- Guide to finding cheap airfare: http://su.pr/2pyOIq #
- As part of my effort to improve every part of my life, I have decided to get back in shape. Twelve years ago, I wor… http://su.pr/6HO81g #
- While jogging with my wife a few days ago, we had a conversation that we haven’t had in years. We discussed ou… http://su.pr/2n9hjj #
- In April, my wife and I decided that debt was done. We have hopefully closed that chapter in our lives. I borrowed… http://su.pr/19j98f #
- Arrrgh! Double-posts irritate me. Especially separated by 6 hours. #
- My problem lies in reconciling my gross habits with my net income. ~Errol Flynn #
- RT: @ScottATaylor: 11 Ways to Protect Yourself from Identity Theft | Business Pundit http://j.mp/5F7UNq #
- They who are of the opinion that Money will do everything, may very well be suspected to do everything for Money. ~George Savile #
- It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach. ~Franklin Delano Roosevelt #
- The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money. ~Author Unknown #
- The only reason [many] American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for [a dollar down]~Mad Mag. #
- I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money. ~Pablo Picasso #
- Waste your money and you're only out of money, but waste your time and you've lost a part of your life. ~Michael Leboeuf #
- We can tell our values by looking at our checkbook stubs. ~Gloria Steinem #
- There are people who have money and people who are rich. ~Coco Chanel #
- It's good to have [things that money can buy], but…[make] sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy. ~George Lorimer #
- The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance. ~Oscar Wilde #
- Money will buy you a pretty good dog, but it won't buy the wag of his tail. ~Henry Wheeler Shaw #
- I wish I'd said it first, and I don't even know who did: The only problems that money can solve are money problems. ~Mignon McLaughlin #
- Mnemonic tricks. #
- The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers http://su.pr/4GAc52 #
- Champagne primer: http://su.pr/1elMS9 #
- Bank of Mom and Dad starts in 15 minutes. The only thing worth watching on SoapNet. http://su.pr/29OX7y #
- @prosperousfool That's normal this time of year, all around the country. Tis the season for violence. Sad. in reply to prosperousfool #
- In the old days a man who saved money was a miser; nowadays he's a wonder. ~Author Unknown #
- Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that. ~Norman Vincent Peale #
- RT @MattJabs: RT @fcn: What do the FTC disclosure rules mean for bloggers? And what constitutes an endorsement? – http://bit.ly/70DLkE #
- Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you. ~Oscar Wilde #
- Today's quotes courtesy of the Quote Garden http://su.pr/7LK8aW #
- RT: @ChristianPF: 5 Ways to Show Love to Your Kids Without Spending a Dollar http://bit.ly/6sNaPF #
- FTC tips for buying, giving, and using gift cards. http://su.pr/1Yqu0S #
- .gov insulation primer. Insulation is one of the easiest ways to save money in a house. http://su.pr/9ow4yX #
- @krystalatwork It's primarily just chat and collaborative writing. I'm waiting for someone more innovative than I to make some stellar. in reply to krystalatwork #
- What a worthless tweet that was. How to tie the perfect tie: http://su.pr/1GcTcB #
- @WellHeeledBlog is giving away 5 copies of Get Financially Naked here http://bit.ly/5kRu44 #
- RT: @BSimple: RT @arohan The 3 Most Neglected Aspects of Preparing for Retirement http://su.pr/2qj4dK #
- RT: @bargainr: Unemployment FELL… 10.2% -> 10% http://bit.ly/5iGUdf #
- RT: @moolanomy: How to Break Bad Money Habits http://bit.ly/7sNYvo (via @InvestorGuide) #
- @ChristianPF is giving away a Lifetime Membership to Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University! RT to enter to win… http://su.pr/2lEXIT #
- @The_Weakonomist At $1173, it's only lost 2 weeks. I'd call it popped when it drops back under $1k. in reply to The_Weakonomist #
- @mymoneyshrugged It's worse than it looks. Less than 10% of Obama's Cabinet has ever been in the private sector. http://su.pr/93hspJ in reply to mymoneyshrugged #
- RT: @ScottATaylor: 43 Things Actually Said in Job Interviews http://ff.im/-crKxp #
- @ScottATaylor I'm following you and not being followed back. 🙁 in reply to ScottATaylor #
Deathbed Regrets
A friend recently pointed me to an article written by a hospice nurse. This nurse spent her career working with people who were dying, beyond recovery, and aware of it. Her job, primarily, was to provide comfort, whether that be physical or emotional.
During her conversations, she found several themes when her patients discussed their regrets and she lists the 5 most common regrets in her article.
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I don’t see this one being an issue for me. While I did buy in to a standard life template (college, wife, kids, suburbs, office, etc.), I am me. I am undeniably me.
I’d be delusional to think that I wasn’t a bit…different. I see things differently than a lot of other people, I react differently, and I’m vocal about it. That sometimes makes it hard to get close to me. I doubt anyone who is close to me would argue with that.
I also tend to do things. Most people talk about doing things, I try to make them happen. “I wish I were out of debt”, “Honey, I want to start a business”, “Let’s drop 40 pounds this year”, or “I want to build a trebuchet”. I think I know why my wife gets nervous when I say “I have an idea”.
I may not be running anyone else’s script, but at the end of the day, I’d regret not doing things more than I’d regret trying them.
I wish I didn’t work so hard.
This one is a personal struggle for me. I’m scared of missing my children grow up. I hate the idea of looking back and finding my children as adults, with few memories of how they got there.
At the same time, I’ve got a pile of debt I need to get rid of before I can dial back too far. I could quit my job tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be providing a good life for them.
My worry, and the worry of some people close to me, is that, once the debt is gone, I won’t be able to let go of my extreme work hours, even though I’m working so hard now to be able to work less later. “Later”, in this case, means a couple of years, not retirement.
I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Ugh. Feelings. If this is a standard deathbed regret, I’m screwed. My loved ones know I love them, but other than that, I’m happy to be in control of myself.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I do. It’s not always close contact, but it is contact.
I’m of the opinion that life’s too short to spend time with people you dislike, so some people have been relegated to the past. My friends, my family, my loved ones are a part of my life, even if it’s occasionally months between emails or years between visits.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
I think I do pretty well on this front, too. Happiness is a choice. I could worry about all of the things that aren’t perfect, or I could enjoy the things I have. I choose to enjoy what I’ve got, even while trying to improve the rest.
In the words of Denis Leary : “Happiness comes in small doses folks. It’s a cigarette, or a chocolate cookie, or a five second orgasm. That’s it, ok! [You] eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to…work, ok!? That is it!”
Happiness isn’t a hobby farm, a new job, or a dream vacation. Happiness is a date with my wife, or cuddling with my kids to Saturday morning cartoons, or taking my son to the range.
Happiness is the things I’m doing now, not the dreams I’m hoping for someday.
Free Tivo
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.
4 Ways to Change Your Finances for the Better
Finance is made out to be difficult, but it’s really not. All financial advice really boils down to 2 sentences: “Spend less than you earn. Save or invest the rest.” Everything else is an unnecessary complication, unless you need to be told that commemorative plates aren’t actually an investment. Unfortunately, we’re all people. (Except for you in the back. I see you, and you are not people.) People make mistakes. People sometimes need things spelled out, or at least explained in a way that makes it seem less intimidating to get started.
With that in mind, here are four steps that will get you out of debt and, over a long enough timeline, make you rich:
1. Lower your interest rates. If you’ve got debt, particularly credit card debt, you’re paying too much interest. It doesn’t matter what the interest rate is, it could be better. It’s time to pick up the phone and politely ask your credit card company to lower your interest rate. If they refuse, mention that their competitor is offering you 3% interest on a balance transfer with no transfer fee. Mention a competitor by name, but don’t worry about a specific offer. There are always offers being tossed about.
If they won’t lower your rate, find a company who will. 5% on a 10,000 balance is $500 per year. That’s 3 months of payments for free.
2. Lower your monthly payments. Do you have a cable bill? A phone bill? Any other bills? Put them in a stack and call them. Every. Single. One. Ask if there is any way you can lower your bill. Can you get put on a new customer promotion? My electric company offers a saver switch for my air conditioner that will lower my bill by 15% just for giving them the ability to toggle my AC on and off. When we had that installed, I never noticed it in use.
3. Save $1000. When you’ve got no money, every unexpected expense is an emergency. When you’ve got a little bit socked away, you can ride out the problems without much worry. $1000 may not be enough to ride out an extended bout of unemployment, but it does a pretty good job of taking the sting out of car repairs. Do whatever you have to do, but get some money in an emergency fund. Then, don’t touch it!
4. Categorize wants and needs. I want a vacation. My kid needs braces. I want a big screen TV. My gas bill needs to get paid. I want a new car. My family needs food. Are you sensing a theme? Pay attention to what you spend. Ask yourself if it’s something you need, or just something you really, really want. Just the act of categorizing it can make it easier to avoid buying whatever it is.
5. Use the savings from 1-4 to pay off whatever you owe. Don’t blow your new-found savings on spinner rims or soap made from rich-people tallow. Use it to finally get ahead of the game.
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?
New Debt
For the first time in 2 years(almost to the day), I am acquiring new debt that I can’t afford to pay off immediately. On a credit card.
Last Thursday, my son entered vision therapy. He has what is commonly known as a “lazy eye”, but is more properly called a “wandering eye”. His eyes don’t always lock on to whatever he is looking at. Instead, one of his eyes will (occasionally, but not always) drift to the side and shut off. His brain doesn’t interpret the signals from that eye.
We had two sessions of tests to diagnose the specific problems: $350.
We will have 28 weekly sessions of therapy @ $140 per session: $3920
There is an equipment fee: $85
That’s a total of $4355 over the next 7 months.
Insurance covers some of it, but the therapist is out-of-network, so it’s “pay first, get reimbursed later from the insurance company”. If we pay up front, we get 1 session free, bringing the price to $4215, minus insurance.
I have a health savings account that I have been trying to max out to cover this, to make my payments all pre-tax. I haven’t been able to get enough in there, yet. In fact, since I don’t have my kids on my insurance, my maximum HSA contribution is $3050.
Since finding out that vision therapy was going to be necessary, I have managed to save $1000 in cash, and about $1500 in my HSA. That’s $2500 of a $4215 bill, leaving $1715 that I still need to be able to cover.
Here is my plan:
We’re charging the entire $4215 at 11.9% interest on a card with a 2% travel rewards program. This will give me $84.30 worth of travel rewards good for reimbursing any travel expenses.
I will immediately pay off $1000 from cash savings.
I will also immediately file for an insurance reimbursement, which will cover 80% – $500, or $2972 minus a bit. Our insurance got a waiver on the pseudo-wonderful healthcare fraud act on the grounds that the plan sucks so bad that it would cost too much to comply with the law. No joke. I’m expecting about a $2500 reimbursement, and I have no idea how long that takes.
In 6 weeks, when I have maxed out my HSA contributions for the year, I will file for an HSA reimbursement for about $2500, leaving about $500 to cover some medical costs for the rest of the year. Vision therapy doesn’t count against my deductible, since my kids are on my wife’s insurance plan.
Starting in June, my debt snowball will no longer be going to max out my HSA and will instead go straight to this card, to finish paying it off as quickly as possible. That’s $750 per month.
Any money from any side work will also go towards this bill, but I don’t budget for that, because it isn’t reliable money.
The projected results:
$3215 on the credit card for 6 weeks @ 11.9% = $50 in interest payments.
After the HSA reimbursement, there will be $715 left to pay, which will be paid off in June for another $10 in interest.
When we get the insurance reimbursement, we’ll replenish the medical bill account, to start getting ready for the kid’s braces next year. We’ll drop $1500 into that account and use the remaining $1000 as a debt snowball payment.
We’ll end up paying $60 in interest to save $140 in therapy costs, so it’s good math, but I hate the idea of racking up another credit card bill. I could drop the interest costs a bit by raiding my emergency fund, but that still wouldn’t cover it all, and it would leave me with very little left for an actual emergency. I could raid the emergency fund for half of its value($700), and reduce the initial interest paid to $25 and the total interest paid to about $40, then use the $1000 leftover from the insurance reimbursement to replace my emergency fund.