Please email me at:
![Jason [at] LiveRealNow [dot] net](https://liverealnow.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/email.jpg "Jason [at] LiveRealNow [dot] net"){kind=small}
Or use the form below.
[contact-form 1 “Contact form 1”]
The Things That Bring You Here
I’ve been walking though my analytics data. That is the Big Brother software I use to know everything about each one of my dear readers. It’s all part of my master plan to rule the world. Muwahaha!
Some of the results are interesting.
The single most-used search term to find this site is “slow carb diet“, which is great, because I really enjoyed writing that post. I’ve been slacking on the diet lately, but I’m still down more than 30 pounds. I’m currently ranked #3 in Google for this term. If I move up 2 more spots, I’ll outrank Tim Ferriss for his own product. If I aggregated all of the “slow carb” variations, this post probably accounts for more than half of my traffic from Google.
Many of you come here by searching for “how to have a perfect life“. I’ll do everything I can to help you achieve that, but it’s going to take work on your part. There are no shortcuts.
“Beat the Check” is another popular search term, but a very bad game to play. It’s almost impossible to win it, since the Check 21 Act of 2004.
It’s interesting that “trained husband” brings a few of you each month. My question: are you shopping, or exploring a new fetish? Don’t be shy.
I’m a bit amazed that “zombie wheels” is something people actually search for, but 140 people hit Google looking for that term every month, and a few of them make it over here.
“How to stretch a meal“, “things you should buy online“, and “unsecured loan advice” are some of the top personal finance terms bringing you all in, though “how to make a bunker” and its variation are popular, too.
“Hoe can you force your wife” is a bit disturbing. Most of the results are naturally for sex. I can’t help but hope that I’ve either really disappointed this visitor, or convinced him that force is a bad idea.
“How much did a pound of gold weigh in 1854?” is a search that makes me giggle. To the best of my knowledge, the troy scale has been used to weigh gold for a lot longer than that.
That was a fun little stroll through my statistics. Hopefully the fact that I used “fetish” and “sex” in a post will draw more crazy search terms.
How did you find me? Inquiring minds want to know, so please tell me in the comments.
5 Pain-Free Ways to Save Your Money
Everyone needs an emergency fund. More than that, you will eventually need retirement savings, a new car, a big-screen TV, or maybe just a new kidney. Whatever the reason, one day, have a comfortable savings account will make your life easier.
But, Jason, you say, it’s hard to save money! How can I start saving when I can’t make ends meet? I’ve got rent, 9 kids, and a DVD addiction that won’t quit. My mortgage is underwater, my Mercedes still has 8 years on the loan, and the Shoe-of-the-Month Club only carries Christian Louboutin’s. What can I do?
Well, I’ll reply, since I am Jason and you asked for me by name, you need to find a way to make it happen. I’d never recommend someone give up their diamond-studded kicks, but something’s gotta give. In the meantime, there are some ways you can save money without feeling the sting of delayed gratification.
1. Save your raise. When you get your next raise, pretend you didn’t. Set up an automatic transfer to stick that new 5% straight into a savings account. Don’t give yourself an opportunity to spend it.
2. Find it, hide it. When your Aunt Gertrude dies and leaves your her extensive collection of California Raisins figurines, sell them and save the money. If you find a $20 bill on the ground, throw it right into your savings account. When your 30th lottery ticket of the week gives you a $10 prize, save it! Don’t waste found money on luxuries. Use it to build your future.
3. Let it lapse. Do you have magazine subscriptions you never read? Or a gym membership you haven’t used since last winter? Panty-of-the-Month? Crack dealer who delivers? Stop paying them! Let those wasted services fall to the wayside and put the money to better use. I don’t mean flipping QVC products on eBay, either. Save the money.
4. Jar of 1s. Roughly once a week, I dig through my pockets and my money clip looking for one dollar bills. Any that I find go in a box to be forgotten. I use that box as walking-around money for our annual vacation, but it could easily get repurposed as a temporary holding tank for money I haven’t gotten to the bank, yet.
5. Round it up. Do you balance your checkbook? If you don’t, start. If you do, start doing it wrong. Round up all of your entries to the nearest dollar. $1.10 gets recorded as $2. $25.75 goes in as $26. If you use your checkbook or debit card 100 times a month, that’s going to be close to $75 saved with absolutely no effort. It even makes recording your spending easier.
There you have it, 5 easy ways to save money that won’t cause you a moment’s pain.
Do you have any tricks to help you save money?
Fixing Your Credit Report
Sometimes, negative things appear on your credit report. Usually, they do a good job of maintaining
Credit card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)accuracy, but mistakes do happen. The creditor or the reporting agency may screw up, or you may have your identity stolen. If either of these situations are true, you’ll want to correct your credit report, making yourself eligible for lower rates on future credit and, occasionally, lowering the cost of things like auto insurance.
If you throw “credit repair” into Google, you get 18 million hits. Most of those are either outright scams or hopelessly optimistic about what they can accomplish. As I said once before:
Credit Repair is almost always a scam. There are ways to get correct bad information removed from your credit report. If the information is correct, those methods are illegal. There are two legal methods to repair your credit. First, stop generating bad credit. Make your payments on time and eventually, the bad items will fall off. Second, write letters disputing the actual incorrect items on your credit report. There are no quick fixes, and anybody telling you different is flirting with a jail sentence, possibly yours.
There are ways to avoid the scammers.
- Avoid advance-fee credit repair. If they are any good, you will pay for results, not intentions. If they charge beforehand, they are already breaking the law.
- If they insist they can erase the accurate, but negative information, run away.
- If they tell you to dispute everything negative, even the accurate information, run away.
- If they tell you to create a new credit identity, don’t just run, report them. It’s a felony.
Legally, you cannot get valid information removed from your credit report. Anyone who tells you differently is advocating a crime. However, according to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you are entitled dispute incorrect records.
To verify the accuracy of your credit report, you need to see it. You can get a free report if your credit is used to deny you for something. This is known as an “adverse action” . You have 60 days from the denial to request the report. You can also get one free report from each of the major credit bureaus each year. I space out these requests so I see my credit report every 4 months.
If there is inaccurate information on your report, dispute it in writing. Send a letter to the credit bureau that is reporting the error. Explain the problem and politely demand an investigation. They will contact the creditor, who usually has 30 days to respond. In the meantime, send a dispute letter to the creditor, along with proof of the inaccuracy. If the investigation does not go your way, the creditor will have to report the dispute status to the credit bureaus in the future.
If the negative items are accurate, there is only one way to get it off of your report legally: Wait. Most negative information can only be reported for 7 years, while a bankruptcy will be reported for 10.
Another way to build your credit in the face of negative credit is to start building good credit to overshadow the bad. Get a credit card. Your first credit card from the bottom of the debt-barrel will probably be a gas card or a store-branded credit card. That’s fine. The main consideration is are low or nonexistent fees. Don’t accept application fees, activation fees, fees for carrying a balance or fees for not carrying a balance. Annual fees are becoming a fact of life, so look for low fees. The interest rate does not matter. You will be paying this card off immediately, meaning no less often that every two weeks. Make sure every penny is paid during the grace period, and make sure your card comes with a grace period. Some don’t. Those are bad cards to get.
There are no quick fixes for bad credit, just good new habits and time.
Your Budget is Worthless
When you realize that you’ve buried yourself in debt and decide to get out from under that terrible burden, the first thing you’ve got to do is build a budget because, without that, you’ve got no way to know how much money you have or need. After you’ve got a budget, you’ll start spending according to whatever it says. Hopefully, you’ll stay on budget, but what happens when an emergency does come up? What do you do when your car dies? When you suddenly find out your kids needs vision therapy? How do you manage when your job suddenly gets shipped off to East De Moines?
Your budget isn’t going to help you meet those expenses. Most people don’t have enough money in their bank account to make it all the way to the next payday, let alone enough to keep the lights on and food on the table. How can you possibly hope to deal with even the little things that come up?
You whip out your emergency fund.
The problem with a budget is that it does a poor job of accounting for the unexpected. That’s where an emergency fund comes in. An emergency fund is money that you have set aside in an available-but-not-too-accessible account. Its sole purpose is to give you a line of defense when life rears up and kicks you in the butt. Without an emergency fund, everything that comes unexpectedly is automatically an emergency. With an emergency fund, the things that come up are merely minor setbacks. Without an emergency fund, your budget is nothing but a good intention waiting to get shattered by the next thing that comes along. With an emergency fund, you are managing money. Without it, it’s managing you.
How much money do you need in an emergency fund?
Every “expert” has their own opinion on this. Dave Ramsey recommends $1000 to start. Suze Orman says 8 months. The average time spent looking for work after losing your job is 24.5 weeks(roughly 6 months), so I recommend 7 months of expenses. That’s enough to carry you through an average bout of unemployment and a little more, but that’s not a goal for your first steps toward financial perfection. To start with, get $1000 in a savings account. That’s enough to manage most run-of-the-mill emergencies, without unduly delaying the rest of your debt repayment and savings goals.
How do you build an emergency fund?
Let’s not kid ourselves, $1000 is a lot of money when can barely make it from one check to the next. Unfortunately, this vital first step can’t get ignored. If you really work at it, you should be able to come up with $1000 in a month or so. Here are some ideas on how to manage that:
- Cut. Drop every possible expense. If you drop cable, your cell phone, Netflix, and a weekly dinner out, you will already be saving $400 that month. You’d be almost halfway there.
- Sell. How much stuff do you have that you don’t need, want, or use? I’d be willing to be there’s more than you realize. Last spring, I had a garage sale that brought in about $1300. Everything we sold was just crap we don’t use any more. We sold candles and candle-holders, DVDs, books, clothes, toys, electronics, games, and anything else we could find. I spent a month going through every room in my house to find my inventory. Craigslist is a good way to sell just one or two things at a time.
- Work. Have you thought about delivering pizza or working weekends in a gas station? If you have some technical or writing ability, you could pick up some part time work on oDesk or eLance. Your opportunities are only limited by what you are willing to do.
Stop at a grand?
Dave Ramsey’s advice is to get your fund up to $1000 and then leave it alone until your debt is paid off. Screw that. I’ve got money going into my fund every month. It’s only $25 per month, but over the last two years, it has almost doubled my fund. Don’t dedicate so much money that you can’t meet your other goals, but don’t be afraid to keep some money flowing in .
Using the fund?
When can you pull the money out? That is entirely up to you. I have ju st two points to make about withdrawing from your emergency fund:
- Don’t keep the money in an easy-to-access account. If your fund is in the savings account that serves as your overdraft protection account, it’s too easy to spend it, and it will go away. I keep it in my INGDirect account. I don’t use the checking account for anything in person, so I don’t carry the card. If I want to spend that money, it will take 2-3 days to transfer into my main bank account.
- Never decide to spend the money on the spur of the moment. There are very few major financial decisions that can’t wait until morning to be answered. Sleep on it. If it’s still necessary tomorrow, you can spend it without guilt.
An emergency fund makes your life easier and your budget possible when the unexpectable happens. Don’t forget to fund yours.
How much money do you keep in your emergency fund? What would it take to get you to spend it?
How have you improved your situation today?
Every day, in some small way, it’s important to do something to improve your situation. Whether it’s paying down debt, researching inexpensive alternatives to your existing expenses, or something as simple as hugging your spouse or playing games with your kids.
Educate
I was once told that every day, you either get smarter, or you get dumber. Don’t do the latter. Never pass up an opportunity to educate yourself. Make the day good for you.
- Read a book. There are hundreds of personal finance books available. Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover is a great place to start.
- Read a blog. Once again, lack of choice is not a problem here. There are thousands of choices. My favorites are in my sidebar, to the left.
- Find a mentor. Failing that, get a PF-Buddy. Find someone you can call when you need the moral support to make an appropriate or difficult financial decision.
- Take a class. Whether it’s a personal finance class, or some other way of improving yourself, do it. Many cities offer affordable community education classes. Ad Hoc college courses are another option.
Elucidate
It’s incredibly important to understand your situation. If you don’t know where you are, how can you control where you’re going?
- Examine your finances. I heartily recommend Quicken to track your finances, but Mint is a great place to see where your money has gone.
- Know your debt. It’s important to know your debt. Own it. Know your fees and your rates. Know every cent you owe. Get a spreadsheet or a notebook and write it all down. Keep it updated. Mint is great for this. I update my debt-sheet monthly.
- Know your spending. This is another plug for Mint. There’s no better way to see where your money has gone in the past. I use Quicken for the present and future, Mint for the past and snapshots.
- Find your waste. Do you have the cheapest plans that meet your needs for television, internet, phone service? Do you have AAA and roadside assistance through your insurance company?
- Talk to your spouse. Discuss your finances. Make sure everyone is on the same page and there are no surprises or hidden bills. Plan together.
- Eliminate problems early. If you see a problem, eliminate it before it gets out of control. The earlier you identify a problem, the easier it is to eliminate.
- Family meeting. Get the family together so everyone can participate, even the children. Young eyes sometimes have a clarity that a lifetime of habits has clouded. If your kids understand the concept of money, they are old enough to participate and even help. Brainstorming means that no idea is a bad idea. It may not be implemented, but everything is worth hearing.
Eradicate
What’s left? Eliminate baggage. Kill your bills. If you’re paying for something you don’t want or need, get rid of it!
- Unnecessary items. Do you have an extra cell phone or an insured motorcycle in the garage? Time to cancel.
- Unused items. Do you really use the movie package in your cable bill? Are you saving money with Netflix, or would Redbox be a better option?
- Forgotten bills. Did you sign up for an identity protection scheme or an appliance repair plan for an appliance that no longer exists? Cancel!
- Fees. What fees are you paying? Do you have an annual fee for your credit card or minimum balance fees at your bank? Find new institutions. Loyalty to your bank may be costing you money.
Unused or unnecessary bills are nothing but unhappiness generators. They don’t provide value so trim the waste and get rid of what you don’t need.
