Search Results for “three-alternatives-to-a-budget/budget-lesson-part-5/debt-burnout/budget-lesson-part-3/travel-expenses-why-i-splurge/future-dreams/budget4/slow-carb-diet-how-to-avoid-going-bat-crazy/financial-pet-peeve-fees-to-receive-paper-bank-statements/money-problems-day-1-setting-goals/money-problems-day-3-whats-coming-in” — Page 14

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?

Fixing Your Credit Report

Finance

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.

Make Yourself Accountable

Finance

Everybody knows the reputation New Year’s resolutions get for being abandoned in under a month. Following through with your saving and budget goals can be difficult. There are thousands of strategies for keeping your resolutions, but I’ve found that the best goal-keeping mechanism is to make yourself accountable. There are several ways to accomplish this.

Make Firm Goals. If your goals are open to interpretation, it’s easy to interpret them in a way that lets you off the hook. Make the goals concrete and immune to interpretation, and that can’t happen. “Get up earlier” may mean five minutes, which is technically meeting the goal, but not really. “Get up at 5am” is clear and concrete.

Get a “Goal Buddy”. When I am out shopping, if I’m struck by the impulse to buy something I probably don’t need, I call my wife. She’s more than happy to encourage me to put the movie or game back on the shelf. I have a friend who will call me up if he’s thinking about buying a new gadget so I can talk him down. Friends don’t let friends mortgage their futures.

Go Public. As you may have noticed, I’m being as open as possible with my goals for the year. I have laid out clear goals and I provide fairly frequent updates through both this site and twitter. If I fail, I fail in front of an audience. That’s strong encouragement to succeed. Tell your family, friends and coworkers. Announce your goals on the internet. Make it as difficult as possible to fail gracefully.

Punish Yourself. I have a line item in my budget called “In the hole“. If I go over budget one month, the overage is entered as an expense the following month. This serves the double purpose of getting the budget back on track and forcing me to sacrifice something the next month to make that happen. Another option may be to write out a check to a charity you hate, and drop it in the mail if you miss your goal. Anything unpleasant can work as your punishment.

How do you keep your goals?

Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site

Business, Finance

In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to show you how to set up a WordPress site. I’m going to show you exactly what settings, plugins, and themes I use. I’m not going to get into writing posts today. That will be next time.

I use WordPress because it makes it easy to develop good-looking sites quickly. You don’t have to know html or any programming. I will be walking through the exact process using Hostgator, but most hosting plans use CPanel, so the instructions will be close. If not, just follow WordPress’s 5 minute installation guide.

Installing WordPress

Assuming you can follow along with me, log in to your hosting account and find the section of your control panel labeled “Software/Service”. Click “Fantastico De Luxe”.

On the Fantastico screen, click WordPress, then “New Installation”.

On the next screen, select your domain name, then enter all of the details: admin username, password, site name, and site description. If you’ll remember, I bought the domain http://www.masterweddingplanning.net. I chose the site name of “Master Wedding Planning” and a description of “Everything You Need to Know to Plan Your Wedding”.

Click “install”, then “finish installation”. The final screen will contain a link to the admin page, in this case, masterweddingplanning.net/wp-admin. Go there and log in.

Configuring WordPress

After you log in, if there is a message at the top of the screen telling you to update, do so. Keeping your site updated is the best way to avoid getting hacked. Click “Please update now” then “Update automatically”. Don’t worry about backing up, yet. We haven’t done anything worth saving.

Next, click “Settings” on the left. Under General Settings, put the www in the WordPress and site URLs. Click save, then log back in.

Click Posts, then Categories. Under “Add New Category”, create one called “Misc” and click save.

Click Appearance. This brings you to the themes page. Click “Install Themes” and search for one you like. I normally use Headway, but before I bought that, I used SimpleX almost exclusively. Your goal is to have a simple theme that’s easy to maintain and easy to read. Bells and whistles are a distraction.

Click “Install”, “Install now”, and “Activate”. You now have a very basic WordPress site.

Plugins

A plugin is an independent piece of software to make independent bits of WordPress magic happen. To install the perfect set of plugins, click Plugins on the left. Delete “Hello Dolly”, then click “Add new”.

In the search box, enter “plugin central” and click “Search plugins”. Plugin Central should be the first plugin in the list, so click “install”, then “ok”, then “activate plugin”. Congratulations, you’ve just installed your first plugin.

Now, on the left, you’ll see “Plugin Central” under Plugins. Click it. In the Easy Plugin Installation box, copy and paste the following:

 All in One SEO Pack
 Contact Form 7
 WordPress Database Backup
 SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
 WP Super Cache
 Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
 date exclusion seo
 WP Policies
 Pretty Link Lite
 google xml sitemaps
 Jetpack by WordPress.com

Click “install”.

On the left, click “Installed Plugins”. On the next screen, click the box next to “Plugins”, then select “Activate” from the dropdown and click apply.

Still under Plugins, click “Akismet Configuration”. Enter your API key and hit “update options”. You probably don’t have one, so click “get your key”.

Tools

The only tool I worry about is the backup. It’s super-easy to set up. Click “Tools”, then “Backup”.

Scroll down to “Schedule Backups”, select weekly, make sure it’s set to a good email address and click “Schedule Backup”. I only save weekly because we won’t be adding daily content. Weekly is safe enough, without filling up your email inbox.

Settings

There are a lot of settings we’re going to set. This is going to make the site more usable and help the search engines find your site. We’re going to go right down the list. If you see a section that I don’t mention, it’s because the defaults are good enough.

Writing

Set the Default Post Category to “Misc”.

Visit this page and copy the entire list into “Update Service” box. This will make the site ping a few dozen services every time you publish a post. It’s a fast way to get each post indexed by Google.

Click “Save Changes”.

Discussion

Uncheck everything under “Email me whenever…” and hit save. This lets people submit comments, without actually posting the comments or emailing me when they do so. Every once in a while, I go manually approve the comments, but I don’t make it a priority.

Permalinks

Select “Custom structure” and enter this: /%postname%/

Click save.

All in One SEO

Set the status to “Enabled”, then fill out the site title and description. Keep the description to about 160 characters. This is what builds the blurb that shows up by the link when you site shows up in Google’s results.

Check the boxes for “Use categories for META keywords” and “Use noindex for tag archives”.

Click “Update Options”.

Date Exlusion SEO

Check the boxes to remove each of the dates and set the alt text to “purpose” or something. This will suppress the date so your posts won’t look obsolete.

SEO Search Terms 2

This plugin reinforces the searches that bring people to your site. It’s kind of neat. Skip the registration, accept the defaults and hit save.

WP Policies

Scroll to the bottom and click import. We’ll come back to this.

WP Super Cache

Select “Caching On” and hit save.

JetPack

Across the top of the screen should be a giant banner telling you to connect to WordPress.com and set up Jetpack. You’ll need an account on WordPress.com, so go there and set one up. After authorizing the site, you’ll be brought back to the Jetpack configuration screen. Click “Configure” under “WordPress.com Stats”. Take the defaults and hit save.

Contact

On the contact configuration page, copy the code in the top section. You’ll need this in a moment.

Pages

Now, we going to create a couple of static pages. On the left, click “Pages”, then “Add new”.

Name the first page “Contact” and put the contact form code in the body of the page. Hit publish.

Menus

Under Appearance, click “Menu”. Enter a menu name and hit save.

Then, under “Pages”, click the box next to “Contact”, “Disclaimer”, and any other policies you’d like to display. Hit save.

Widgets

Also under Appearance, click “Widgets”. This is where you’ll select what will display in the sidebar. All you have to do is drag the boxes you want from the middle of the page to the widget bar on the right. I recommend Text, Search, Recent Posts, Popular Search Terms and Tag Cloud. In the text box, just put some placeholder text in it, like “Product will go here”. We’ll address this next time.

Posts

We’re not going to worry about getting posts in place, yet. That will be the next installment. However, the steps in the next installment could take 2 weeks to implement, and we want Google to start paying attention now. To make that happen, we need to get a little bit of content in place. This won’t be permanent content. It’s only there so Google has something to see when it comes crawling.

To get this temporary, yet legal content, I use eZineArticles. Just go search for something in your niche that doesn’t look too spammy.

Then, click “Posts”, then delete the “Hello World” post. Click “Add new”. Copy the eZine article, being sure to include the author box at the bottom, and hit publish.

To see your changes, you may have to go to Settings, then WP Cache and delete the cache so your site will refresh.

Congratulations! You now have a niche blog with content. It’s not ready to make you any money, yet, but it is ready for Google to start paying attention. In the next installment, I’ll show you how I get real unique content and set it up so Google keeps coming back to show me the love.

5 Things to Do in the New Year

Finance

: Image via Wikipedia

CNN Money has an article up on 5 things to do this year. After posting a similar article a couple of weeks ago, I thought it’d be interesting to post about someone else’s perspective.

1. Shop for a no-fee checking account.

If you are paying fees for a checking account, go somewhere else. There are so many alternatives available that you shouldn’t be throwing money away. Ally Bank has a great no-fee checking account, as does INGDirect, though ING won’t let you write paper checks against the account. The same principle applies to credit cards. If you have a card with an annual fee and you aren’t getting some monster services or rewards to go with it, run away.

2. Save your raise.

I don’t necessarily agree with this one. If you are in debt, it’s better to use the raise to pay off that garbage, first. When I got my last raise, I immediately boosted the automatic payment for my car to use every new penny. I’ve never had the money available, so I haven’t missed it. Whatever you do, fight lifestyle inflation. Just because you have some more money doesn’t mean you need to spend it. At my last job, I got a substantial raise, so I bought a new car, only to get laid off a few months later.

3. Go for a checkup

Wealth doesn’t matter if you squander your health. Go get a physical. Every disease is easier to treat if you catch it earlier as opposed to later. Don’t make the mistake of running your body into the ground. You will regret it later. Effective this year, most health plans will cover a physical with no copay, co-insurance, or deductible allowed.

4. Score a better rewards card.

B***-****. If you’ve still got debt, don’t concentrate on using more of it. Get that crap paid off. If you’re out of debt, look into getting a rewards card that aligns with your goals. If you like to travel, get a card that gives you frequent flier miles. Otherwise, I’d go with a cash-back rewards card.

5. Use your vacation days.

37% of Americans don’t take all of the vacation to which they are entitled. That’s insane! We work harder and better when we have time to recuperate and relax. Unfortunately, I usually fall into that unfortunate 37%. My vacation resets on February 1st, and this will be the first year in a lot of years that I haven’t had to roll it over or even lose some.

What is your financial plan for the new year?

Budget Lesson, Part 6

Finance

It’s been a month since I’ve written a post for the budget series, so I’ll be continuing that today. See these posts for the history of this series.

This time, I’ll be reviewing my non-monthly bills. These are the bills that have to be paid, but aren’t due on a monthly basis. Some are annual, some are quarterly.

School Lunch – This could be cut by sending a bag lunch. We pay about $1.25 per day for school lunch. At that price, I don’t think I can beat the nutrition, let alone the convenience of the meal. We pay this whenever the account gets below $10.
Property Taxes – We pay this semi-annually. This bill goes up every year due to the ****** ***-******* ******-******* who don’t care about their constituents making ends meet. ******* ***** ******* *******. Huh. Who knew WordPress came with a censor? I could move, but I’d have to get out of commuting distance to get this down much.
Life insurance – I’ve got two quarterly life insurance policies. I can’t get these much cheaper, but I should be able to next year. The questions asked if I’ve smoked in the last three years, and that will be up on Halloween.
AAA – It’s only been recently that I’ve owned vehicles reliable enough to avoid paying my AAA dues for me. I could cancel this, but for $80 per year, the hotel discounts make it a wash. One vacation per year comes close to making the difference.
Vehicle Registration – The only way to cut this would be to get rid of a vehicle. I don’t think that’s possible for us. We work in opposite directions and, for at least one quarter per year, spend too much time chasing around for activities.
Daycare – We’ve been using our current daycare provider since my oldest(10) was one. When my youngest turns 2 in June, our costs will go down. Without one of us quitting our job, this bill can only go down as the kids grow up.
City Bill – This bill combines our garbage, water, and sewer. With three adults, three kids, and 5 animals in the house, reducing our garbage level is difficult. We do try to manage our water usage in the summer, to keep that down.
Web host – I have a few domain names and a hosting package to handle my side hustles and miscellaneous projects. This is a deductible expense. I have been allowing my domain names to expire if the project isn’t being actively pursued.
Memberships – I have annual dues to two organizations. I’m making payments on lifetime memberships, so these will be going away in about 18 months.

Reviewing this list, there doesn’t seem to be too much I can cut and accomplish any meaningful savings. Am I missing something?