- Uop past midnight. 3am feeding. 5am hurts. Back to bed? #
- Stayed up this morning and watched Terminator:Salvation. AWAKs make for bad plot advancement. #
- Last night, Inglorious Basterds was not what I was expecting. #
- @jeffrosecfp It's a fun time, huh. These few months are payment for the fun months coming, when babies become interactive. 🙂 in reply to jeffrosecfp #
- RT @BSimple: RT @bugeyedguide: When we cling to past experiences we keep giving them energy…and we do not have much energy to spare #
- RT @LivingFrugal: Jan 18, Pizza Soup (GOOOOOD Stuff) http://bit.ly/5rOTuc #budget #money #
- Free Turbotax for low income or active-duty military. http://su.pr/29y30d #
- To most ppl,you're just somebody [from casting] to play the bit part of "Other Office Worker" in the movie of their life http://su.pr/1DYMQZ #
- RT @MoneyCrashers: Money Crashers 2010 New Year Giveaway Bash – $8,300 in Cash and Amazing Prizes http://bt.io/DQHw #
- RT: @flexo: RT @wisebread: Tylenol, Motrin, Rolaids, and Benadryl RECALLED! Check your cabinets: http://bit.ly/4BVJfJ #
- New goal for Feb. 100 pushups in 1 set. Anyone care to join me? #
- RT @BSimple: Your future is created by what you do today, not tomorrow"— Robert Kiyosaki So take action now. #
- RT @hughdeburgh: "Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now." ~ Sophia Loren #
- Chances of finding winter boots at a thrift store in January? Why do they wear our at the worst time? #
- @LenPenzo Anyone who make something completely idiot proof underestimates the ingenuity of complete idiots. in reply to LenPenzo #
- RT @zappos: "Lots of people want to ride w/ you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus w/ you…" -Oprah Winfrey #
- RT @chrisguillebeau: "The cobra will bite you whether you call it cobra or Mr. Cobra" -Indian Proverb (via @boxofcrayons) #
- RT @SuburbanDollar: I keep track of all my blogging income and expenses using http://outright.com it is free&helps with taxes #savvyblogging #
- Reading: Your Most Frequently Asked Running Questions – Answered http://bit.ly/8panmw via @zen_habits #
Personal Finance, Canine-Style
No matter how many excellent books you read, or how many experts you consult, sometimes the best advice comes from beast out fertilizing my yard. My dog is pretty smart. At middle-age, she’s got no debt, no stress, and no possibility of being fired. I asked her what her secrets are, and she gave me 5 rules for managing her finances.
- Sniff around. You never know when or where an opportunity will present itself. Keep your eyes open and look in some unusual places and you may just find the golden opportunity you’ve been waiting for. Jacob and Susan D’Aniello have a multi-million dollar franchise called DoodyCall. They have turned themselves into millionaires, starting with a shovel, a leash, and a plastic bag. Never be afraid to look your future in the eye.
- Don’t be afraid to sniff a butt. It’s important to know who you are dealing with, especially when your are making life-changing or expensive decisions. If it doesn’t smell right, bare your teeth and back off. Seriously, in most situations, you can trust your gut instinct. Especially if that instinct is telling you to run away. Read everything you sign. If you don’t understand it, find someone who does. Know what you are getting into at all times. Get referrals. Call the Better Business Bureau. You are in charge of protecting your own interests.
- Lick your own butt. Watching your emergency fund grow is nice, but not everything is. There are some aspects of personal finance that are downright unpleasant, but ignoring them is worse. You can’t ignore an upside-down budget forever, or it will never get fixed. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do what needs to be done, no matter how distasteful. But keep the mouthwash handy.
- Bury a bone. Minds out of the gutter, please. Save for the lean times. You may have two bones today, but what about tomorrow, or next week? What if the bone-fairy never comes to visit again? Make your surplus last, because you never know when life will whack you with a newspaper. If you don’t have an emergency fund, start one. Today. Now. Go set up an automatic transfer of $10 per week. Now. If you don’t have an emergency fund, everything is an emergency.
- Wag your tail. Don’t be afraid to enjoy the good things. When you make progress on your debt, congratulate yourself. Take credit and take pride in what you’ve accomplished. It’s more important to be happy than rich, so don’t obsess over the little things, or the material things. Enjoy your family, enjoy your job(or find a job you can enjoy), enjoy your life.
Maybe I shouldn’t write while watching my dog poop at 5AM.
Update: This post has been included in Festival of Frugality.
3 Things Everyone Should Do Before the End of 2010
- Image via Wikipedia
New Year’s resolutions are great, but what are you doing the rest of the year? As we roll into summer and we see the year’s halfway point approaching, it’s important to look at our goals and our progress and see if we’re on track for where we want to be in our lives.
Financially, now is the time to start preparing for the new year. Don’t be like most people and wait until December to think about it.
Here’s a place to start:
- Max out your 401(k). If you are under 50 years old, your maximum annual contribution is $16,500. If you haven’t contributed to your 401(k), yet, this means you will have to deposit $2358 per month to max it out. If you would have started at the beginning of the year it would only be $1375 per month. If those numbers are out of reach, at least contribute enough to get your employer’s match. If your company matches 50% of your contribution up to 5%, you need to be contributing 5%. If your gross paycheck is $1000, you should contribute $50. If you do so, your company will be giving you $25. That’s free money and a 2.5% raise! With a pre-tax contribution, you are also lowering your taxable wage, so the 5% contribution is not lowering your take-home pay by 5%. In some cases, it may even raise your take-home pay!
- Know your money. Take some time to examine your income and your expenses. What are you having withheld? Will that leave you with a large tax bill next spring? Will it give you a huge tax refund, which is just an interest-free loan to the government? You withholding goal should be to pay nothing and receive nothing when you file your taxes in the spring. The less you withhold, the more you have for your daily expenses, but, if you withhold too much, you risk an unaffordable tax bill and possible penalties later. Look also at your expenses. Have you used your gym membership in the last few months? Cancel it. Do you know every cent you have to pay each month? Figure it out so you can plan the rest of your financial year. A budget is helpful here.
- Own your debt. “It’s not my fault.” “My ex stole my bank account.” “My dog ate the bill.” “My kidneys were stolen and I woke up in a bathtub full of ice and an invoice for services rendered.” “I lost my job.” “I have an X-Box addiction.” “I gave my credit card to a stripper, but we broke up. Go after the stripper.” Excuses. Here’s the thing: None of it matters. You owe the debt. Your choices are to pay the debt or file bankruptcy. Either way, you need to own the debt and take responsibility for whatever choices you made or debt you’ve accumulated. Denial is not a successful coping mechanism. Whatever you choose to do, know that it is your choice. You can’t hide from your bills or your $15/day “Venti Soy Hazelnut Vanilla Cinnamon White Mocha with extra White Mocha and caramel” habit.
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What are your financial plans for the rest of the year?
Update: This post has been included in the Festival of Frugality.
Cheap Vacations
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Last month, we went on vacation for a week. It was our first debt-free vacation, ever! We had a busy week, full of fun activities and it didn’t break the bank. We saved money on everything we could.
Hotel
We save a lot of money by staying at a casino/hotel that was a 20 minute trip away from our vacation city. This won’t save money if you have a problem with gambling. The only time we went to the casino was to get to the connected restaurant.
We made the hotel even cheaper by arriving on a Sunday and leaving on a Friday, avoiding the weekend rates. That gave us a full 6 day vacation with no rush to pack and 2 days to recover and relax when we were done. We just didn’t see the point of checking out on Saturday, just to head home, when we could check out on Friday, spend the day seeing the sights, then leave late.
Meals
I like good food, but feeding a family of five for a week costs far too much. So we compromised.
We brought milk and cereal to the hotel. Instead of rushing to get out of the hotel for breakfast, we had a leisurely breakfast in our jammies and took our time getting moving. No stress. For our daytrips, we packed sandwiches, juice, and snacks; avoiding the need for lunchtime restaurants. Dinner was our extravagance. Every night, we ate someplace nice. Not fancy, but nice. Our food budget was about $30 for the week, not counting dinner.
Attractions
I had a plan to keep every day fun, without resorting to using an agenda. We were far to flexible to call it an agenda. They just don’t make vacations fun for me. We had one thing planned each morning, one each afternoon, and one each evening. Every day, one of those things was spending a couple of hours in the hotel pool. No stress.
The first thing I did was hit the city’s tourism website for coupons. Yay us!
We tried to group our activities geographically to save on parking. For example, one day we went on a sight-seeing boat tour, then walked over the a retired-ore-freighter-turned-museum and only paid one parking fee, which was actually reimbursed by the tour company.
We also hit a lot of state parks, which was mostly free, except for the daily parking permits.
Some of the museums had gotten together to offer a “3 attractions for the price of 2” deal. This was available to us, but I didn’t find out about it until the end of the week. Luckily, it only cost us a few dollars more to use the other coupons.
When we had some spare time, we did other things, like bowling or catching a matinee. They were just some cheap time-fillers, but still good times.
All in all, we had a great time. Nobody was bored and we didn’t end up broke. A good time was had by all, and I got to teach my son how to play poker.
How do you save money on vacation?
6 Ways to Stretch a Meal
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You eat.
Right?
Sometimes, we have more money than month and wonder how we’re going to avoid going hungry at the end of the month. When the grocery budget has run out and the cupboards are almost bare, how do you keep the kids fed?
The secret is to keep some staple stocked all the time. If you have these ingredients, you can stretch $1 of beef into a meal for 10 people. Almost.
Rice
We buy rice 20 pounds at a time. I try to keep a bowl of cooked rice on hand at all times. When we cook a soup, stew, or hotdish, we add a cup or two of rice to the dish. If we’re running late for dinner(a painful situation with a 2-year-old, a 4-year-old, and an 11-year-old who’s about to hit 5′ 7″), we’ll dump a can of soup over the top of a bowl of rice. A quick trip through the microwave, and we’ve got a reasonably healthy meal in 2 minutes. Another trick is to add some to ground beef, whether it’s a meatloaf or sloppy joes.
Beans
This is another ingredient I try to keep on hand, cooked, and in the fridge. We use it like we use the rice. We add a cup to soup, or almost anything else. Throw some barbecue sauce on them, and you’ve got pseudo-baked beans for cheaper than you can buy a can. Mash them with taco seasoning and you have refried beans. Add a cup to scrambled eggs for a filling breakfast.
Potatoes
There are so many ways to use potatoes to stretch a meal. Shred them to cook with eggs or slice them onto a hotdish. Cube them into soup or dice it as a thickener in stew.
Pasta
Yet another item that can go into almost anything. Before I met my wife, I’d make a dish that consisted of nothing more than whatever pasta I had on hand, with a can of soup, cooked until the pasta was done and most of the liquid was absorbed by the noodles. I learned how to wield spices like a crazy Neptunian ninja.
Soup
Whenever we cook, whatever we eat, we make enough for leftovers. When the leftovers are no longer enough to make a meal for anyone, they go in a bag in the freezer. When we have enough, we put them all in a slow-cooker with some water and a ton of seasonings. When we get home from work, we have a delicious soup waiting for us–free soup. If we want stew, we throw in some rice. By the end of the day, the rice has completely dissolved, transforming our delicious freaking soup into yummy dang stew. Everything we make tastes good, so combining a dozen dishes into one soup should also taste good, right? The exception: fish. Never, ever add fish to free soup. Trust me.
Bread
I don’t use bread to cook much, though it’s harder to get much cheaper than a grilled-cheese sandwich. I like to serve a slice of bread with dinner. It just makes the food feel more filling.
That’s how I make a meal for two stretch to feed my family of five, without sacrificing taste or nutrition. How do you make a meal stretch?
10 Dumb Money Moves
Free Money Finance has a post up on Stacy Johnson’s 10 dumbest money moves. I thought I’d share my take.
Here are the mistakes:
1. Not having a goal
2. Not having a spending plan
3. Attempting to derive self-esteem from possessions
4. Doing what everyone else is doing
5. Starting to save large and late rather than small and soon
6. Paying interest to buy things that drop in value
7. Turning down free money
8. Buying a new car
9. Buying more house than you need or can afford.
10. Not protecting your good credit
Here is my response(and a test: Orthogonal Monkey Silicon Beam)
:
1. For most of the last 15 years, I didn’t have much for financial goals. “Get more money” isn’t specific enough to be a goal, and our spending precluded the possibility, anyway. Right now, my financial goal is simple: Get out of debt. I’m down to about $61,000.
2. We have a budget, even if it’s been partially ignored for the last couple of months. If it weren’t for my side-hustles, we would have come out negative last month.
3. We struggle with this one a lot. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is an issue in our house. My wife’s closest family is 10 years older than we are, and has more stuff, which makes it hard to visit without making comparisons. We both know it’s irrational, but it’s the way it is.
4. We are fighting this one as well. The fight is going better than #3. We’ve stopped using new debt, which shocked our friends, and I’m working on launching a new business, to break more bonds.
5. Is 30 late? We’re saving small while he fight debt, but I think we started early enough to make the rest of our lives easier.
6. We pay far too much in interest each month, but there has been absolutely no new debt since April 2009.
7. I got into my company’s retirement plan to get the match, but that ends next month. My wife’s employer killed the match 5 years ago. There’s no free money to turn down anymore.
8. We bought a new truck, as part of our debt-accumulation, in 2001. In 2005, we instead bought a car as it came off a lease. It had 11,000 miles on it and that saved us $10,000.
9. We bought our house in 1998. It sits on 1/8 of an acre. sometimes space is tight, but we’ve watched so many people trade up and find themselves in severe trouble. I’m happy we’ve stayed here.
10. This is one we’ve always guarded. No matter how much debt we’ve had, we’ve made every payment. We’re hugging the underside of an 800 FICO score. Thankfully, we’re closing in on the point where FICO no longer matters, because we’re paying in cash.
What are your biggest money mistakes?
