, no matter what happens, you aren’t going to struggle financially.
