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Don’t Screw Future-You

Finance, Life

A conversation between me and my temporally displaced self.

Future Me: Excuse me, Jason?

Me: Yes?

FMe: <Slap!>

Me: May I ask what that was for?

FMe: Of course.

Me: What was that for, jerk?

FMe: That was payback for all of the hell you have put me through.

Me: What?!? I’ve never even met you, before.

FMe: Of course you have. I am future-you, and I’m sick of getting screwed by past-me, that is, you.

Me: Huh?

FMe: Listen close. You’re not the sharpest brick in the box and I don’t want to explain this twice.

Me: ???

FMe: A long time ago, when you first met our wife, you were dumb.

Me: I don’t appreciate….

FMe: Shut up. I was dumb then, too. Remember? You…err…we bought a new truck, built an addition on our…err…your…err…whomever’s house, got married in the same year. On top of many other expensive decisions. Do your recall?

Me: Yes, I do. So what?

FMe: If that wasn’t enough, you and your smoking-hot bride are still shopping like you’re rich. You drive a new car. Your kids wear new clothes. You’ve got a house full of new furniture. How did you pay for all of that?

Me: Naturally, I charged it. Zero payments, zero interest for a year! Pretty smart, huh?

FMe: What happens in a year?

Me: I don’t know. I’ve got a full year to figure that out.

FMe: <Slap!> I’ll tell you what happens! Future-you, that’s me, gets screwed! Your raise didn’t come through. You had a baby. The truck broke down. Your wife took maternity leave. A roommate moved out. You took a loss in the stock market. You didn’t plan! You had no savings to cover any of those problems because you were too busy servicing debt to pay for your current life.

Me: How was I to know?

FMe: <Slap!> Life happens! You never know what is coming next. You need to plan and save for what might happen. Otherwise, you’ll just accumulate more debt to be serviced by yours-truly. That is not acceptable.

Me: So? What are you going to do about it?

FMe: <Slap!>

Me: Really? Again?

FMe: <Slap!> I’m struggling to pay your debt. Your son starts college next year, but you’ve left me completely unable to help. Your daughter wants to get married in a couple of years, but the Father-of-the-Bride can’t afford a tux. My wife, your beatiful bride, wants a vacation that I can’t afford. You’ve screwed me, dude.

Me: I’m sorry. What can I do to fix it?

FMe: Buy me dinner, first.

Me: Huh?!?!?

FMe: Stop the excess spending. Spend less than you make, for a change. No credit.

Me: None?

FMe: None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Only spend what you can afford. Budget. Pay off those nasty bills. Don’t leave me hanging.

Me: So, what you’re saying is that, if I don’t have the money, I shouldn’t buy it?

FMe: Exactly. That’s the path to wealth, freedom, and financial independence. Live in the real world.

Me: Gee, thanks, Future-Me! Now I know.

FMe: And knowing is half the battle.

What would your future-you have to say to you?

6 Questions to Financially Get to Know Each Other

Finance

This topic has been blatantly stolen from Budgets are Sexy.

1) How do you spend: cash, debit or credit? I use cash almost exclusively. I live in Minnesota and have two small children, so bundling the brats up to go inside the gas station to pay is nuts. Gas stations get the debit card. Online shopping, or automatic payments set up in the payee’s system are done on a credit card that gets paid off every month.

[ad name=”inlineright”]2) Do you bank online? How about use a financial aggregator (Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee, etc.)? I bank online. I use USBank for my daily cash flow, INGDirect for savings management and Wells Fargo for business. I used Mint strictly as a net worth calculator and alerting system. I use Quicken to manage my money and a spreadsheet for my budget, but I really like the quick, hands-off way that Mint gathers my account information and emails low balance alerts.

3) What recurring bills do you have set on autopay? Absolutely everything except daycare, 2 annual payments, and 1 quarterly payment.

4) How are your finances automated? I use USBank’s billpay system, instead of setting up autopayments at every possible payee. This gives me instant total control and reminders before each payment. The exceptions are my mortgage, netflix, and Dish. My mortgage company takes the money automatically from my checking. The other two hit a credit card automatically. Our paychecks are direct-deposited and automatically transferred to the different accounts and banks, as necessary.

5) Do you write checks? If so, how often? Once per week, for daycare. Occasionally for school fundraisers.

6) Where do you stash your short-term savings? I have quite a few savings accounts with INGDirect to meet all of my savings goals. For the truly short term, I add a line item in Quicken and just leave the money in my checking account.

Who’s next?

Make Extra Money, Part 6.5: Why I Do It The Way I Do It

Business, Finance

This is a follow-up to part 6 of the niche site walkthrough, Setting Up a Niche Site. If you haven’t read that post, this one won’t mean much. Go ahead. Read it. I’ll wait.

Several people have asked me to explain why I use the plugins and settings I use. In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to explain every choice I recommended last time.

WordPress

WordPress is a site development dream. With the right themes and plugins, you can literally make a WordPress site look, feel, and behave in any way you wish. Even without digging too deep into plugins and premium themes like Headway, you can put together a niche site blog in very little time and know that it’s happening on a robust platform that is actively being improved.

Configuring WordPress

Updates

Keeping your site updated is the single most important thing you can do to avoid getting hacked. Since I haven’t yet figured out how to make hacking a terminal disease, I do the best I can to avoid letting them cause problems. Keeping your site updated is the condom of WordPress.

WWW

This is entirely a personal preference, but, after 20 years of reinforcing habits, most people type “www” by default. WordPress will automatically forward visitors correctly, so this isn’t actually a necessity.

The “Misc” Category

I don’t spend much time worrying about categories when I post, and sometimes I experiment with using external software to post from pools of articles, so I set up a default category. “Misc” is much nicer to see than “Uncategorized”, even if they mean the same thing.

Theme Selection

I like SimpleX because it is uncluttered and easy to navigate. It’s hardly the most powerful theme out there, but it doesn’t pretend to be. If I want more, I use Headway.

Plugins

Plugin Central

Plugin Central is just a plugin installer that lets you install and activate many plugins at once. Even knowing exactly what plugins you want, this easily saves half an hour of setup time.

All in One SEO Pack

SEO is important. In fact, it’s what I base my niche site traffic on. All in One SEO makes it easy to manage the SEO titles that search engines see and the meta descriptions that search engine’s display to visitors when they see your site after a search. Some themes do this themselves, but I still use this plugin.

Meta keywords are all but useless, but not entirely. Google and Bing don’t care, but some networking and sharing sites do.

I “noindex” the tag archives because I don’t want the search engines finding each page twice. Identical pages with different addresses will register as two pages with Google. How does it know which one I consider most important? It doesn’t, so I don’t give it the option of indexing my tag archives.

Contact Form 7

This is just a free and easy contact form. I haven’t found anything better for the price.

WordPress Database Backup

Backups are important. Always back up your data. Do you want to spend 3 weeks building a site, just to have your server crash, killing everything? 5 minutes now will save hours or days of headache later.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

When someone comes to your site from a search engine, this plugin takes the term they searched for and appends it in a list at the end of the post the visitor found. This reinforces your site as a good result for that search term. It also provides a handy list of the most popular search terms people use to find your site.

Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress

I hate spam. If Akismet finds a spam comment being posted, this plugin will give the user a change to enter a CAPTCHA code to post the comment. Even if I turn off comments on a site, I keep this installed in case I ever change my mind. Real comments are good for SEO, so I occasionally test allowing the comments. I won’t waste the time moderating comments on a niche site, so this is a good compromise.

Date Exclusion SEO

If someone comes to a site and sees the last post was two years ago, they’ll leave. I don’t want a post to look like it’s outdated, so I suppress the dates.

Pretty Link Lite

This plugin lets me mask a link and set it to nofollow. Nofollow tells the search engines to discount the value of the link, which removes a spam-site indicator from their algorithms. Masking the link turns a messy affiliate link into a link that looks internal, making it easier for a visitor to click and allowing you to see how often a link is clicked.

Google XML Sitemaps

Making it easy for Google to find your entire site is a good thing. This plugin helps with that.

WP Policies

This plugin provides a long list of site policies, formatted for a WordPress page. The most important one is the disclaimer announcing the fact that your are making money on your site.

WP Super Cache

Super Cache creates a pre-generated copy of your page so the site doesn’t have to hit the database to rebuild it dynamically every time someone visits. It’s all about speed, which affects your search rank.

JetPack

I like using the WordPress.com stats instead of Google Analytics for most of my niche site. I don’t see a need to announce to Google that these 12 sites are owned by me, so I don’t. WordPress.com included their stats plugin in JetPack, then discontinued the standalone plugin, so I use JetPack.

Backup

If I subscribe to my own feed, I get every post in Google Reader. That means I don’t need to make a daily backup of any of my sites. For the amount of changes I make to my niche sites, weekly might still be overkill, but that’s what I do. I get the backups by email so I have a copy somewhere other than the host. I don’t believe in letting anyone control my money but me.

Settings

Discussion

Most comments to niche sites are spam comments, so I hide them without actually turning them off. Sometimes I test letting the comments through, because some niches might have great people that want to post good comments. I haven’t had a lot of luck with that, on my niche sites.

Permalinks

The default permalink structure is absolutely not recommended for search engine purposes. It’s also harder for someone to mention. I don’t put dates in the link for the same reason I hide dates in the posts: I don’t want anything to look outdated.

Menus

I keep the navigation menu simple. It has three purposes:

Link to the page that’s designed to make money.
Link to the pages that show Google and readers it is an active site.
Link to the disclaimer that keeps my butt away from federal fines.

Anything else is wasted space.

Widgets

On my niche sites, I use widgets to help with navigation and to point people to the pages that will make the most money. I haven’t addressed how I do the second part yet, because I haven’t created those pages yet.

Posts

Right now, http://www.masterweddingplanning.net/ has exactly one post, and it’s a duplicated post from eZineArticles. It has served its purpose. This site is fully indexed by Google.

When I get the rest of the content written, I’ll delete that post.

There you have it, the reasons behind every choice I make during site creation. Did I miss anything? Do you have any other questions?

Don’t Be A Dick

Life

White chocolate is marketed by confectioners a... — Image via Wikipedia

Integrity is what you do when nobody is looking.

Do you cheat at solitaire, steal from an untended garage sale, or keep something a store forgets to charge you for? If so, integrity may not be your strongest trait.

Similarly, if you let the actions of others dictate your behavior, you may be integrity impaired.

If you get cut off in traffic, do suddenly feel justified in cutting off the next guy?

If you have a dollar stolen from your desk, does that make it okay to take a candy bar from the honor-system candy box?

If the last guy left the water cooler empty, are you going to refuse to refill it the next time you are the one to drink the last drop?

If you’re answering yes to these questions, it may be time to examine your moral code. Doing the right thing means doing the right thing all of the time. You can’t be an honorable person if you resort to dishonorable behavior whenever you dislike what someone else does, especially if your actions are hurting an entirely uninvolved 3rd party.

You know the proper behavior. You know what the ethical choice is. The fact that someone else made an unethical choice doesn’t give you a license to be a dick.

If it’s your turn to clean the community refrigerator, do it and do it well, even if the last guy did a poor job.

If the last mom driving the car pool showed up late, don’t deliberately forget her kid.

If someone forgot to pay at a group lunch and you covered it, that doesn’t mean you can skip out on the bill next time.

Even if everything else is taken from you, no one can ever steal your ethics, your integrity, or your honor. Those things are up to you to destroy, and they nearly impossible to replace.

In all cases, in all things, do the right thing. You won’t be sorry.

Resurrected from the archives.

Building 5 Bad Habits

Finance

Meth powder hexagon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Good habits are boring. I mean, yes, they will help you succeed and provide some security, but so what? Bad habits are fun. Except meth. Meth is a bad habit that is decidedly not fun. Don’t do meth. Seriously.

There are so many entertaining bad habits that I couldn’t possibly cover them all. I’m going to stick to the bad financial habits that will make your life more exciting.

Break your budget. A budget constrains you, keeps you from buying the things you want and traveling to distant, exotic places when you know you can’t afford the trip. The best way to build this habit is to not only avoid tracking your expenses, but also avoid tracking what you actually spend. If you don’t know what you owe or what you’ve spent, the end of every month is an adventure!
Impulse shopping. For the next week, I want you to go to your favorite store every day. Buy the first thing you see that makes you want to hum. Every day. Don’t worry about being able to afford it. That’s what credit is for, right? Bonus points for buying it on the “no interest for a year, then we screw you” plan. I’m sure you’ll be making more money by the time the bill is due. You could get lucky and have a rich relative die and leave you a fortune. That’s like winning the lottery twice, because you won’t have to buy him Christmas cards anymore.
Meals on the go. Cooking is a drag. Besides, who wants to slap a slice of meat and cheese on a couple slices of bread, when you can get a drive-through case of the Aztec two-step for $5. Did you know that the big yellow ‘M’ stands for “Montezuma?” On your way to practice impulse shopping, pick up some lunch. For your money, you’ll get less convenience, more additives, and the opportunity to gamble on the lunch employees caring as much about cleanliness as you do. It’s a win for everyone!
Ego shopping. Actual accomplishments and improvement are hard. It’s much better to wrap up your sense of self-worth in the smartest phone, the shiniest car, or the Gucciest purse. Allowing Mastercard to finance your self-esteem guarantees that your next smile is just a shopping trip away. Who needs the hassle of dealing with things that matter? After your impulse purchase, buy something fancy! Show your friends that you are not only a more discerning consumer, but also that you are better than they are. Watch them turn green with envy. When they shrug and tell your that their phone has the one feature they need–the ability to ring when called–know that it is envy speaking.
Expensive Vacations. You need to relax. I know how hard it is lugging that iBlackPhoneP(a/o)doid in and out of the designer sportscar with all-leather cow interior and big, brown baby seal-eyes for headlights. It’s work. Back and forth buying crap you don’t need to fuel your ego, dodging vicious calls from creditors and having to Dine-N-Dash every time a friend invites you out for dinner makes a dude tired. Take a week in Europe to calm your thoughts. You deserve it, even if you don’t actually have the money for it. Isn’t Great-Uncle Horace sick?

What are your favorite bad habits?

Update: This post has been included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

10 Tips to Help Parents Stay Out of Debt

Finance, Parenting

People say that when you have a baby, your world gets flipped upside down. That’s not true. Your world gets dropped in a martini shaker and left to the whims of a sadistic bartender with a shaking fetish. Everything changes. That sounds like an exaggeration and nobody believes it until it happens, but it’s true.

When you find out you are about to reproduce, you will experience a phenomenon called “nesting”. Nesting is the idea that, if you take your credit cards and beat them against the curb until they bleed and VISA calls you asking for mercy, you will be transformed into the best parent ever, regardless of what you may actually screw up. It’s the way parents calm their fears by spending money, often on things that aren’t needed.

Q. How do you avoid becoming a debt-ridden, worried mess of an over-protective, over-extended new parent?

A. What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros?

I can’t help with the rest, but here’s 10 ways you can avoid the debt problems.

Have a budget. I may have said this before. It’s possible this counts as a recurring theme here. If you don’t have a budget, you aren’t in control of your money. If you aren’t in control, then how do you know where it has gone or where it is supposed to go?
Budget for baby crap. This will be a recurring expense for years, so get used to it. A friend of mine is on the cusp of having everyone out of diapers for the first time since 1993. Do you think they plan that expense? Diapers.com has $10 off and free shipping on orders over $49. Use code “ LiveReal” during checkout.
Double the number you have in #2. Seriously. It will cost you more than you think, but it doesn’t have to cost you as much as you fear. It’s far better to have too much budgeted and find yourself with extra money than it is to budget too little and be forced to make up the difference at the feet of Master Card.
Only take the advice of people you know and trust. Every random jerkface on the street has (usually) well-intentioned advice for new and expecting parents. Ignore them all. If they aren’t your doctor, your mother(assuming she did her job right), or friends with children, they are clueless and their advice should be immediately round-filed. Ditto for parenting magazines. The writers don’t know better than you do. Read the magazines for six months and watch for conflicting advice, not only in the same magazine, but often from the same writer! Don’t add the stress of bad advice from strangers to what is already a stressful time.
Don’t get every gadget designed to cushion the baby. A wipe warmer is a waste of money. Do you want your baby to be scared of a little chill forever? Cold wipes build character. If that isn’t good enough, hold the wipe in your hand for a few seconds before using it. There are a million other gadgets to keep your little one from ever feeling a moment of discomfort. Don’t waste your cash. It may only be 10 pounds, but it’s tougher than you think.
Don’t get every gadget designed to cushion the parent. They make ergonomic bottles, braces to hold your arms in the right position to feed, fancy cloths to catch baby vomit. Tough it up. Support your baby yourself. Build some muscle and some character. Use cloth diapers to catch various treasures your little brat will spit up on you. Spending more doesn’t always make it better. The ergonomic bottles that make it easier to feed a baby, make it harder for the baby to hold the bottle. This is actually making your life more difficult.
Focus on the necessities. Yes, the fancy formula with the pre-digested proteins has a nicer label. It doesn’t make a difference. The generic brand at the warehouse store usually has the exact same ingredients in the exact same ratios as the brand name at the baby store–for half the price. There is nothing special about the blankets in the baby section–except the price. The fancy bottle warmer doesn’t do anything that a cup of warm water on the counter won’t handle. You need: A crib, unless you are doing a family bed; a easy-to-clean mat to change diapers(on the floor works!); and a diaper bag(back-to-school backpacks are more ergonomic and easy to organize than anything in the baby store!). Everything else is a luxury.
Time counts more than stuff. No matter what else you hear, no matter how old your child gets, time with you counts more than anything else you could do or buy. Be there for your kids and the rest is gravy.
Brand-name and designer labels are not status symbols. The opinions of the other soccer mommies do not matter. The opinions of the random jerkfaces on the street do not matter. Designer labels do not make you a better parent and are not an indicator of a happy baby.
Always remember: Babies bounce and have short memories. While I don’t recommend bouncing your baby on the floor, they are surprisingly resilient. They don’t hold grudges, either. There is room to make mistakes without screwing up your kid.

For a hundred thousand years, people raised babies with nothing more than a scrap of hide to alternately chew on or wipe with. You can probably get buy with just a bit more. Relax and enjoy the process of raising your kids. Money doesn’t matter nearly as much as your presence.