Penny Foolish

Big news!

2012-02-01T21:26:00.003-05:00

Actually, two big pieces of news!

First: Boyfriend got an upgrade and is now Fiance! He proposed at our favorite restaurant and I of course accepted. I had to tell my mom before I put it on Facebook, but now that everyone's informed I felt I needed to share it here. We're planning on keeping the wedding very simple, mostly because I am the least girly girl on the planet and could not care less what color the napkins are, and won't be able to muster up caring, but also because neither of us sees spending a ton of money on a wedding as a worthwhile endeavor.

So I don't anticipate that I will be gushing about wedding crap here much, and I am actively avoiding the bridal-industrial complex and Brides Magazine and all of that. I registered for an account on The Knot and it told me I had 189 things on my to-do list and I don't wanna go back. We're hoping to get the major parts nailed down within a month or two for June 2013 (officiant, ceremony location, reception location, caterer) and then promptly forget about it for six months.

Second: I paid off my Amex Blue card! I feel like I should not be as excited about this as I am, given that I paid off the CareCredit and Amex Gold cards previously, but this feels like a milestone more than those did. For one thing, this has really made budgeting a lot easier. Before I paid it off, I was paying $100 per paycheck, and with the new job, the paychecks were a little smaller (since I took a pay cut and started contributing to a 401k again.) So now not having to pay that $100 per paycheck means I don't have paychecks where less than $200 is left for actual spending, and I can up my payments to the other cards without running out of money after a week.

Paying it off also means I have more ability to save money for the wedding. Boyfriend (sorry, Fiance) and I are each contributing $150 per paycheck to the wedding account, and I already had $500 in it because I kind of knew this was coming. So we should be able to take care of our deposits pretty soon, especially since I am still working two jobs and running the business, and then we can just save up for all of the million expenses we can't anticipate now. But not fancy napkins.

Guest Post: Mitigating That Student Loan Burden

2012-01-27T15:38:00.002-05:00

This is a guest post written by Sam Peters, who frequently blogs about topics relating to money and personal finance.

Those of you following my battle against debt have probably realized that a substantial portion of that debt – around $13,000 worth at the end of last year – is tied up in student loan obligations. Student loans reflect a different sort of debt when it comes to prevention or mitigation. Consider it this way: someone with thousands of dollars of debt sitting on their Visa likely made some imprudent spending decisions in the past. But a person trying to pay off their Discover graduate student loans, for example, was probably fully aware of their impending burden when they took out the loans in the first place. They knew they were going to be in debt, they saw the writing on the wall, but they decided that it was worth it to get an education.

Considering the importance of a college degree these days, I believe that there is certainly nothing wrong with that approach. I have student loan debt, to be sure, but education I received has contributed to a job that helps me pay off that debt. In the long run I come out even, if not (hopefully) on top.

So I don’t regret deciding to take out loans and financing a college education. But what I do regret is that I didn’t take concerted steps to reduce the cost, the number of loans I needed to take out, and consequently the debt with which I graduated. If I could go back in time, I would tell my pre-college self to try harder to bring down my college costs. Specifically, these are the tips I would recommend:

Boost Financial Aid

Increasing the amount of financial aid you receive is naturally often a losing battle. Still, there are countless tricks that I may no effort to try back in the day. These tricks include investing assets in retirement accounts, taking yourself as a dependent, and including family liabilities if you have siblings in school at the same time.

Follow A Loan Forgiveness Program

Many schools, scholarships, and financial aid programs provide stipulations whereby a graduate can earn forgive on loan interest if they pursue certain public sector careers for a given amount of time. While such work doesn’t exactly interest me, it would have been nice if I had kept those options open. I could have paid off my debt and moved on to a different job by now.

Save on Textbooks

A surprisingly significant portion of my student loan debt comes not from textbook costs. I’ve always appreciated that textbooks are expensive, but I never realized how quickly that all added up. If I was redoing college, then, I would make a point to shop for textbook deals on half.com, share books with friends, or simply forgo a non-required class that has a heavy reading load.

There are many other tips for reducing your student loan debt, but there are the three main ones I would probably give my pre-college self. Too bad time travel isn’t possible. But fortunately, someday my student debts will be gone and – hopefully – the benefits of my degree will continue to live on.

Don't Give Up Yet! Why Sticking to Resolutions Can Save You Money

2012-01-17T16:38:00.003-05:00

This is a guest post written by Sam Peters, who frequently blogs about topics relating to money and personal finance.

The holidays are rarely nice to any of our budgets. I personally dread the holidays only because I feel like I won't be able to pay down as much of my debt as I would like due to gift buying, holiday cooking, and additional travel expenses. Then once New Year's has passed, I find myself scrambling to set a budget to determine how quickly I can get my finances back on track.
However, living on ramen isn't the only way to get yourself back on the right financial foot come the new year. By simply sticking to those New Year's resolutions, you can save yourself a substantial amount of cash both short term and long term. A few of the most money saving new year's resolutions that you should think twice about before giving up on include:

Dropping Weight and Getting in Shape

If you are looking to save yourself a substantial bit of money both short term and long term, losing weight is the way to do it. You will immediately notice a difference in your monthly budget as you will save on eating out in both restaurants and drive-thrus - common places to be avoided by dieting individuals - and you will also save yourself money over the long haul as you will prevent yourself from having to pay higher insurance premiums and high medical bills from health conditions associated with being overweight.

Giving Up Addictions

While you may not consider yourself an addict, if you just “have to have” that cup of coffee each and every morning from your favorite coffee shop, there is a good chance that you are a coffee addict. Whether you are addicted to caffeine, cigarettes, or just frequent that after work happy hour, by giving up these vices, you can save up to $200 a month. All three of the aforementioned also negatively impact your health, especially smoking, and by giving them up now you can avoid high medical bills often associated with the health conditions that arise from abusing any of them.

Living on Less

Choosing to live on less in the New Year obviously has its financial perks, but like losing weight or giving up any vices, living on less is often very difficult because it requires a complete lifestyle change. The reason why most of us get ourselves into high debt is because we overindulge and neglect our budgets for years, and going from living in a nice roomy apartment with a great view of the Chicago skyline to a cramped studio with most of our possessions either sold or tucked away in area Chicago self storage facilities isn't always an easy transition. However, if you stick to living without the excess – including those shopping sprees you feel as though you deserve sometimes – you can quickly reduce your debt.

Getting out of debt isn't always easy, but you don't always have to take extreme measures to make it happen. Sometimes, following a simple tradition can help you get there while also making you feel better about yourself both physically and mentally.

State of the debt

2011-12-18T00:06:00.002-05:00

How I'm doing as of December 18th:

Total debt: $37,938
Bank of America $7,507
Amex Blue $1,028
Amex Gold $0
CareCredit $0
Chase PerfectCard $6,376
Chase Universal $5,334
Discover $4,196
Student loan debt $13,497

Total assets: $34,378
Savings (in various accounts) $1,281
Traditional IRA $23,089
Roth IRA $1,478
401k $4,304
SEP-IRA $4,226

Well, I'm pleased with how the debt has come down (it was $44,591 July 1st) so that's down more than a thousand a month. I repeatedly have this realization about how much freaking money I will actually have once I pay off my debt - so, so much of my paycheck goes to debt that it's going to be shocking to have actual money when I am finished paying it off. However, all my assets went down a lot, so that's not good. Not much you can do about that though!

I paid off the CareCredit card and the Amex Gold card, and also paid off the car repairs I put on Boyfriend's card. I also got some extra money and paid down the Amex some. I was hoping to get the Amex paid off entirely by the end of this year, but it doesn't look like that's likely to happen at this point.

I'm also pleased that I paid off the CareCredit card because I took a new job! It's great and I'm very happy that I did it, but it did mean taking a small pay cut of about $100 a paycheck. So it's nice to not have that extra payment to be made.

I am a business MACHINE

2011-11-23T21:25:00.002-05:00

So a few months ago, after I had sold CashDuck and gotten that all squared away, I began to feel.. bored. Restless. I'm not used to not having a business to take care of! I'm still writing for MoneyCrashers, but that doesn't occupy my brain in the same way. I started browsing around looking at businesses for sale. And then, because I don't always think things through, I spent the last $1000 I had in cash on a new business. Hooray!

After a few months of running the business, I had had some fun, learned some things, and spent some unnecessary money, but didn't think that this was the business for me. So I thought I'd put it up for sale. And I did, and I got emails from several interested parties, and now I am about to sell it for, all told, a profit of $1200.

That is what we in the biz call Not Freaking Shabby.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine, who had been watching the goings-on of my business acquisition with interested, and he said, "If you're going to flip another business, I would be up for investing in it."

I hadn't actually thought of what I was doing as "flipping" - more like repositioning. The website where I bought the business specializes in selling websites, but doesn't generally deal in honest-to-Pete businesses that have been well established and have cash flow. (More like sites cluttered with AdSense ads and affiliate programs.) So a lot of the increase in price on the site was related to the fact that I put it up for sale on a site that sells real businesses - restaurants, dry cleaners, etc - for which people are willing to pay real money. It's a matter of selling to people who are prepared to pay what a real business that earns real money is worth.

But I said I'd keep an eye out, and a couple weeks later found a nice website with solid revenue and tons of traffic, which was being sold at a really low price - both because it was on the cheaper website, but also because the owner needed the money immediately. It was pretty obvious that no one else was willing to pay even close to what the owner would have wanted for it, because the next lowest bid to mine was more than a thousand less. (The cheaper site uses an auction system, but not an eBay style of auction where your bid only goes up as much as it needs to in order to stay winning.) So I bid a price that was a little below the reserve but would still be attractive to the owner, and went to bed. No one else bid, and in the morning we worked out a compromise with the owner and started the process of transferring the site.

So I have now been in control of the site for about two weeks, and things have been going well. I'm back in that feverish business-mind mode where I'm constantly thinking about stuff I want to add, programs I could start, what's going to be in the newsletter, etc etc. It's frustrating sometimes (like when AdSense put the account on review and then took it off review three times in one day) but I realize how much I really enjoy this kind of work.

The end game for this site is to sell it probably in January or February (hopefully, once we've captured both Christmas and Valentine's Day sales!) and make some money, both from the profit it's making as it goes along and on the higher price we'll sell it for. I am a really enthusiastic seller, because with both this site and the previous site, I think it's a great investment for somebody who wants to have a good solid moneymaker. So it'll be interesting.

I've checked off most of the things on the starting-up to-do list, like getting a bank account and a PO box, so now I'm turning my attention to the products on the site. The previous owner didn't seem to have paid much attention to which products were selling and which weren't, and since it's drop-ship I can see why, but people like to see a carefully curated collection of items and don't want to wade through a list of everything you think they could possibly ever want. So I'm deleting stuff that no one has ever bought or even looked at, and adding new products that are similar to the top movers. The previous owner had also never sent out any newsletters, so I'm hoping a few carefully timed Christmas newsletters and promotions are going to bring people back who haven't been there in a while.

State of the debt November 1st

2011-11-01T16:36:00.000-04:00

How I'm doing as of November 1st:

Total debt: $40,585

Bank of America $7,916
Amex Blue $2,103
Amex Gold $0
CareCredit $417
Chase PerfectCard $6,779
Chase Universal $5,545
Discover $4,205
Student loan debt $13,620

Total assets: $33,455

Savings (in various accounts) Basically nil
Traditional IRA $23,257
Roth IRA $1,387
401k $4,484
SEP-IRA $4,327

Net worth: -$7,130

In July my net worth was almost $2k higher, but I'm actually pretty pleased about this month's number anyway. Because:
1 - I sold my previous car and bought a new one worth about $1k more. I used savings to fix some things in the old car so I could get the best price for it, and to pay for the "upgrade" and fixing the new car's condenser.
2 - I also used savings to buy a business. Yes, I know I just sold the last one, but it looked like a good opportunity and the price was good. I will probably sell this business fairly soon, as I put a lot of time and money into upgrading it (new shopping cart system, affiliate program, etc) and will hopefully make about a thousand bucks on the deal. Not bad for a few months' work.
3 - I didn't know it at the time, but July was the high point for my investments' worth. The markets have been pretty bad and overall my investments went down about $2500. However, since I am aggressively paying down my debts (at the rate of about $1,000 a month) my debts going down outpaced my investments going down somewhat. So most of the loss of net worth is due to me spending my cash. I guess technically my car and the business are assets, but I don't like including them here since they are not particularly liquid. But, I will use some of the proceeds from selling the business to pay down debts, so it'll eventually show up on the balance sheet.

The one thing I'm not too pleased about is the fact that I have practically zero cash on hand. This makes me very nervous. I've started my Christmas shopping, and after spending $300 have presents for most of the people on my list. (I like to get started early, and make sure I have something at least halfway good for everybody, and then if I find something better later, either they get multiple presents or I put the less-good one in the present pile for anyone I forgot to buy something for.) I have a good chunk of change coming in this month from various projects, but none of it's here yet, and then I'll need to spend it on getting the car's heater fixed (go me, buying a car that neither heats nor cools!) and taking the dog to the vet. So here's hoping that nothing goes too wrong between now and whenever I manage to save up some money. I had set a goal of paying off my Amex cards by the end of the year, and I did pay off the Gold card, but have not made as much headway on the Blue card. Hopefully if I sell the business by the end of the year, and get cracking on other projects to make money, I'll still be able to meet that goal.

The other day I opined to Boyfriend about how much f&$!@# money I will have once I pay off my debt, given that I turn over essentially half of each paycheck to debt. I make a decent salary, so if I'm not paying $1k a month to someone else, we could go to Italy twice a year without any trouble. He regarded me balefully and said, "Yeah, but by then we'll have kids, so we still won't really have any money." Voice of optimism.

Five Financial Lessons Learned from Star Wars

2011-10-16T21:10:00.002-04:00

I am a big nerd so I thought this was funny. Today's entertainment is provided by the freelance writer Nicolas Gallego!

Once a year, I force my family to sit down with me and watching the original three Star Wars films back-to-back (the other three are banned from the household). This year was special because the series was finally released on Blu-ray so for once we could play it on our huge living room screen and actually watch it like we were in the theater. Seeing the intergalactic action unfold more vividly than I ever had before, I got to thinking about how much these movies had made me the person I had become.

For the sake of this blog, I've isolated five lessons learned from Star Wars that relate to personal finance and money in general:

1. Sell your landspeeder to follow your dreams.

In the original film, hero Luke Skywalker must say goodbye to his landspeeder in order to afford the journey across the galaxy to enroll in spaceflight school. You have to be willing to give up that sports car or other precious personal possession if it allows you to pursue your dreams. Otherwise, you'll continue to stay stuck on the same rock that you've been living on for years.

2. Rewards work.

In order to talk swashbuckling gun-for-hire Han Solo into helping him save Princess Leia, Luke reminds the cynical hotshot that if she were to be saved, her rescuers would surely be handsomely rewarded. Most people in life - even the noble ones - respond best to rewards. Incentives are what get people off the couch, and the earlier you learn this, the better. It's a priceless part of getting goals accomplished.

3. If they are stronger, then you are faster.

The Galactic Empire never thought that the Rebel Alliance was a real threat because they had 1,000 times the firepower and resources. Whether it's a small business or a bake sale, those who are financially better equipped than you are always going to create an unfortunate disadvantage on your part. But success can still be found by converting these apparent disadvantages into actual advantages; the Rebels always stayed one step ahead of the Empire because their small size enabled them to.

4. Material does not matter.

Who can forget the stunning revelation that the great Jedi master Yoda was not some decorated beast of a man residing in a fortified palace but rather a munchkin hermit hacking it out in a mud hut? What you are made of - “this crude matter” - and everything else physical in this world doesn't amount to squat compared to who you are. Keep this in mind when making judgments about others you don't know.

5. All the wealth in the galaxy can't break certain bonds.

Darth Vader returned himself to the side of good by saving his son Luke from the clutches of the evil Emperor, something the latter never expected to have happen. At the end of the day, wealth withers in the shadow of family and friendship. All the number crunching and data mining in the world can't predict the power of love in determining how people conduct their lives.

Money and finances are strong forces, and have their place in the functioning of society, but they are by no means the only force at work or the only influence that are important in life. Putting money into perspective is key to bettering your life, no matter how much richer or poorer you expect to become in the near future.

Ack ack ack

2011-08-14T15:30:00.002-04:00

That's one ack for each thing that's gone wrong this month. It's been a ride, let me tell ya.

First - Our kitchen ceiling started leaking, and after sawing a hole in it, the plumber determined there was nothing wrong with the pipes (phew) but that the walls around our tub were leaking (shit!) and so we have decided to replace the tub walls. The owners before the last owners of this house redid the bathroom, and while they generally did an OK job, they put this PVC sheeting stuff up on the walls around the tub, and didn't quite get it to actually meet at the bottom. This means that there is a lovely gap wherein water can shoot through and come out the kitchen ceiling. We had been meaning to redo the bathroom and put in tile, which would look nicer and also raise the value of the house somewhat, but it was rather low on our priority list. So we have to bite the bullet and get that done, and hopefully it will be all up tonight so maybe we can take a shower sometime soon! I'm actually kind of glad that we are getting this done, because when we took off the PVC sheet, we discovered that the drywall and part of the window box were wet and gross, so now we are preventing the gross from migrating further. It seemed pretty contained so the damage should be all gone now. I think this is going to cost us about $900 and a year off my life - our contractor is very nice and very good, but not very punctual, and I went to four different stores yesterday trying to find special tiles for our weird little foot-of-the-tub wall and the window surround.

Second - So my car developed an expensive and irritating condition - the speedometer needle started jumping a little bit. I didn't think much of it, and when the car went in to have its shocks replaced, I asked the guys to take a look at it and replace the sensor or whatever was not working properly. I figured $100 max. Turns out that there is something wrong with the wiring to the instrumentation panel, which is a single unit, and costs $600 just for the part, plus another $500 for the labor, which includes taking it to the dealership and having the car's computer reprogrammed. Fun! Other than being annoying, this caused the car's cruise control to no longer work properly, as it's an aftermarket addition and depends on the speedometer needle to maintain speed, instead of being routed through the car computer as is typical in other cars where it's installed at the factory. I decided that one way or another the car's value would go down by at least $1,000 - either I would put $1,000 into it to fix this, or the speedometer might eventually break altogether and then I would have to fix it then, or attach a gizmo to the car computer slot that would tell the speed, which would probably look really stupid and further make it difficult to sell the car in the future. In the end I decided I'd rather not deal with it at all, and should sell it before it gets more noticeable. I ended up selling it for only $200 less than I bought it for a year ago, and I probably could have gotten the same price if I'd been more savvy about my advertising. Then I went out and bought a nicer car, for about $1,000 more than I sold the old one for, which needed $500 in repairs (the condenser was cracked so it had no A/C.) Altogether after all is said and done I am pretty much out of cash, but I own a more valuable car that works much better. Hooray!

Third - American Express cancelled my cards. I had kind of seen this coming, because I am no longer exactly the prime grade A beef customer I was when I got my cards several years ago. I put several large purchases on the gold card which I immediately paid off, but they saw this as suspicious activity, and asked me to have my bank verify how much money I'd had each of the last six months. The not very nice lady on the phone told me that this was to help out their customers who were having some financial straits. Lady, if I was not having financial straits, don't you think I would have just paid for those in cash to begin with?? Sheesh. So basically they cancelled the cards because I don't have a lot of money and didn't use them much. I still have a balance on the cards and have to pay that off, but now the only older credit card that is still actually open is the Discover, which only has $400 in open credit line on it, since all of my cards keep cutting my line every few months to be pretty close to my balance. I realize that they don't want me to charge any more, but if they haven't noticed, I've only been putting charges on the Amex gold card, which I always pay off quickly, and I've been paying everything else down as much as possible.

Because I now have so little actual available credit anymore, Boyfriend went ahead and put me as an authorized user on one of his credit cards - obviously without asking me, because I would have told him not to, but he does have a point, that I might have an emergency and need to borrow money, and he knows I'm good for it. And I have a tiny bit of hope that perhaps his stellar credit will lift my credit score a little, since it's likely to have taken a nasty hit after my Amex cards were cancelled - one was at least eight years old, and one was five years old, and given that I've only been able to have credit for nine years, that's kind of important.

And a little bit of funny news - I did apply for a credit card and got approved. However it has a $250 limit and comes from Virgin Airlines. I guess it's better than nothing, since I'm trying to raise my credit score. I'm pretty sure that nothing short of paying off all of my credit cards is going to raise my score at this point though. I'm looking forward to that day (according to Mint, in approximately March 2014) when I have no credit card debt, and I start getting fawning credit card offers in the mail for all of those lovely 0% balance transfers that I could REALLY USE NOW. Grumble.

All about the H&R Block tax class

2011-08-04T08:04:00.003-04:00

I took the H&R Block basic income tax class a few years ago, and since I know a lot of people come to this blog looking for info on it, I also wrote up an article for MoneyCrashers to spread the knowledge. If you're interested in taking the class (you only have about two weeks to register in most places, for the standard twice a week class) you should definitely check out the article here and then go sign up! Financial knowledge gained is money saved, and taxes are one place a lot of people throw away money because they don't know what they're doing, either by paying someone else hundreds of dollars, or by missing crucial items.

State of the Debt

2011-07-03T13:27:00.001-04:00

How I'm doing as of July 1st:

Total debt: $44,591

Bank of America $8,482
Amex Blue $2,586
Amex Gold $521
CareCredit $577
Chase PerfectCard $7,574
Chase Universal $6,365
Discover $4,387
Student loan debt $14,096

Total assets: $39,235

Savings (in various accounts) $3,177
Traditional IRA $25,502
Roth IRA $1,085
401k $4,655
SEP-IRA $4,815

Net worth: -$5356

I never thought I'd be so happy about a negative number!

For comparison, here is what my debts looked like last July, according to Mint (which currently isn't doing so hot of a job at basic math, but it seems OK on regular data)

Total as of July 2010: $53,215

Student loans: $15,393
Bank of America: $10,627
Chase PerfectCard: $9,659
Universal $8,631
Discover $4,653
Amex Blue $3,361
CareCredit $683
Amex Gold $207

So in one year I have paid down about $9,000 worth of debt. It doesn't feel like a lot on a month to month basis but it looks great over time!

My goal for the year is to get the Amex Blue card paid off. That feels like a little bit of a daunting goal right now, partly because I am first trying to pay off the Amex Gold card since it has a higher interest rate, and I'm also paying down the CareCredit card faster than strictly necessary because it is 0% but only for a certain period of time, and I don't want to get hit with the penalty interest. So to accomplish this I have been stepping up my extracurricular activities. I picked up a couple of assignments I might not otherwise have looked at (like doing price audits at a furniture store - lots of running around the store!) and trying to do more mystery shopping that helps us save money (like getting a pizza pickup shop so we don't have to spend money on dinner.)

Hopefully this will get it moving in the right direction so even if I don't get it completely paid off by the end of the year, I will have made a serious dent in its balance. I'm really hoping that that will help improve my credit profile enough that I can qualify for low-rate balance transfers, which would REALLY help pay down the cards that aren't at a fixed rate. Luckily those are the low balance ones but it would still be really nice.

I'm also really pleased that I have so much cash on hand, and I'm really loath to spend any of it now, even on paying down my debt. =) Cash on hand means security to me, because I would be OK even if there was something catastrophic. (I found out I have to replace my shocks, but that's $400, not catastrophic.) Our household had a pretty good run of no catastrophes and I was able to save the extra money I earned. Also, I just sold CashDuck to a very nice guy who I think is going to do well with it. I really wasn't putting in as much time and energy as I could and I think new blood will really help it. So that gives me more free time as well as an additional bump to my cash reserves.

Our run of no catastrophes ended about two weeks ago, however, when our big cat got a urinary tract blockage and had to spend five days in the vet hospital, to the tune of $1,000. He is doing very well now, and is super floppy and willing to be held any way you want because he is on Valium to keep his urinary muscles relaxed to avoid another blockage. He's... puddly. Boyfriend opened a CareCredit card and put the bill on that, and I'm sending him extra money with each of my paychecks to pay off my half of the bill. Hopefully we can now start on another long catastrophe-free streak!

The Sane Person's Guide To Starting Couponing

2011-06-21T08:00:00.004-04:00

"Extreme" couponing is the latest craze among the frugal, but I like to practice a more casual couponing. I'm kind of an evangelist for couponing - I get all het up when I see someone buy something that I know has a coupon, and even worse, is going on sale TOMORROW - but I also feel like people think you need to fill up your basement with mustard and spend all day alphabetizing your coupons by barcode in order to get deals. Not so! I will teach you how I coupon, which is to say, the relaxed couponing method.

1. Get 2 copies of the Sunday paper each week.

Why 2? Dunno. I suppose you could get 3. But I forbid you to get more than that because it leads down the spiral of I Could Be Getting More Stuff Free! This is the path to the mustard-filled basement. Man cannot live on what you buy with coupons alone (well, I guess you could, but you might die of scurvy.) Also, unless you are really, really good at couponing, the $2 per paper is going to set you back a lot if you buy ten a week.

The Sunday paper is where you will get most of your coupons. However, if you don't have a local paper that has coupons, you can also buy whole inserts, which is very economical compared to buying the coupons individually. I use Whole Coupons Inserts and Coupons By Dede when my paper doesn't have all the inserts for that week. You can even buy previous weeks of inserts to get you up to speed. Also, especially when you're new to couponing and don't have a ton on hand, printable grocery coupons will help fill out your binder.

2. Keep your coupons in order by date and insert.

This is how most couponing websites will refer to the location of the coupon you want to use - referring to the inserts by date and insert brand. RedPlum, SmartSource, and Procter and Gamble are the three major kinds. I'm a cutter-outer - I like to cut up my coupon inserts - so I keep them in envelopes labeled with the date and RP, SS, or P&G. Some people prefer to keep the coupon inserts intact and just cut out what you need for that week, which is also a good method. But whatever you do, don't cut them all out and then sort them by Dairy, Snacks, Canned Goods, etc like most coupon organizers are labeled. It'll make it harder to pull out what you need. If there are coupons you know you'll use RIGHT AWAY because you buy this stuff every week, buy more of that coupon from The Coupon Clippers and leave the original coupon in its envelope or insert. That way you can still find it two months later when you've forgotten all about it and now there's a big sale.

3. Get a giveaway bag ready.

Why start thinking about giving away stuff before you've bought a single thing? Well, I have a hard time admitting I'm wrong about stuff, and being wrong about whether we'll use something I paid ten cents for is the hardest thing of all. Luckily, if I determine I've gone on a couponing binge and bought something we'll never use, I repurpose that purchase charitably in my mind. "It was for the food bank!" I say. And thus my dignity is restored. If you don't have a giveaway bag, you might look at that eighth bottle of Caesar dressing and think, "Ah, we'll use it someday." The next time you see that bottle might be six years after it expires. Instead, it could've been doing somebody some good. You know somebody's going to have a food drive eventually, whether at your work, your church/synagogue/commune/whatever, or barring all else, the Post Office does it once a year in May. So make sure that your giveaway bag is always in the back of your mind - not least because you can do ten times as much good if it's 80% off. In fact right now I have an entire paper grocery bag filled with tampons, body wash, toothpaste, and other items that would keep a family clean for a year, but the whole bag cost about $20 and will make the women's shelter very happy. (The food bank bag, however, is full of mayonnaise, to keep me from hoarding it.)

4. Pick two grocery stores to target (max!)

While true extreme couponers will hit every store in the area, I think that attempting to cover all the sales will drive you batty. If you have any stores in the area that double coupons, you could pick that one, but do try to include the store you usually go to. I do most of my couponing at Giant Eagle, and go to Kroger when there's a special storewide sale on. I used to try to hit a third one too, and it became too much to keep up with. I would actually feel bad when I did not go to the third store, but who needs to go to the grocery store three times a week with only two people in the house? It was unwise. Some people prefer CVS, Walgreens, or other drugstores over grocery stores, and those have their pros and cons as well. I try to keep it simple and do most of my coupon shopping at the store I would be shopping at anyway. This is also a crazy-limiting suggestion - you can certainly go to other stores if you know there's a promotion, but trying to go to all of them every week just eats up time.

Then, once you've picked out your stores, sign up with any loyalty card programs they have. Use your real name and address (you might get coupons in the mail!) and make sure to sign up with that card on their website too. Many stores are moving towards e-coupons, so this is a potential source of free extra coupons that you can't miss.

5. Sign up with The Grocery Game or pick out coupon-matching blogs.

There are several different coupon-matching sites out there, but I think the Grocery Game is the easiest for newbies. How you use it: It just gives you a list of items that are on sale that week with their percentage-off and prices, you check off what ones you want to buy, and it generates a list of coupons you need to pull from your (dated and labeled) envelopes. Then, you can print off a shopping list and go to the store. It doesn't have a lot of printable coupons listed, nor will it always be 100% correct for your region, but it is super duper easy.

Here is a widget from the Grocery Game so you can see what it looks like:

View all Grocery Coupons & Grocery Deals

Alternately, you can find a coupon-matching blog. Even though I use the Grocery Game, I also check Coupon Katarina and Saving in Akron for their Kroger and Giant Eagle matchups respectively. These ladies go through the whole sale list and find all the coupons, both from the Sunday paper, coupon websites, and the manufacturer websites, that you can use that week. Usually, they also offer suggestions about how to match up the coupons to get the best deals if there's strategy involved. Make sure that the blogs you follow are using the circulars for your region - there are tons of these blogs so you shouldn't have a hard time finding one that does.

6. Think about what you are actually going to use.

This is another trap that we frugal people sometimes fall into. I'm perfectly willing to eat Fruit Roll-ups for lunch every day, but Boyfriend is not so willing. I'm probably more willing because I know how little they cost and that makes me happy when my lunch is inexpensive, but Boyfriend is only thinking about whether he likes Fruit Roll-ups or not. Your family may be happy that you are saving money, but beware of bringing home ten boxes of cereal and declaring that everyone is having cereal for dinner for the next two weeks. You may incite a revolt.

The best way to get the most out of your coupon money and time is to buy things that your family wants, ahead of when your family wants them. There is nothing to "win" here by getting your whole grocery cart for free if no one in your house wants to eat any of it, or you don't use enough of those things to get through them before they expire. So it might help to go through your list with your partner or someone else in the household and say, "Are you going to eat this if I buy it?" If they say no, and you buy it for ten cents on the dollar, that's going to be ten cents wasted, instead of ninety cents saved.

7. Start shopping!

At first, you're not going to be able to get really great deals, because it takes time to get going with couponing. A lot of sales will involve coupons from the previous week's circular, but a lot of times they will use two-month-old coupons which you won't have until you've been doing this a while. So the best deals will come over time. Keep at it! The idea is to buy things you need before you need them, so that when you want them, you can just pull them out of the cupboard. It's really hard to explain how exciting it is when I can just pull a frozen pizza we already own out of the chest freezer (another good investment, if you can get one used on Craigslist) and ta-da, we have dinner. Or if we want to have fajitas and only need to buy lettuce because I already have everything else in the house.

It is very easy to get 50% or even 75% off on many items. It is very difficult and rare to get 100% off unless you go nutty about the process. But you can really save a lot of money by getting 50% or 75% off stuff you use all the time! I haven't paid full price for paper towels, soup, cereal, dog snacks, salad dressing, or any kind of health & beauty stuff since I started couponing last year. The number of things I get for free is pretty low, though I do try to pick those things up for my giveaway bag even if we won't use it. (Brut deodorant, I'm talking to you.) But even though I'm not overly obsessive, I still have four shelves of stuff in the basement and two full bags of stuff to give away.

People of the internet, have you started doing any couponing? What do you think of my method? How do you do your coupon shopping? Any other tips for sanity-retaining couponing?

It's quiet... TOO quiet... Plus meditations on couponing

2011-06-09T19:54:00.004-04:00

When nothing explosively bad has happened for a while, I start getting antsy. If both my car and Boyfriend's car have had no accidents, major repairs, or green smoke in a few months, I start assuming that it's right around the corner. No pet emergencies? Somebody's gonna eat a spool of thread any day now.

So it is with trepidation that I report that all has been normal for several weeks now. As long as nothing terrible happens, we get by fine on my salary and Boyfriend's unemployment, and I'm even saving some money up from all my extracurricular activities. But I hate to plan too far ahead, or use that stockpile of cash, because I'm sure something will come along to deplete it. For now I'm just hoarding. Boyfriend has a short term contract for now, and several interviews, but I'm not counting those chickens yet.

Speaking of hoarding, I haven't seen the TLC show on extreme couponers yet, but people keep telling me I need to, and from what I've read about it, I think they think I'm going to go right past being able to be on that show and going straight to being on Hoarders. I swear, people! I know I am not NEARLY as bad as I could be. Trust me. There are some websites that I look at now and again for coupon matchups, since they'll put up printable coupons and give suggestions for how to stack your coupons to get the most out of it. (If you're interested, I use Saving in Akron for the Giant Eagle matchups, and Coupon Katarina for the Kroger matchups, since they're both near me. And sometimes they assume you have NINE of one coupon. I thought at first that that was just nutty, until I tried to buy some coupon inserts from my favorite site (unironically titled Whole Coupon Inserts) where I purchase two of whatever wasn't in the local paper that day. There was literally a run on the store - they were cleaned out of the May 22nd circulars. The next week they started a subscription service where you could get ten of each circular each week. Apparently this has been very popular. Now, I am not so obsessed that I don't realize that spending $20-40 each week just on the coupons themselves is probably not a smart move when our whole food expenditures for a week rarely go above $100. (And we buy pie regularly.) But there are definitely people who do this. Had I six children, it would probably make a lot of sense. Since I have 0 children, although the dog would dearly love eighty-three bags of Doritos, all that kind of coupon obsessiveness would do is fill up my basement. (Although I am currently trying to get some shelving units off Craigslist to hold the bounty.) I do send stuff off to the food bank, but I generally only buy food-bank stuff if it's a) cheap or b) something that the food bank really wants, like peanut butter or pasta.

I do feel pretty good about my recent couponing hauls for the shelter, though - I have nearly an entire paper grocery bag full of various toiletry items - toothpaste, body wash, etc - but it's mostly tampons and sanitary pads. Men will not get this on quite the same level, but I really couldn't imagine how much it must just unbridled SUCK to be too poor to afford them. (And these aren't store brands, either - it's the good stuff!) So I am pretty pleased that I was able to get so many, even if they were a little more expensive than the stuff I usually buy for charity, since I feel like they'll really come in handy for some beleaguered woman.

When it rains it pours

2011-05-24T17:27:00.002-04:00

So if you are a regular reader you know of my penchant for picking up extra work. I am always looking for ways to save money and make money, and since Boyfriend is currently between contracts, I've been especially keeping my eyes open lately. I think I may have overdone myself, however. Currently I am:

1) still doing at least one mystery shop a week, often two to four
2) doing online test grading - I did this back when I was unemployed and now they let you do it from home so of course I am doing that in ADDITION to my actual job, and have been putting in 15 to 25 hours a week at it
3) writing tons and tons for MoneyCrashers - tax season was very exciting!
4) another small writing gig
5) spending 3-4 hours a week on couponing - granted, our pantry makes our house THE place to be during the apocalypse, whenever it comes, but it does take time

Pant pant pant.

I know this won't last forever (the test grading gig, at least, is over next week, although I might get offered another one) and I'll be glad of the extra money at the end of it, but it seems lately like there is no piece of time when I am NOT doing something extracurricularly productive in my free time.

I don't know if I mentioned this but about two years ago I bought a very nice electronic keyboard at a yard sale for $50. It sat around for a year until I bought some books since I would like to learn how to play - I can't read music at all so this is a daunting proposition. I was making decent progress (I can now play King of the Road as well as several children's songs) but haven't played in weeks.

A few weeks ago I bought some beginner piano books off Amazon, and then some more at an estate sale. I was really excited to get back to practicing since I do really enjoy learning this new skill, but I was a little sad to realize that I wouldn't actually be able to do any practicing without feeling REALLY guilty for at least several weeks. I have this complex where I feel bad if I'm not doing whatever it is that needs to be done, at times when I am instead choosing to view many pictures of lolcats. But one cannot be good all the time.

I do really enjoy being busy in the off hours though because my regular job is pretty slow paced. It's nice to run around and accomplish things quickly, but we'll see how long I can keep it up!

Professional Indemnity – It’s Not Just The Private Sector…

2011-04-30T17:41:00.000-04:00

Say the words ‘professional indemnity insurance’ and it’s all too easy to think of a solicitor or accountant giving bad advice, or the latest ‘mis-selling scandal’ that’s hitting the headlines.

But today, the need for professional indemnity cover goes much wider than that and covers many sections of the public and not-for-profit sectors as well as the private sector. Social enterprise groups and community organisations are also affected.

With increasing sections of our society needing care and support – whether it’s the vulnerable child or the old person living alone – more and more organisations in the public and not-for-profit sectors are realising that they are going to need specialist and wide-ranging help with their professional indemnity cover.

This article was presented by Markel UK. For more information visit their website today

Whether you like it or not, we’re increasingly living in a ‘blame and claim’ culture – and that doesn’t just mean answering “yes” when the TV ads ask if you’ve fallen over on a wet floor. Today, many sections of the public and not-for-profit sectors have a duty of care to the vulnerable in society. But it’s becoming increasingly evident that even the most vulnerable members of society (or their relatives) are prepared to make a claim if they believe they have a case.

The number of groups who may be at risk from a claim is surprisingly high – it’s not just the local authority with responsibility for a care home, or the charity looking after clients with a learning disability.

Any organisation running an after school club or a nursery; charities offering help with rehabilitation, or any sort of children’s organisation – all of them will be at risk from claims and will need to seek expert help with their professional indemnity insurance. As the law becomes ever more complex, and opportunities for claims increase, even the small local charity will need to move away from the local insurance broker to companies who specialise in professional indemnity for the public and not-for-profit sectors.

Of course, for the directors and management of the organisations affected, the buck doesn’t stop with public liability insurance – they also have to worry about the vagaries of employment law, the duty of care they owe to staff… The list goes on, but the most likely source of a potentially devastating claim is their professional indemnity. Expert help from a specialist broker is an absolute essential: without it, they might not be able to carry on helping their vulnerable clients.

The benefits of using price comparison websites

2011-04-24T17:36:00.000-04:00

The popularity of price comparison websites isn't just a trend; it's now fast becoming a way of life for people up and down the country. Ensuring that you get the best deal, online resources like Money Expert are excellent to secure you deals on a wide variety of things, from credit cards to holidays.

Naturally, the advent of the internet as an accessible resource was always going to have a major effect on the way people shop. Just as e-commerce began to boom, people soon started to get sick of visiting various websites to buy what they wanted, knowing that they could miss out on one-time offers or great deals much in the same way they would on the high street. Comparison websites emerged off the back of this. Now, these portals are cleverly changing shopping for the better, while providing a raft of benefits to anyone who uses them.

Obviously, convenience is the number one benefit. After all, time is money, so saving both minutes and hard-earned cash is twice as good. All you need to do is turn to one reliable comparison website, type in the product you want for yourself and a list of every available deal online is made readily available. While you may enjoy keeping fit by walking between stores in a town or city centre, price comparison websites are nice and easy to browse and lengthen the lifetime of your shoes.

Many of the best deals are now found online, too - you only have to look at transport services, offering as much as a third off just because you use their internet services. Other service and product providers are much the same, and price comparison websites tap into this like no other. Additionally, they can link to product reviews and feedback on the stores themselves, making sure you don't make an error of judgement regarding your investment.

On top of this, users of comparison websites often get the best deals because of the interaction between sellers as part of a wider marketing strategy. Online portals can increase traffic to a website and therefore increase sales, effectively lowering prices.

Whatever you do, don't go with the first deal. You may not even go with the second, third or fourth; with price comparison websites, you know you'll get the best deal available.

100 Updated Things About Me

2011-03-31T08:14:00.002-04:00

I had completely forgotten about this post from way back when until someone commented on it a few days ago - I don’t remember writing it, but it is a funny snapshot of my life five years ago. It's funny to see how much has changed and how much hasn't! Below is the original with my comments.

100 things about me
1. I was born on December 8th. - Still true.
2. I am a brunette.- Still true.
3. I am short. - I am actually somehow half an inch shorter now. I don’t approve.
4. I wear a digital watch all the time. - I stopped about two years ago and now this watch is out of batteries. I just check my phone if I want to know what time it is.
5. I have two guinea pigs. - The guinea pigs passed away within a few months of each other about two years ago.
6. My guinea pigs are named Adrian and Wedge Antilles.
7. Both of my guinea pigs are named after movie characters. - The first was named after Rocky’s girlfriend (my previous guinea pig was Rocky) and the second is a character from Star Wars.
8. I hate grapefruit juice. - Yup, still disgusting.
9. I like ranch dressing on my French fries. - It’s good, you should try it.
10. I went to college in Cleveland, Ohio.
11. I am a science dork.
12. Specifically, I am a biology dork.
13. I own at least 30 books about genetics. - Still true although I don’t buy so many anymore. I do like nonfiction books and like to learn about new things.
14. I hate shopping for clothes. - Actually now I like shopping for clothes, but I do it all online. I have a lot more clothes than I used to!
15. I love shopping for food. - Still true. Now I have gotten into couponing and go at least once a week.
16. My favorite color is red. - Still true.
17. My favorite stores are IKEA and the grocery store. - I would say now it’s Target, The Container Store, and a local Giant Eagle Market District where they make crepes.
18. I love fruit. - I still eat a ton of clementines in season. I don't really like bananas anymore though for some reason.
19. I have bought only 1 music CD in the last five years. - I have been given physical CDs as gifts several times in the past few years, and have bought several albums on iTunes.
20. I have more than 11 gigabytes of music. - Probably still true, I haven’t counted.
21. I use Excel to organize just about everything. - Still true. I really, really enjoy making lists.
22. My cat is named after an ancestor of Aragorn. - Still have this cat. (The name is Fingolfin, if you were curious.) We also have acquired a second cat, named Zoe (after the character from Firefly, since she is a feisty woman.)
23. I have a bamboo plant in my office. - I still have this bamboo plant. It’s much bigger now and needs to be re-potted for the fourth time.
24. There are earthworms living in my bamboo plant's pot.
25. Both of these earthworms are named Rupert. - I’m pretty sure these earthworms are now part of the bamboo plant. I haven’t exactly checked, though.
26. I enjoy high-quality scissors. - I do love scissors. I used to buy them wherever I saw a sale because I’d lose them, but I’ve been better about keeping them where I can find them these days.
27. I am trying to grow out my hair - below the shoulders is short. - It’s almost down to my bum now. I do need a trim.
28. I wear glasses. - Still true.
29. I got glasses in tenth grade, but am only on my second pair. - I’m still wearing these frames, though I have had the lenses changed.
30. I used to collect cut gemstones. - The collection is in the glasses case from my first pair of glasses.
31. I also used to collect blue glass bottles. - I’m pretty sure my parents threw them in the recycling when they moved house.
32. Now I collect Shaun the Sheep items. - I have a few, but now the only thing I would say I collect are “maneki neko” or “lucky cat” figurines.
33. I have art posters all over my office to cover the damage from the previous occupant. - I didn’t realize how lucky I was at that job to have my own office - now I have a cubicle! I have art up here, mostly drawings sent to me by one of my patients.
34. I am extremely organized. - The older I get, the more anal I get about some things.
35. But, I am very messy at the same time. - My tolerance for messiness is going down, but I can still whip up a righteous mess!
36. I have been using computers since I had sufficient manual dexterity. - My parents have a picture of me using one of our first computers while sitting on phone books. I was probably about four.
37. My home computer is blue with a light inside. - I actually have an entirely new computer but it is still blue with a light inside.
38. My previous computer case had a hole cut out of the top with tin snips. - The things one does for ventilation.
39. I eat dry Mini Wheats and Cup A Soup as snacks at work. - These days I bring cheese slices, peanut butter crackers, sliced cucumber with hummus, Fruit Rollups, or Cheezits. I do have some Cup A Soup in my desk.
40. I can't cook independently, but I can follow a recipe. - Boyfriend does most of our cooking. I do all the baking.
41. My favorite ice cream is mint chocolate chip. - Still true.
42. I hate mint in all other forms, including gum and toothpaste. - Unless it involves chocolate, as in York peppermint patties, which I do like a lot.
43. I hardly ever write checks or use cash. - I use checks now for buying things at estate sales, or paying for the dog’s daycare.
44. I have never actually used up a book of checks before I switched banks. - I did actually have to order checks about two months ago. But we haven't moved in almost three years.
45. I was an early adopter of Paypal in about 1998 - they gave me $20 to sign up. - I have three PayPal accounts now.
46. I was also an early adopter of eBay. - I still use it all the time!
47. In high school, I used to buy what can nicely be described as drag queen shoes on eBay to wear to school. - I wrote one of my college application essays about the economics of drag queen shoe sizes on eBay (i.e. they were not listed for men, but those items that were large enough for men to wear were much more expensive.)
48. These were the "scare the freshmen" shoes. - I hope I made an impression.
49. I want a dog. - I got a dog a little over three years ago. I got her two weeks before getting canned from a job, so it was very good timing because I wouldn’t have gotten a dog when I didn’t have a job, but having the dog for company made unemployment a lot more bearable.
50. I didn't get a cell phone until junior year of college. - I have had one continuously since, and don’t have a home phone line.
51. I really get a kick out of getting those $10 checks from the credit card company to sign up for crap I don't need. - Sadly you don’t get those anymore.
52. I love editorial cartoons. - Eh. I like them but I read more articles now.
53. My favorite TV show is Animal Patrol on Animal Planet. - I still like this but I’d say I like It’s Me Or the Dog, The Soup, Glee, or Community better. I watch more TV because I go to the gym and they have it on.
54. I also like Project Runway on Bravo. - Haven’t watched it in years!
55. For these reasons we are not getting rid of our cable even though it is expensive. - We still have cable. It’s actually not that much since we also have cable internet.
56. I held 11 different jobs during college. - I don’t know how I crammed so much in!
57. By the time I graduated college, I was working four different jobs at the same time. - I’m kind of a workaholic.
58. I got fired from two of those jobs. - I’ve now been fired from two more jobs.
59. But I didn't like them anyway, so pooh to them. - Pooh to them.
60. My favorite candy is Zero bars. - I’d say it’s malt balls now.
61. Actually, I just love candy. - I do love candy, but I now have diabetes. Hooray pancreas!
62. Fortunately, I have had only one real cavity, and that was in a molar that fell out. - I haven’t had any since then either.
63. I had braces, but only for about a year and a half. - I still have cement on my teeth. Dental hygienists think it’s plaque and try to take it off. Eventually they will remove all of it.
64. Which was fortunate because I did so much damage to them that it probably cost twice as much as it should have.
65. I have one sister, who is older than me. - She is still older than me.
66. She had to have braces a lot longer than I did. Ha ha.
67. I have a bicycle with a detachable basket. - This was stolen. I was very sad.
68. I do not like to vacuum. - I still hate vacuuming but I do like using my Swiffer sweeper vacuum to get dog hair off the hardwood floors.
69. I do like to load and unload the dishwasher. - I am still in charge of this. I have my own methods of getting as much crap in as possible.
70. I lasted only three weeks in my new apartment before breaking down and buying the dishwasher. (I was going to wait for my second paycheck before buying it.) - We later sold this dishwasher for $100. I probably could have gotten more, it was a nice one!
71. I am not much of a doodler. - I can’t really draw. I do color in the insides of letters sometimes if I am bored in a meeting.
72. I like to have separate bank accounts for different goals, even if all but one don't have anything in them right now. - I have accounts in ING for my car insurance, synagogue fees, and home improvement - only the car insurance one has money in it.
73. I read very quickly and devour content. - Love to read - I read fast and indiscriminately.
74. I like Asian food, particularly Thai and Japanese. - Yes. Now I am hungry.
75. I will eat just about anything with Korean barbecue sauce on it. - This is very sugary so I don’t eat it much anymore. When we eat chicken wings now, I use melted butter, Red Hot, and chopped garlic as a sauce.
76. My favorite vegetable is red peppers. - I like them a lot but I eat a lot of cucumbers with hummus now.
77. I have absolutely no tolerance for spicy stuff. - Hate hate hate.
78. I almost always order eggplant parmesan at Italian restaurants. - I have branched out a lot!
79. I have an ancient laptop with stickers all over the lid (it's about seven years old now.) - I still have this laptop but never use it. I bought one new about four years ago.
80. It took me less than six weeks after graduation before I started my first job. - I was at that job for a year and a half.
81. This was the fourth job I interviewed for. - I do really well at interviews.
82. I really enjoy saving up coins. - Now I mostly use them in the snack machine at work.
83. I have two piggy banks, one for silver change and one for pennies. - One is an elephant and one is a zebra pig.
84. Unfortunately, I hardly ever get any change because cash runs through my hands like water, so I try not to carry any. - I carry an emergency $20 but otherwise don’t carry more than a few dollars.
85. I have a weird farmer's tan from going to a baseball game more than a month ago. - I got burned really badly at that game. I usually get a pretty good tan in the summer, though, from being outside gardening and mowing the lawn.
86. I like to eat frozen fruit. - Haven’t done this in years. Now it hurts my teeth.
87. In the summers, when I lived in un-air-conditioned places, I used to keep a store of blue cool-packs in the fridge to wear on my head. It really works. - It does work. You can also put them behind your knees.
88. I also had a special ice-tube-maker-tray for making tubular ice that I would put in my guinea pig's water bottle when it was really hot. - Now I put ice cubes in the dog’s bowl.
89. I really like egg salad, potato salad, macaroni salad.. all of those salads that are in fact really bad for you. - I will make macaroni salad sometimes in the summer, from a recipe from Boyfriend’s family, but otherwise I eat much healthier now!
90. I drink Crystal Light all day at work cause I am too cheap to buy more Powerade. I just reuse the bottle over and over. - I still do this. And I am so cheap I buy the Crystal Light at Big Lots.
91. I was a vegetarian from ages 12 through 21. - I was a bad vegetarian - ie I never ate vegetables!
92. I still buy most of my meat from Whole Foods. I used to buy it from a co-op. - Much of our meat still comes from Whole Foods.
93. My cell phone plays "Call Me" by Blondie when my parents call. - I have a new phone and it plays “When I’m Sixty-Four” no matter who calls.
94. It plays "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish" when my boyfriend calls. - I had forgotten about this. Maybe I can set that back up. That’s pretty funny.
95. At any given moment there are usually four pairs of shoes in my office - one pair is on my feet. - I still store shoes under my desk. Right now there are clogs, ballet flats, and probably a pair of flip flops.
96. I like the premium Kraft better than the regular old mac 'n cheese, but I don't like Velveeta. - I eat Easy Mac now and again but hardly ever eat other macaroni from a box. Sometimes we’ll get prepared mac and cheese from the deli.
97. My favorite cheese is Havarti. - I eat a lot of weird shit now.
98. As a kid, I used to eat raw hot dogs pretty much all the time. - I still do this sometimes. I will cut them up and take them to work with me.
99. At one point, I had five sets of earring holes. I let the top ones close and now I don't wear any earrings. I kept losing them. - I’m down to two sets of earring holes. I don’t wear earrings very often though.
100. I love books and have bought more than 40 in the past year. - I don’t buy as many books these days, partially because Boyfriend’s family gives me books for Christmas and partially because I am trying to get through my backlog.

There's many degrees of money problems

2010-12-31T16:56:00.006-05:00

So something just happened at work that affected me so much I had to rush home so I could tell it to you.

There are some temps that are in my cubicle row at work, who have been brought in to do data entry work, I don't know for how long. They know my name (because I have a nameplate on my cube) but I don't know theirs. We have exchanged pleasantries, "bless-you", and napkins but little else.

Today the lady in the cube across from me got my attention and then leaned over and asked me for something in a barely audible whisper. I couldn't hear her so she repeated it a little louder - could she borrow a couple of dollars for lunch? and something about her check. I immediately said sure and gave her the singles I had in my wallet, figuring she had been given a ride to work, had forgotten her lunch, and now had to eat lunch out of the sandwich machine in the cafeteria. I didn't think much of it. I have done the same thing, but I have emergency backup ramen in my desk - if I didn't, though, I would just have asked to borrow a couple bucks from a coworker.

Around lunchtime I saw her heading for the front door, evidently heading out to get lunch.

Later in the day, I came in the bathroom and this same woman was standing at the bathroom mirror dabbing her eyes, clearly cleaning up after crying so she could go back to her desk presentable. I asked if everything was okay and she said yes. On my way back to my desk I saw her getting a hug from her supervisor and she seemed somewhat upset still.

So at that point the wheels start turning and it occurs to me that if she left the building to get lunch, it means she wasn't stuck here, but instead that she didn't have any money at all that she could tap to buy herself lunch. And since today is a Friday, if she's missing her check, she won't have any money until at least Monday or even later.

When I get back to my desk, she's picking up her things and preparing to leave. I get out my emergency $20 bill, which is all the cash I have left on me, and go over and ask if she'll be okay for the weekend if she doesn't have her check. She starts to say she'll be okay and I hold out the $20 to her. She's looking at it like her pride is saying no but the rest of her knows she needs it. So I just put it in her hand.

At which point she starts telling me what happened with her check - she should have gotten her first paycheck from this job today but they messed up her direct deposit, and the payroll woman breezily told her that "this cycle we'll just give you a live check", ie a real check and not a paystub. Which means they mailed it to her yesterday or today, and it won't be here till at least Monday or Tuesday because there's no mail on Saturday. Which means if she didn't have money for lunch today, it's unlikely she has money for lunch tomorrow.

We talked a little bit more and I said, no worries, we've all been there. Every time you start a new job you end up working and spending money on gas and childcare and lunches for one to two weeks before you start getting paid. We've all had that new-job bank account dip. I told her not to worry about it (I hope she understood I meant I didn't expect her to pay me back) and she wished me a happy new year.

All the way home I was thinking about why exactly I felt like shit now. Hadn't I just done something nice? It's not like I've got extra cash right now - Boyfriend's working but is on furlough for the last two weeks of the year, and we just got back from traveling to see our families. It costs us about $300 for any trip between hotels, gas, and dogsitter, so neither of us has much at this point. So Boyfriend and I are watching what we spend and waiting for our next paychecks too.

And I finally figured it out - I felt like shit because here I was worrying about how I could speed up paying off my debt, when am I going to be able to start contributing to my retirement again, avoiding paying interest on our veterinary credit card, etc etc etc, but there was no way in hell we weren't eating tonight. We've got enough food in our house to easily not shop for a couple of weeks, including everything the pets need. I have half a tank of gas at least, and while my car needs struts soon, it's running fine. Our heat and electricity are paid up early, I just bought some new clothes with a gift from my supervisor, and I spent last night making cookies for dogs. We're not in need of anything. And here was someone who is.

I love my deals sites!

2010-11-29T08:00:00.001-05:00

Hate to let the cat out of the bag but several friends and family will be getting certificates from Groupon, LivingSocial, et al this Christmas. I have been on a real lucky streak in the last couple of weeks - since you can't predict what the deals are going to be, you can't really plan on purchasing them as gifts, but there have been a few that once I got the email I immediately knew who would love it. I am going to have to buy some cards or something to put them in as it's rather hard to wrap a sheet of paper. :) If you have not signed up with a daily deals site, you are missing out, kids! I'm writing an article on them and have found a ton that are awesome.

If you are not a member of these sites you are sorely missing out:

Groupon - almost everywhere!
LivingSocial - also almost everywhere!
Eversave - many cities available and also tons of online stuff, multiple deals per day

These are nice but don't usually have in-your-city stuff, mostly online deals:

Roozt - exclusively online, all eco-conscious stuff!
Jasmere - all online, lovely luxurious stuff that makes great presents!
Mamapedia - great stuff for kids, especially little kids, and great as gifts for moms
Plum District - lots of great online deals plus you get $5 for signing up!
BuyWithMe - in-city deals for an expanding list of cities plus some pretty good online deals.

Trust deeds

2010-11-20T19:32:00.000-05:00

Large debts can feel like an inescapable grey cloud hovering over your head; it can seem impossible to shift your thoughts away from financial stress no matter how hard you try. All in all, being heavily in debt can significantly affect your life and personal happiness.

A trust deed is a legally binding agreement between an individual who is unable to meet payments to their creditors and a licensed Insolvency Practitioner (the Trustee). The process is not as formal as filing for bankruptcy but once signed, you are committed to the terms of your agreement.

When under the agreement, the trustee acts on your behalf and puts together a proposal to your creditors for approval. If accepted by all creditors, a trust deed is administered and you are then expected to maintain the new agreed payments.

If taken out with the right intentions, a trust deed can relieve some of the burden by consolidating all of your existing credit cards, loans and other debt problems into one often lower monthly repayment. With this method, individuals can pay off as much of their debt as their assets and/or monthly surplus income will allow, usually over a three-year period.

Providing that the terms of the agreement are met, all creditors are obliged not to make contact with you. They may increase their demands on the debtor at any time, but interest and charges will be frozen for the duration of the agreement. That said, the decision to take out a trust deed isn’t a light one and it should be considered carefully.

Trust Deeds are available only to residents in Scotland. There is no set amount of debt or level of contribution required to enter into this process, but only unsecured debts can be included – these are debts not secured against property or other assets such as mortgages. Each trust deed proposal is treated individually, tailored to the individual’s own unique circumstances and confidential advice can be given to anyone considering the process.

Getting better

2010-11-18T07:49:00.002-05:00

Things have gotten a little better in recent months. Boyfriend has a three-to-six month contract again, but this time at a major bank that isn't known for running out of money and firing its newest employees like the last few places he's worked. Unfortunately there aren't a lot of full time permanent jobs out there - a lot of these places seem to be taking on contract employees to try them out, and potentially offer them positions, but they also seem to use contractors when they aren't sure they'll have any money to pay somebody after three months. It kinda sucks. And my job is getting busier all the time, but I'm on salary so I don't get overtime or anything.

At work we're heading into open enrollment season - this year my company is giving us SIX different medical plan options and giving us several for vision and dental where we used to have just two medical and one vision/dental plan. I'm not sure if this is actually designed to give us choice, or to confuse us into not realizing that the costs have doubled again this year. Since Boyfriend is getting his own health insurance now, I can get something that hopefully will lower my costs, since I'm currently paying about $130 a month for my health insurance and feel like I could do with a more catastrophe-focused plan that would lower my premium. I should go use my vision benefits, actually, but I think my glasses prescription is fine.

In pets news, the only sick animal recently has been the dog, who developed a "lick granuloma" on her paw - basically an infection that occurred because she licked a wound, and the wound healed but the infection didn't. I took her to a new vet on a mystery shop and actually really liked the vet, so we'll be going there from now on. With this mystery shop you can do the same pet at the same location approximately once a year, so hopefully I can get her shots for free. The antibiotics were a little pricey but much less than surgery to remove the granuloma would be, and they seem to be working, so fingers crossed on that. I've been putting all the pet expenses on CareCredit (a 0% veterinary/dental credit card) and you get 3, 6, or 12 months to pay depending on the size of the purchase. I've got to really start paying this down because the 0% periods on several purchases are expiring early next year and I haven't made much of a dent in the older purchases.

I'm hoping to get through Christmas with a $300 budget for gifts - we'll see how that goes. I've been buying gifts on and off through the year at estate sales and with Groupons, so I already have several. I'm also combining forces with Boyfriend, who isn't rolling in it either, so we can buy one present jointly for friends and some family members.

If you're not a MoneyCrashers reader, you should be, since I'm now a writer there! It's been interesting trying to write about things that other people can learn and benefit from, instead of going on whining about how I don't have any money on my blog. ;)

A couple of recent articles that were very popular: Essential Tips for Saving on Plus-Sized Clothes, How I Got My Minimums Reduced, Is a College Degree Valuable without Job Skills?

Bad day

2010-09-25T22:30:00.003-04:00

So I recently reopened my website CashDuck.com. I had closed it over a year ago because I was losing my shirt, and there were just fewer and fewer offers I could put up for the users since the advertisers were getting really fed up with not getting enough real paying customers through using incentivized offers. I felt like this was the right thing to do financially, because there were a lot of ongoing costs associated with maintaining the website and I couldn't compete with the other sites who were putting up junk offers, scammy things and using offers they weren't supposed to be using. Recently when I checked in on my accounts with the ad agencies, there were a lot more offers and the quality and price of these offers were a lot higher than they were a year ago. So I decided to reopen CashDuck. I really enjoyed running the business and I feel this is an industry I know something about, so why not use it?

Well, today has been a load of suck as far as getting interest in CashDuck going. I tried to put a post on a Disney forum where a lot of CashDuck users used to go - it got deleted and I got permanently banned for spam, despite this being my second post and despite there being a lot of other posts that were similar if not more spammy. Now I can't even see if anyone replied with a question. Then, while reading pfblogs looking for good personal finance blogs to buy advertising on, I find a post by a former CashDuck user complaining that she feels used by the reopening. And how does she know I was reopening? Because I had sent a few of the previously active users an email to let them know I was reopening. Many of these people already have referrals since there are lots of referral links floating around on old webpages, and since there are new users that have not heard of CashDuck I thought they might pick up a few more referrals, or at least come in and collect their earnings for doing nothing more than having referred someone years ago.

So today is just the day of can't do shit right. I didn't expect people to be doing a little jig when they found out it was back, just log in to see what's new. And of course now that every other GPT website is using the ideas I introduced, which four years ago were very new and interesting (like giving feathers in addition to cash, and allowing Disney Dollars as a cashout method) I have to come up with all new exciting features for everyone else to copy. It's great to go into business for yourself, kids, so everyone can steal your ideas or badmouth you. Bad day.

Car excitement! Part 2: Selling the old car.

2010-08-03T08:06:00.000-04:00

My previous car was a 2002 Chevrolet Cavalier which I had bought in October 2007. It had a rebuilt salvage title from having been in a front end crash, and part of the reason I had decided to get a new car is that the air conditioning was going. Quoth the guy at Midas, either the compressor or the fan on the compressor was going, or both, which would have cost multiple hundreds to fix. After the poor decision making of the transmission incident (I stupidly paid $1700 to have its transmission fixed, on a car that was not worth $1700 at the time) I had resolved that the next major thing that went wrong, I would not fix it and I would replace it. Well, this was the next major thing and so I started looking for a new car.

With all the car's body problems (I sideswiped a parked bus, swiped some ATM poles, backed it into the telephone pole behind the garage multiple times, hit the garage with the front bumper, etc etc etc etc. Let no one say I am a good driver) and with the A/C going and its transmission issues, I didn't think I could get much for the car. When I was at the dealership doing the paperwork for the new car, I jokingly asked if they were interested in a piece of shit Cavalier that drove well but looked like it'd been through a fence. (Because I think it had - it had many spots where the guy I bought it from appeared to have touched it up, but all those touchups came off the first time I took it through a high-powered car wash.) The dealer became very interested and asked a number of questions about it, and asked how much I wanted for it. I said I didn't know, probably $650 or $750, and the dealer said that I should put it up on Craigslist for $1900 and I'd probably get much more, but if I couldn't he'd buy it off me for $650. Apparently his daughter who was about to turn 16 had taken a shine to the car I bought, and was trying to get her father to give it to her instead of selling it, so I wonder if he thought that my Cavalier would be a better starting car! When I called to tell them to deposit the check, I thanked him for the advice and told him I'd sold it for much more than I thought and I appreciated that he was willing to tell me what he thought it was worth. (i.e., most car dealers would have told me it was worthless and that they would buy it for $500, then turn around and sell it for more than what I sold it for.)

After I had bought the new car (see part 1) I got the car cleaned (not a full detail, but washed outside and vacuumed and wiped down inside) and took some pictures. I put it up on Craigslist for $1500 at about 8PM on Monday and had 2 calls that night. I met with one man on Tuesday evening, who was looking at the car for his daughter. No calls or emails Wednesday so I reposted it. (Well, no useful calls - I had one person offer to trade me his $2500 motorcycle for the car, to which I wondered, if it was worth $2500, you should easily be able to get $1500 cash and buy the car that way! I declined to trade.) Thursday I got a few calls and set up an appointment with someone. I also got a call from someone who wanted to know if I could hold it for a few weeks till the middle of August, since she only had half the money at the moment. I was a little flabbergasted because it's not like there won't be other $1500 cars in three weeks! Maybe she thought that the paint on the sides from the ATM poles just matched her outfit or something. I don't know.

Anyway, so I met up with the second guy on Thursday evening - rather late, as the appointment was for 5:45 and he said that if he wasn't there by 6 to call him and remind him. Lo and behind he was not there at 6 so I called him and he eventually got there about 6:25. He did not say too much but poked around the car a lot, apparently he is a mechanic and buys cruddy cars like mine and fixes them up. This week he was looking for a car for his "girl", whom he told my boyfriend while I was walking home to get the title that he had bought and fixed up an Acura for her, but that she didn't want to learn stick and wanted an automatic. As Boyfriend told me later, he said "She bitching all the time!" So I hope this car passed muster. After the test drive he offered $1000 cash and I negotiated up to $1200. I tried to negotiate a little higher and he looked concerned, I found out later that he had only brought $1200 so it seemed he was afraid I wouldn't take it. But I took it, since I had decided early on that that was what I was trying to get for the car, and cash on the spot is always nice!

Since I had the title, I went home and got it and signed it over to him, and then promptly went and deposited the cash at an ATM since I really don't feel comfortable walking around with a huge wad of cash. When we bought Boyfriend's car, I had literally $5,000 in my purse in 20s and 100s and I felt like everyone knew it and was going to choose that day to steal my purse. Sheesh. We also forgot to take the plates off the car, and had to call the guy back and drive to his house to take the plates off once he got it home. So that's saving me another fifty bucks by not having to get brand new plates for the car, since I can transfer the old ones onto the new car.

My parents had lent me $2000 for the car, so now I can send back the proceeds from selling the old car and be able to pay that off pretty quickly. I felt a little bad about doing this since my parents have been helping me out from time to time during the past year of financial badness, but then it occurred to me that my grandparents had financed my family's cars up until I was in middle school, so I shouldn't feel too bad about the loan. =) I think my grandmother thought it was a better use than sticking it in a CD and I think she is right. After we sold the Cavalier, Boyfriend remarked that he was very glad that I had a nice reliable car now because he was constantly dreading getting a teary phone call from me that my car had died in the middle of the highway. He hadn't mentioned this fear to me before, probably to keep me from also getting paranoid about it, but I had already considered that possibility. So I am quite glad that it didn't take long to either find a new car or sell the old, and I am pleased that both transactions went relatively smoothly and with nary a ding to my credit! I feel like I should put a bumper sticker on the back of the Grand Am, "This car brought to you by working for the U.S. Census Bureau", since that is where I got the money to save up for the car. I am down to about $500 in savings now, but since I have been doing a ton of mystery shopping and other work (more details later) I should have a lot coming in this month to replenish it. Hooray!

Car excitement! Part 1: Buying the new car.

2010-08-01T18:19:00.004-04:00

So I finally got a new car! (Well, a new to me car.) I am super psyched as I am quite pleased with myself with both the deal I got on buying it, and what I was able to get for my old car. But one thing at a time.

1. The New Car

New car is a 2003 Pontiac Grand Am. It's bigger than the Chevy Cavalier I had but gets the same mileage, and has remote start and cruise control, which were 2 things I was dying for. It is also in much better shape than the Cavalier was (since I haven't run it into anything yet) and doesn't have any body damage or any other major problem. However, the reason I was able to afford it is that it has a rebuilt salvage title. I bought it from a small town dealer who did some detective work and found out that the reason it has this title is because it went in to a dealership in Lima, OH for an oil change, and somebody forgot to tighten something, and all the oil leaked out. Well, the engine seized, and since that is an expensive repair job, whoever owned the car opted to just get the cash for it from the insurance company and turned it over to insurance. Any time that happens, it automatically gets a salvage title. It seems that someone at the dealership, probably one of the mechanics, then bought the car back from the insurance company and replaced the engine. They then sold it to someone else three weeks later, and that person drove it for two years before selling it to a dealer near the one I bought it from, who sold it to my dealer. Somewhere along the line the remote start and cruise control were added aftermarket.

So that's the Grand Am's story. Having a rebuilt salvage title means that I got a great deal on it, but it will also sell for less when I want to sell it down the line. I'm hoping that I can get many years out of this car before that happens, and also hoping that I don't make the stupid mistakes I made with the Cavalier. (I put $1700 into the Cavalier in November to fix its transmission. I just sold it for $1200. Dumb.)

Overall I am very pleased with the car. I had wanted a bigger car that was easier to drive on the highway because Boyfriend and I frequently drive the three hours home to see our families, and this month will be driving both home and to Michigan to see some friends who recently moved there, so lots of highway driving. Boyfriend doesn't want me to drive his car (and if you'd seen the Cavalier's body damage, you wouldn't want me to drive your car either) however since I am perfectly happy to drive long distances, it makes more sense for me to do the driving, and so we used to rent a car whenever we'd be driving a long enough distance that we needed to trade off. I'm over 25 now so it doesn't cost as much as it used to, but still a good $40 a day for a nice car after all the taxes and what not.

This was actually the first car we saw - I tried to make an appointment to see a 2004 Malibu off Craigslist but the guy balked when I said that I would like to take it to a mechanic. Well, more accurately, he said it was fine, and then when I called him back to make a specific appointment, he said that "my wife and I" had thought it over and thought it wasn't a good idea, but I could bring the mechanic there. Nuh uh. If someone won't let you take the car to a mechanic, they know there's something wrong with it. The guy also claimed that he had multiple others interested in it with just a test drive and were willing to pay cash (what was I willing to pay with, fresh live lobsters?) so he was taking a pass on showing it to me. I took great satisfaction in seeing this car appear on Craigslist day after day - the last listing was for $600 less than it was originally listed for (at $3600) so I guess those multiple others didn't exactly pan out.

I also found this car on Craigslist, but it was listed by a small dealership literally called Just 2 Guys Selling Cars. I am not kidding, and I wrote that on the check. They said they had had a number of people out to see it but that everyone was scared by the rebuilt title. I was a little nervous, because many of the Cavalier's problems were directly related to having been in a crash (one time, the frame had to be tightened, and we had to replace items you should never have to replace, such as the circuit board that runs the turn signals) but they exhaustively went over what they had found out about the car and they were very certain it had never actually been in a crash. They took it to apparently every car place in town to get its electronics checked, the body checked at a body shop, oil changed, etc. So I felt pretty confident.

It was listed at $3500 but I asked if they would be willing to take $3200, and they did some numbers and said they could do $3600 total including tax, title, etc. That works out to about $3300 for the car itself so I was pleased with that. What really floored me though is that I said that I was transferring money out of savings and my parents were sending me a check, so would it be possible to put down a deposit and I'd bring them cash on Friday and pick up the car? And they said, Nah, just write us a check now and call us when we can deposit it. I was totally floored as I have never had anyone take a check in a situation like that. They also said that if I wanted to take it to a mechanic and I found something I didn't like, that I could just bring it back and they would tear up the check. I was very impressed by their not acting like I am a scam artist out to get them and that they were willing to stand behind the car if something was wrong. So they will definitely be getting my business in the future when we need another car. If you're in the central Ohio area, the dealer is in Groveport, OH and their website is http://www.just2guyssellingcars.com/.

Numerous times over the next few days, Boyfriend would drive the car and say how pleased he was and that he thought we got a good deal. I am also very pleased with myself and feel that my obsessive-shopping approach saved us both time and money. I had been looking at cars on Craigslist for the past month, so it is not by accident that we saw this particular car. I looked up KBB values and Edmunds reviews on all the models I was interested in so I knew it was a good deal. I am willing to accept the risk inherent with a rebuilt salvage title, and with a replaced engine in general, and feel that for the price I got, I will be happy even if the car only lasts a few years.

To keep this post from being 9 million words long, tune in next time for exciting tales of meeting strange men in church parking lots! (To show them the Cavalier.)

And finally some good news! And then more good news!

2010-05-18T19:09:00.003-04:00

So Boyfriend finally got a job offer. It's a 3 month contract to hire doing programming at a place that does police department database integration. It's a good hourly rate and they seem sane. And, he can start Monday, which is awesome. We were really worried about what was going to happen with unemployment - it certainly won't extend forever and since his last job only lasted 19 weeks he didn't get to start over on the unemployment clock for the year. He's been on so many interviews the last couple weeks that I was really hoping at least one would turn out. He got the offer two days ago and got all his paperwork done. Well, it seems good luck travels in packs, because today he got a call on a different job offering him a different 3 month contract to hire gig. Sheesh.

Now that our financial life is going to be looking up, I'm thinking again about buying a new car. Well, not new new, of course, but "new to me" as my family says. I saw a good car on Craigslist at a local dealer a few weeks ago and it got the wheels turning. Part of the problem there is that my car is truly a piece of junk on the outside. It's reliable on the inside, and I took good care of it, but this was my first car and I.. well, I hit a bunch of stuff. I hit ATM poles twice, I hit the garage, I hit a parked bus (it's a long story and left some ugly damage) and the car already looked bad when I got it. Boyfriend doesn't think I can get $1000 for it and he might be right. I was hoping to sell it to some 16 year old who's also just going to hit it on stuff, but we'll have to see. Since we've been pretty lucky recently (no major car problems, none of the animals needed surgery, no house emergencies) I actually have a couple thousand saved up. After all we've been through though I am incredibly antsy about spending the cash, though. The car I found is a hatchback 2004 Aveo for $5400 at a nearby dealership, and I could probably put a good chunk down and trade in my car, but I am unlikely to get a stellar financing deal. I had intended to run this car into the ground, but now that that point is getting close, I envision "running into the ground" translating into "stranded in the middle of the road in rush hour traffic when the transmission inevitably seizes."

I'm kind of hoping it rains tonight - among other things, I've been working for the Census as a door to door person, and if it rains I don't have to go out. :) But I only have eight addresses to hit, and we're leaving Thursday for a friend's wedding so I'll miss a few days of work, so I should probably go. I'm pretty glad I have the census gig even if the work is less than exciting, since it pays really well ($15/hr! seriously!) and is self scheduled. I know I'll be happy in two weeks to have the money from the couple hours I'll get tonight, but it's not much of a motivator right now.

The ol' I-Have-No-Money blues

2010-03-27T21:58:00.002-04:00

One thing that's struck me recently is that I used to post a lot. And I mean a lot. When I first started blogging sometimes I had to save posts so that I wouldn't look like a crazy person. Some of this is due to the fact that I was very bored at work and so would have the time to write up a post on anything that popped into my head. Some of this is due to being new to blogging, so that most of those thoughts were new ones and did indeed merit a post. But increasingly I realize that much of it was due to the fact that I was new to having a real salary and extra money, and so I had to for the first time think about what exactly I was going to DO with the extra money. Other than spend it. I had enough money to spare that I had the luxury of deciding what to do with my 403b that I had at the time, best ways to leverage it to make more, etc.

The difference now is that a year of my unemployment and a year of Boyfriend's unemployment and purchasing a house that needed work means I am in a lot of debt. Boyfriend was laid off from his last position after only four months because some contracts they'd been counting on didn't get signed. At this point we're looking to conserve cash and earn what extra we can. So any decisions about money are very straightforward - do I save this money or do I pay down the highest interest rate debt? We aren't in any danger of not eating or not making the mortgage payment or any of that, but there a) aren't a lot of extra dollars to have to worry about what to do with, and b) I don't really have any money that can be considered "extra" anymore.

Consequently, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my finances these days. I spend most of it thinking about ways to earn more money, and I have been doing a ton of mystery shopping, to the point that I will get paid for 14 separate mystery shops in April, but all of that money is either going to go into savings or towards whatever is the most pressing cash need at the time (such as getting my front wheel bearing fixed on my car.) Other than that, I'm only contributing 1% into my 401(k), which at least is getting fully matched now, but I don't really do anything with my other investment accounts.

So I admire the bloggers who do manage to make something interesting out of having a mountain of debt and a small income. I'm just not sure what else to say about mine. In the future (and I will try to update this more regularly) I will post a State of the Debt note. I had previously not wanted to fully disclose how much debt I have, being rather embarrassed to have got into such a mess from being in a really good position a few years ago, but what do I have to gain from pretending that it doesn't exist?

Current State of the Debt, March 27th, 2010:

Chase #1: $10,388, at 6% interest
Chase #2: $9,450 at 2% interest
Bank of America: $11,384 at 5.5% interest
American Express: $4,496 at 15.24% interest
Discover: $4,719 at 14.49% interest
CareCredit: $764 at 0% interest (temporary)

I'm not going to bother including my student loans, because otherwise I'd be even more depressed than I regularly am when I look at these numbers. Mint helpfully totals them in for me - currently it tells me that I am $53,000 in debt. But the student loans are low priority and I deduct the interest anyway. So I'm not putting them in. Nyah.

Next month I will be getting paid for a bunch of mystery shops, plus starting a working at home project to grade standardized tests. So that will help out a lot, not least because anytime I am awake and fretting about how much I owe and how little money we have, I can log into the system and earn some more, which will at least make me feel like I'm doing something about it.

Also, the cards (other than CareCredit which is a veterinary expense card) that are at lower interest rates are there because I called up the companies and said, look, I really can't afford this, is there anything we can do to lower the payments or the interest rate? And Chase and Bank of America put me on repayment plans, which is great in that it lowered the interest rate significantly, but bad in that they closed the cards. I had not wanted to do this with all of my credit cards, since I wanted to preserve some measure of flexibility and still have some credit left when I get out of this. However, American Express and Discover keep cutting my lines of credit (before all this, I had at least $7k in credit line on each card) and raising the interest rates. So I think it's probably not worth an extra $100 a month in interest charges alone to preserve the existing lines of credit. Once I get better established and have lower debt-to-credit limit ratios, it shouldn't be otherwise difficult to get new credit since I've never missed a payment in my life. I've been trying to do balance transfers but no one will touch me, and even Prosper, et al, won't take me since I have so much debt (despite explicitly offering an option to list it as a debt consolidation loan.) I don't want to destroy my credit, but I also want to be out of debt someday without ending up paying thousands in interest. I'm still waffling about this though - I don't want yet more mistakes screwing up my future.

Hey jobhunters: Be nice to the secretary

2010-03-02T18:42:00.002-05:00

As a useful addendum to the popular post in which I mention tattoos, here is another little tidbit that I would like to pass along. At work, I frequently visit with the front desk secretary as I process my outgoing mail through the mail meter. She checks in people who are coming to interview for positions at the company. Here is my inside info: The front desk secretary is part time HR. Once the people have finished interviews for the day, the guy who interviewed them comes out and asks the secretary what she thought of them. Her impressions of whether you were nice to her, on time, said please and thank you, etc, could make or break you. And in a pinch, if someone is out sick, she may actually interview you as well. So always be nice to the secretaries!

Me 'n my restaurant coupons

2010-01-16T14:33:00.004-05:00

So I have become a serious cheapskate when we eat out now. We hardly ever eat out and pay full price anymore. First it started with going out with friends to a place with 1/2 price appetizers between 5 and 7 - we get there at 6:30 and have appetizers for dinner (this includes chicken wings, which counts as real food in my book.)

My 3 best resources:

1. Restaurant.com - they have gift certificates between $10-100, although most are for $25 or $50. $25 certificates are usually $10 to $15, already saving you at least ten bucks. But here's the secret - sign up for the email list, and use the tons of coupon codes they send out. For all but the most popular restaurants, you can get them for $2 or $3 at 80% off. For Christmas, I gave Boyfriend's brother a folder full of certificates I'd picked up over the previous two months for a couple bucks each.

Caveat here: they don't expire for a long time, which means you may forget about them. I usually buy one and then when we use it I buy another. I have no shame at going to these places every two months and using a certificate every time. Also, check the fine print - some are only good if you buy $50 of food, or only Sunday through Thursday, or what have you. We have some for Ted's Montana Grill, which is a completely awesome and delicious restaurant, but you have to spend $50. It's not a terribly expensive place which means you either need four people or a hollow leg.

2. Entertainment book (entertainment.com to order) - if you've never heard of this, I feel bad for you and your wallet. These are basically just big books of coupons, which are available in most big cities, and contain offers for lots of local restaurants and other services as well as chain restaurants. My mom got me one this year and within 48 hours of receiving it we'd already gotten buy 1 get 1 free fajitas at Baja Sol. Given that the book is $20, you can pay for it pretty quickly. There are some other really good things in there, like $10 off per night through Priceline, and the usual dry cleaners and what not. But definitely worth it for the restaurants alone, especially if you're willing to try new places, because most of them are buy 1 get 1 free.

Caveats - many of these restaurants you may never have heard of. My book has a ton of little places that aren't familiar to me, and so it can be a bit of a gamble. Best to check the internet first for any reviews. Also, although many coupons are BOGO, they can limit the amount you can get free. So a Mexican place near us that we like has a BOGO coupon in the Entertainment book, but only up to $6 (most entrees are $8-9, so not a huge deal, but kind of annoying.)

3. Groupon - sign up and get an email each day with some kind of percent-off deal on a gift certificate to a specific place. They just started in my city a few weeks ago and it is somewhat hit or miss, but when it hits it's pretty awesome. For Christmas I got Boyfriend's mom a Groupon for $60 of services at an Aveda salon - and it only cost me $25. And I also got super cheap tickets to the art museum to keep in reserve if we have a slow Sunday.

Caveats - you get a random deal each day which isn't really targeted to you, so you may have no interest whatsoever. And a lot of them aren't for food (they're for, say, personal trainers) and almost none are for durable goods. But when you get something good, it's REALLY good - usually at least 40% off. And they're good for a year. On the downside, though, probably 400 other people also bought that same coupon today, so they may be a little slammed with the coupons for a month or two. They're good for a year, so I'd hang onto them for a few months so the staff doesn't give you the stink-eye.

4. Email lists of chain restaurants - I am signed up with every chain restaurant we've ever been to, and ones that we'd like to go to as well. Frequently you get something for signing up, so if we're thinking of going someplace, I try to sign up for it a couple hours beforehand and see if they send me something. Tip - they usually ask you for your birthday and sometimes your anniversary, so unless you want to eat out twice a day for the two weeks surrounding your birthday, try to space them out and choose random months. I've never actually had anyone ask me for any proof, and if you stick the coupon in with the bill, they won't sing to you either. (Blech.)

Caveat - in addition to coupons you will get lots of other emails, about special events, etc. I don't mind too much, but if you already get a lot of email you might. Perhaps a separate email address you check only when going out? Also, the coupons aren't as good - usually on the order of $5 off or a free appetizers.

My favorites: BD's Mongolian Barbecue - recently I got a "loyalty card" to print out that essentially means buy 3 get 1 free.
Red Robin - I get a free appetizer coupon every couple months.
The Melting Pot - they send you free chocolate fondue coupons for birthday and anniversary, but more importantly on their email list they let you know about upcoming special-price days.
Gordon Biersch - sometimes I get a BOGO entree coupon, which is super nice.

Any other suggestions for good sites I've missed? I love me some discounted gift certificates, so if anyone knows of sites I don't, please comment.

Starting to look up

2009-11-10T17:57:00.003-05:00

Of course, I always think it's starting to look up - stupid optimism.

Good: Boyfriend got a job!
Somewhat bad: Boyfriend is on hourly at a lower rate for the first 90 days. Then he will be bumped to salary at his old rate. It's still more money than unemployment!

Good: Boyfriend's mom is doing a lot better.
Bad: Boyfriend's mom is still living with us with no plans to basically ever live independently again. We are not sure if she is moving in with another family member soon or not.

Good: Boyfriend's mom will soon be getting unemployment due to the extension. So she will be financially contributing to the household.
Bad: This means she's even less willing than before to look for work, if that was even possible. I personally think working for a living, if it is possible for a person, is not something that you should actively attempt to get out of, and don't much appreciate this perspective. (Especially since I have been mystery shopping my ass off to cover household expenses.)

Good: Boyfriend's mom's house got a reasonable offer and is selling.
Bad: Boyfriend's mom never completed her mortgage modification paperwork several months ago, and stopped paying the mortgage four months ago, and so we will clear at best several hundred dollars on the sale. The foreclosure fees and unpaid payments are eating up most of the equity.

We're not too far from paycheck to paycheck right now - Boyfriend has savings in the form of the money the government gave us for buying the house, but since we got the $7,500 deal and not the $8,000 deal, we may have to pay it back, and so he is holding on to most of it, and pulling out money only for emergencies. My parents sent me a bailout since I had to pay my car insurance and replace all my brake pads and rotors - fun!

Plus, we took in a stray cat who's been living in our basement for several weeks - he had an infected toe, so we took him to our vet to get that treated, and once we can scrape it together to get him neutered and get shots, we'll start trying to find him a home. He's very sweet and just wants to be with you, unfortunately I don't think our male cat wants to be with him. =P

Boyfriend's birthday, my birthday, our anniversary, and Christmas all fall close together, so the next several weeks will consist of much watching the mail for mystery shopping checks to come in, and trying to figure out how much I can spend on gifts. Normally I'm quite organized and start a list months in advance, but I haven't given it much thought and need to get on that so I don't forget anyone or double-buy gifts. Last year I bought some stuff from J-List which didn't get here until after Christmas, so some people will get that stuff this year.

I'm just really looking forward to trying to climb out of the hole of paycheck-to-paycheck, and start actually saving some money and paying down debt. At this point most of my debt is a fixed amount per month, so paying those down won't make much of a dent, but I have a couple smaller ones (under $500 each) that if I pay those off, I'll have a lot more to put towards other debt. I just want to feel like I'm getting somewhere. I try to put $100 into each of two savings accounts each paycheck, but inevitably something happens and I have to pull it all out. When I got the brakes done, I had to fall back on ING's policy of letting you "borrow" up to $250 over your checking balance - I didn't have the money until when I got paid, so I went $200 in the red and then transferred money in when I got paid. I've been doing a lot of mystery shopping (between the beginning of October and the end of November I will have gotten my tires rotated three times, windshield wipers replaced twice, gotten carded for alcohol five times, had my oil changed, and gone to the vet with Boyfriend's mom's dog.) So I am hoping I can kill off at least one of the small cards with that. That would feel like something of a victory.

And I got all excited because there was an ad on Gmail for Groupons where I live - if you have not heard of this, it's a site that lets you sign up to purchase super discounted gift certificates, basically, to local stores, but only if a certain number of people also sign up to buy them. I thought this was terrific and I am always looking for restaurant gift certificate deals (we have only once paid full price at The Melting Pot and rarely at many other places) so I was very excited to see that they had come to my city. Alas, they are not yet actually here, but I guess they are planning on it soon. If you are interested, and you like me, you could click here and use my signup link. Or, if you don't like me, why are you still reading this blog?

Life is whizzing by

2009-09-21T21:13:00.002-04:00

I feel like hardly any time has passed since I last posted (in July) mostly because we have been very busy the last several weeks. Boyfriend's mom became very ill, and also ran out of unemployment at the same time, so we spent a number of weekends going up to her house to fix it up so we could put it on the market. It wasn't in bad condition or anything, just needed a lot of cosmetic stuff, cleaning, and removing a bunch of stuff from the house.

Interviewing listing agents was interesting - I felt pretty well prepared for it, having read Searchlight Crusade for years, but was surprised at how much we ended up going with the person that had the best rapport with us. We interviewed four agents altogether. They varied widely in the price they thought they could get for the house - one agent thought it would have to be a short sale, at nearly the price that a smaller, older house down the street sold for in 2 months flat, one agent thought the best price was the break-even point, and two thought that we could net more than $25,000 on it. Boyfriend and I did not think that making that much was likely, nor that it was an appropriate price given that his mom is never going to make another payment on this house and we are trying to sell it before it gets foreclosed. We ended up going with the break-even agent and listing it for a little more than break-even. I liked this agent the most because he emphasized getting it done quickly, and had a great marketing plan and lots of neat strategies (like sending postcards to people who rent in the nicer areas nearby.) When we asked one of the agents what his marketing plan was, he kind of hemmed and hawed and ended up saying that he let all the other agents in town know about the property, and listed it on the MLS. Not too impressive. The other agents that lost weren't terrible, but one of them appeared very disorganized, and actually called me about ten minutes before she was supposed to show up and was all flustered because apparently her printer hasn't worked for a few days, and should she just cancel altogether since she couldn't print out the comparables? I did not find this very professional, and mentally took off several points, but she showed up anyway, and later emailed me multiple times to show the comparables. And another one walked all around the house with us taking notes on the features, and seemed very dismissive of the house overall. I got the impression that she was used to selling bigger, nicer houses (although this house is 2,000 square feet and quite nice) and she gave the impression that she thought it needed a lot of work (which it doesn't.)

Work has been going well, if slowing down - unfortunately Boyfriend still doesn't have a job, although I guess he'd be having to take a bunch of time off to deal with his mother's problems if he did. The job market is not terrible, but there are a lot of people applying for the same jobs that he is who already have a lot of experience, so it's not exactly fair. Here's hoping the FBI calls him very, very soon.

With all this going on with Boyfriend's mom, I don't have much in savings now, which makes me nervous. I still have lots in my IRA, but don't want to pull much out - I already pulled out about $800 because my car needed repairs and there were other one-time expenses. Between Boyfriend and me, our household is really a closed economy, so when I have to spend more money, it means I have less to spend on joint expenses. We also accidentally ran up a $200+ cell phone bill (stupid T-mobile raised the price of extra minutes from about 20 cents to 45 cents, and Boyfriend had several phone interviews, and we don't have a land line) which is also not exciting. My car insurance is due next month - hopefully no more surprises. I also stopped contributing to my 401k when Boyfriend lost his job and am thinking of at least doing 1% - just to keep doing something, even if I'm missing the full match.

In pet news, the remaining guinea pig also passed away, pretty much just from loneliness. I think once a few weeks had passed, she started getting increasingly lonely, and started turning down one treat after another, till she wasn't eating anything at all. I don't think she was in any pain, just very tired at the end, and she passed quietly while she was lying on my lap, being petted, in the vet's waiting room. With Boyfriend's mom came her snortly little 9 year old pug, who hadn't been to a vet in a LONG time. Our vet noted several problems, one of which requires surgery (fixing a dropping soft palate, which causes some breathing problems), but there is neither the time, money, or inclination to fix it currently as it isn't lifethreatening. We didn't get him his shots when we went, since that's an extra $100, but I did find a mystery shopping company that does vet offices, so I'm hoping to pick up one of those and hopefully get the cost of his shots reimbursed.

You win some, you lose some

2009-07-18T21:22:00.005-04:00

I got a notice in the mail from Chase saying my minimums were going to go up to 5% of my balance instead of 2% or whatever they'd been - I did some quick math and lo and behold I can't frigging afford that. So I called them up and said, I can't afford this. A very nice Indian lady went through my budget with me, how much I spend on this and that, and how much I pay to other companies, and set me up on a fixed payment plan where I pay a little less than my current minimum for the next five years to pay it off. Not bad. The interest rate even got lowered to 6% - a win on one card, where much of the balance was from a balance transfer that had expired, and had been at 9.9% and then raised to 14.9%, and a slight loss on the other card, which had all fixed rate balance transfers at 4.9%. But altogether a good deal. And once I have more money I can certainly pay more and get it paid off sooner.

Flush with this victory, I decided to call Bank of America, who'd also raised my interest rates and slashed my credit line (though, among my creditors, who hasn't?) and told them that the interest rate increase was too high and I couldn't afford it. Apparently at some point they'd included in the very fine print, in the online statement they encouraged me to sign up for, that the rate was going to increase on x date and if I didn't want it to increase I'd have to call them and tell them so. The deadline for doing this? The day before I called. So the somewhat-less-nice-than-at-Chase Indian lady went through the same budget thing with me, except that they determined that I make too much money so good luck with paying the higher minimums ha ha ha. Screw them.

In my perpetual habit of finding the upside to things (even when I really just want to be angry about it and leave it at that) I guess it's good that I didn't reject the interest rate increase at Bank of America because if you do, they close your account and you just get to pay off what's left at whatever the rate used to be. Given that the deal with Chase also closed my cards there, once I paid off all of this, I'd have little credit left (I also have Discover and Amex cards but they are much smaller credit lines.)

But still, not fun. Things are pretty tight as Boyfriend is still not working. There have been some leads but nothing solid yet.

My ridiculous amounts of mystery shopping are finally starting to pay off - yesterday felt like one big money party because I got a $100 check for the open house jobs, 2 $50 Visa gift cards (in lieu of checks, I guess) for our rebates on the phones we recently bought at T-Mobile, notification that another $100 would be deposited next week from a set of mystery shopping jobs I did a few weeks ago, and two other jobs paid by PayPal. Plus, I sold a text link ad and completed a bunch of shops this week and will get paid for older ones at the end of the month. I feel like I am maybe catching up a little bit. Of course, we have plenty of uses for that money - reserving a hotel room for a friend's wedding in September, buying dog clippers and a Peticure for the dog, fixing the oven which fails to complete the essential purpose of an oven (which is heating up), fixing my car which is getting progressively louder, buying more storage shelves for the basement to get our crap off the floor, finding out what that smell is in the kitchen, etc etc freaking etc. But mostly I just want to put it in savings as it makes me nervous to not have any.

Between my job, Boyfriend's unemployment, and the mystery shopping, we certainly aren't going to not eat - but I'd like to be a little less flying by the seat of my pants, financially. If we have any large catastrophes, such as my car breaking down completely or having a major house repair, we're going to have to pull money out of my Roth IRA, which is obviously less than ideal. Boyfriend's glasses just broke, so he's currently wearing contacts full time, but that's not a great solution since he's going to run out of contacts eventually. Hopefully when he gets a job it has vision insurance...

Wheeeee mystery shopping

2009-06-02T21:53:00.004-04:00

So with Boyfriend's recent unemployment, I have cranked up doing the mystery shopping. Yeah, I probably should have been cranking it up all along, to help pay down the mountain of debt in whose shadow I live, but I'd been taking it easy for a while. But now with the extra $75 or so per month to pay on the CareCredit card from the vet bills, and I hit the end of the two years of low payments on my Sallie Mae loans (and, naturally, their online system for trying to get it lowered again has been down ever since I started trying to lower it), I really need to get going.

So in the next month I will be doing:

Four price audits (taking pictures of prices at a home store)
Three grocery store alcohol audits (I buy some booze and see if they ID me)
Two Pinkerton open houses
One fitness center shop

And a partridge in a freaking pear tree. In the past two weeks, I have also done a cigarette audit (I try to buy cigarettes without showing ID - with my baby face I do a lot of these and ones for alcohol), an apartment shop, an alcohol audit (but this time I did get to show ID and buy some Guinness, which I don't drink, cause I don't drink), and drove a brand new car. Unfortunately a lot of this money won't roll in for a while - a few weeks up to two months away - but it won't start coming in unless I start doing stuff. It's nice to keep getting small amounts and sticking it in savings - it also on more than one occasion has saved my keister when there is an unexpected expense.

I would also like to give a shout out to Text Link Ads and LinkWorth, who find me buyers for text link space at the bottom of the right sidebar. I don't get paid as much for the links as when I deal with the sellers directly, and it costs them more, but then I don't have to find them and they don't have to go looking for me either. It is painless to do and gives you a bit of predictable income - definitely different than mystery shopping. If you have a blog you should check it out, and if you love me, you'll use my links. :)

Am feeling somewhat better about the departed guinea pig - I'd been kind of expecting her to die for a while as she was obviously unwell and not eating for a few days. I put the other guinea pig in her cage (the departed pig's was bigger) and the other guinea pig ATE the ramp connectors and so the ramp to the water bottle platform fell off. Oh, rodents. I bought a new one online (about $5, with $5.50 shipping of course) and will attempt to put her in the big cage again when it arrives. With all the non-food items they enjoyed consuming, it's a wonder either of them is alive.

Boyfriend also has a very promising interview on Thursday, with a really great company making MORE than he did at the old job. The place is so awesome, their average tenure for people in his position is about 14 years. Which means people love it so much they NEVER LEAVE. They even have a gym with a POOL. Can you tell by the use of caps that we are both very excited about this? Hopefully it is someplace he can be happy for a long time (unless the FBI finally calls him up, of course.)

More fun news from the Department of Kicking You While You're Down

2009-05-26T23:09:00.002-04:00

So I may have mentioned before that Chase cut my credit lines a few months ago. This pissed me off because my balances were in fact going down and I hadn't put anything on the cards in months. This made my overall balance-to-limit ratio look really bad, because I had my two cards with the biggest limits at Chase. Today I got a nice thin letter from Discover, stating that they'd done the same damn thing, except they cut it to within $150 of my current balance, instead of the $500-750 that Chase had done. And I bet I know why they did it.. drumroll please...

Because I took out a CareCredit no-interest veterinary card so I could PAY FOR MY DEAD GUINEA PIG'S SURGERY. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, one of my guinea pigs had a medical emergency and required immediate surgery, and died the next morning, and I didn't exactly have $850 rattling around in my pocket... because.. drumroll please...

Because my boyfriend got fired the week before and until he gets his unemployment we are paying the mortgage using the money he got from his tax return for buying the house, which we'd been saving since we may have to sell the house before the tax return is repaid to the government.

Fucking hooray.

So my beloved pet is dead after a horrifying, bloody, and fairly sudden illness, our household income has been halved, and Discover thinks this is a fantastic time to eliminate the very last vestiges of any financial flexibility I might have and cut my credit line to nothing. Fantastic.

Let's just hope nothing else goes wrong (my job is sound, so no worries there) or I will be pulling money out of my retirement accounts. I don't have much other than that right now since between all the debt and the veterinary expenses and the house and the oh yeah buying food, we don't have any cushion left.

It's really hard to have any optimism about my situation right now. I'm usually fatally optimistic - I even joked that my guinea pig had the kindness to die $400 earlier than I thought she would (a week in the vet hospital costs as much as the surgery itself.) But I've just about had it.

I'm trying to take on as many mystery shopping assignments as I can, and we've stopped eating out unless we can keep it under $20 for both of us. We've started having our friend get togethers at a place with half-priced appetizers before 7. I'm not spending any money on BrainMarket right now (although Boyfriend does now have time to work on the website. See, there I go with the optimism.) But it just isn't denting the real problems much - how do you earn an extra mortgage payment each month out of mystery shopping? I'm even thinking of trying to get a second (well I guess third, after CashDuck) job and do ten hours on the weekend to make any kind of dent.

At least we're better at the unemployment website now.

Getting back on track

2009-04-30T18:03:00.002-04:00

I've somewhat recovered from the fiasco where I got half a paycheck - unfortunately, a side effect of that was that I went off the nice, stress-free system I had set up for myself to pay all my bills. I had been paying half the bill each paycheck, and generally staying well away from the due date, and I was very happy with this. Also, it meant that every paycheck ended up about the same, and I had the same amount of money to spend. I like planning things out like this - it makes me nervous to not know what's going to be due. So since I was knocked off my plan for a while, I had to wait until I either had enough money saved up or I hit a three-paycheck month (which is new to me, since for the three years previous I got paid once per month.) May for me is a three-paycheck month, so I'm going back on the plan. This makes me feel much better! From the end of May on, I'll be paying half of each bill every two weeks, except for utilities, but I'll be putting $100 aside each paycheck to cover it so it'll come out the same. Yay!

I think that subconsciously I am some kind of obsessive-compulsive, but obviously only about certain things, if you have ever seen my desk. For instance, today my purse strap broke, and I went to Kohl's to look at purses and bought.. the same purse. (Well, the same purse with minor changes that don't affect anything functional, such as it having pebbly leather instead of smooth.) I also honestly considered buying a second for when this one breaks in two years, in case they don't sell it anymore.

Kind of happy to not get Kiplinger's anymore

2009-04-07T20:45:00.002-04:00

I got a notice in the mail a few days ago that my subscription to Kiplinger's was soon to come to an end, and did I want to send them some more money? I got a three-year subscription waaaay back when (which frankly seems like a frigging eternity ago, when I first started this blog.) It was pretty much free with a serious coupon code that all the bloggers were using. Since that time I've been glad, over and over, that I only paid $1 per year for it.

Kiplinger's confuses me. Basically it confuses me why anyone would pay for it. It's a split personality magazine - half of it is stock tips, mutual fund analysis, and world-market news, and half of it is personal-finance tips on the order of "Raise your car insurance deductibles to save money!" Generally these tips are things that fifteen minutes actually thinking about it would come up with. I imagine they pay the personal-finance writers a lot less.

I often don't even read the Kiplinger's anymore - it gets shuffled around the dining room in various piles until it gets up to my office, where it goes through some more piles until I dump it in an old-magazines box that eventually gets taken to the volunteers office at my former workplace so that people at the hospital have reading material. (I apologize for this, cancer patients.) But the March issue was the kicker.

They have a big "Save $50 A Day!" blurb on the cover, and the entire cover is devoted to telling you how much money they saved on your bills in various areas. Now, this perked up my ears, but frankly, $50 a day is somewhat less than half of all of the total expenditures of our life, between me and Boyfriend, so I was not sure how they were going to accomplish this. How did they accomplish this? By assuming that you are not able to save money on your own using commonly-accepted techniques, and also that you are the worst shopper in the world and pay through the nose for everything. You must be the person at the supermarket that says, "But these grapes! They are fantastic! I insist in paying a thousand dollars for them!" There is nothing to stop people from spending more than they have to - but there's also nothing to stop you from doing three seconds of Internet research.

And for all the cover-story shenanigans, the piece only gets eight content pages. They devote way more to comparison shopping for cars you can't afford to buy new (or at all.)

Because I have a lot of time on my hands, here's the complete list of all the things you'd have to be stupid enough to do in order to save $50 a day using their tips.

Pay six late fees on your credit card per year
Carry a credit card balance at 13.6% (even *I* don't have a rate that high)
Make an out of network ATM withdrawal every single week
Pay 1.3% fees on your $100k portfolio
Have an eTrade account and never make trades or close the account ($40 inactivity fee per quarter)
Pay a 4.75% load on a $5,000 investment
Using a full-service brokerage for one stock trade per month (but wait, you have an eTrade account too?)
Get free checking (does any bank NOT offer this now, seriously?)
Not use a cash-back credit card (but I thought you were in debt?)
Get fleeced on your life insurance
Bounce a check six times a year
Shop for everything you need, including toilet paper, at Whole Foods
Get a Starbucks coffee every day (although their solution of substituting Dunkin Donuts to save 36 cents a day seems pointless - why not just cut back?)
Rent a car for a week once a year (that isn't for business)
Drive like an asshole with a bunch of crap in your trunk and never inflate your tires properly

I get the feeling that this list wasn't really compiled for anyone for whom $50 a day is most of their spending. They also assume that you eat out at a fancy-ass restaurant three times a month, and go to six major events (concert, sports game, Broadway show) a year, for which you are willing to pay through the NOSE. They also let you know that if you book your Amsterdam vacation last-minute, you'll save 20% off the price ($2,500.)

And then there's a long list of things that cost more to do than you'll get back in savings for years, such as replacing your toilet, or getting a $1,600 clothes washer to save $50 per year on water. Really? Cause my front-loading washer saves me a ton on water, and the set was $1100 including delivery. And that you're buying a digital camera, a laptop, a big flat-screen, designer handbags and shoes and jeans, and men's suits.

The one thing that strikes me as sad is them telling you to cut out the bimonthly night at the movies for a family of four, which they tote up to $168 per year. Yeah, you can get Netflix and save some money, but if you have two kids that are willing to go to the movies with you, especially if they're teenagers, that strikes me as money well spent to do something relatively inexpensive as a family. Even the pre-movie meal would cost more than the tickets.

Anyway. I apologize for the rant. But this is the essential idea of why I hate Kiplinger's. Because people who have enough money to buy into Contrafund, and thus would be interested in a long article about why it's reopening, should have enough damn common sense to figure out that you can save money on a digital camera by looking for a better price, or that generic medications cost less than brand-name. It's just sad if that's what the world is now, that they need Kiplinger's to tell them basic financial skills that teenagers should be able to understand.

A new blog for the very, very small business

2009-03-20T07:59:00.000-04:00

Check out my new project - The Itty Bitty Business at http://ittybittybiz.wordpress.com. This grew out of a collection of articles I started writing when I was propositioned by a magazine-type site to write some articles for them, and when they stopped responding to my emails I just kept on writing more articles. It's got a bunch of articles up already so far (and if you see one that says something about a link that's not there, or something otherwise doesn't look right, let me know :). There's a lot of stuff about what to think about when starting a small business, how to grow a small business, articles on resources that one might find useful, and a bunch of random stuff, all geared towards people who are the only employee in their own business, or are otherwise really, really small-time. I really enjoy writing this stuff because I know that my fellow tiny-business owners have situations that aren't really addressed by the kind of books you can get at Barnes and Noble, but that the majority of businesses start out this way, so there should be a place for people like us. Let me know what you think or if there are other topics you would like to see!

Victory is mine!

2009-03-18T21:55:00.002-04:00

So waaay back in October, I did a one-day stint at a scholarship fair. I was supposed to be paid about $100 for a nine-hour day. Hilarity ensued trying to get me this check - I wrote about this briefly in January - but I think now that the woman who was paying me was basically just lying as much as she needed to so I would leave her alone. I finally got a check, by driving there and picking it up from an empty office, but it bounced. I tried to resolve this with her but of course she did not follow through. So I sent the check (or rather, a scan of the image the bank sent me in the mail) off to an NSF processing company.

Today, I got a check in the mail for my $109.50. I rejoiced with a happy yay. (Plus I know she got a fat fee - that's how the company makes their money, by charging the person the legal maximum fee.) Me and the check prevailed in the end. (By waiting until she deposited more money.)

I got two other small checks in the mail from CashDuck activities, so I'm feeling good. Not awesome, cause I've still got to build my savings back up from squat to diddly, at the least, but every bit helps.

And just when I thought I was getting somewhere...

2009-03-07T14:31:00.003-05:00

So yesterday was payday for me. I get paid every two weeks. I have a bunch of automatic debits set up so that everybody gets paid and the money just whooshes out to where it's supposed to be, usually ahead of time. So yesterday I log on in the morning to check my bank account, because I like seeing the big fat deposit, and what do I see but a deposit that is about half of what it should be. I freak. Then I figure, well, I got a reimbursement check for some copying that I put on my credit card, maybe they treated it as an advance. It doesn't quite add up but it's pretty close, so I race in to work to see the HR lady, thinking that if they catch it they can issue me a new check. I talk to her and say, I'm not sure what's going on, but maybe it's because of the reimbursement check. She says, write me an email with all the details so I can send it to payroll and they can check it out.

Apparently, what happened is that my manager requested that my salary come from the Operations budget instead of the Marketing budget. This means that instead of being paid current (ie the week I get paid, it's for that week and the previous one) I'm being paid one week in arrears (ie the week I get paid, it's for the two weeks before that.) So that means that this paycheck, I only got one week because they've already paid me for the previous week.

I am PISSED BEYOND BELIEF. I did not get ANY warning about this, and the only way I'll recoup this money is that when I leave the company, whenever that is, I'll get an extra week's paycheck. Big fucking whoop. That'll do me a lot of good.

I am so mad that I am actually annoyed at myself for seeing any positive in this. The positive things would be 1) since I logged in in the morning before most of my automatic debits proces, since Chase usually processes around noon, I was able to bump most of them to my next pay date and thus prevented overdraft, 2) I hadn't deposited the reimbursement check yet and the bill for the credit card I used isn't even available yet, so I'm putting the money in the bank now to make sure I don't overdraft anything, and 3) since I've been saving as much as I can, I have enough money in savings to transfer in and can make all the payments I need to.

But I'm still really pissed that the only reason I'm not in dire straits is because I planned ahead and was diligent - if I went crying to the HR woman that I wouldn't be able to make rent, they'd probably advance me part of my next paycheck. Not that that would solve the problem permanently, but they'd have more sympathy for me than if I said, this is going to make me take money out of my savings account!

Mostly though I am pissed because I was finally going to have enough money in savings that I felt secure. I have $300 in absolute-emergency money in a savings account attached to my regular checking account, so I can get it at an ATM, but I wanted to have at least $1000 somewhere else, in case the car had a major repair, another pet got sick, etc. Now I have about $250 in non-emergency savings. Which sucks. Boyfriend repeatedly asked if I needed money (because he knows about all the debt, and also that I pay the utilities) and I said no, but if anything even minorly catastrophic happens, I will. Which makes me feel dumb, because I should have had more in savings than this - I've been working full time since December, and have been doing mystery shopping and what not. But with a gas bill routinely $250-300, and a few very minor catastrophes, I haven't been able to put away as much as I wanted to.

Yesterday Boyfriend and I were talking about the new business that we're working on (he will be the lead programmer for the site) and I said well, once this makes money, I can go back to spoiling you. And he said, maybe this time around, just give me money. Which really would have been a good plan for both of us when CashDuck was doing very well - I did save a lot, but most of it was in retirement accounts, and it definitely would have been a lot better for both of us just to save it instead of eating out as much as we did. Hopefully if this does well, I'll be much wiser with it this time.

Update on dog daycare, among other things

2009-02-14T12:53:00.003-05:00

So I did hear back eventually from the doggie daycare owner of the place Maggie goes to - I had emailed them about two weeks ago asking if it would be possible to trade me working on Saturdays for her going during the week. They said that everybody was trying to get as many shifts as possible right now, but offered that she could come at a much reduced daily price for the next three months. Which is really super awesome of them and is really going to help. She'd been going two days a week for the past few weeks because I couldn't afford the $75/week for her to go everyday, but on the off days she was all wound up and lonely. So it's definitely good for her mental health to go back to going every day. I feel a little like I shouldn't be taking advantage of their offer, because it's not like we're not going to eat if she goes, but I'm sure they realize that if it were a choice between groceries and dog daycare, the daycare would always lose, and $25 a week is better than $0, especially since the incremental cost of labor for caring for each dog is pretty small, and Maggie is a well-behaved dog.

Still trying to increase my savings - it makes me nervous to not have much in savings so I've been paying minimums and putting the rest into savings. I do also contribute to the 401k at work, which is about $100 a paycheck, but I want to contribute to my Roth as well.

Speaking of which, I did roll over my 403b when I left my previous job, into a traditional IRA and then into a Roth IRA, but my calculations on whether I could afford the taxes depended on me getting a job sooner than I did. So I called TIAA-CREF and asked that it be recharacterized and turned back to a traditional IRA. Not something I particularly wanted to do, since last year was (hopefully) the lowest annual income I've had since leaving college, and stock prices are so low that it would be less money to roll over, but I really can't afford an extra $3,000 in taxes right now. I'll try and roll it over in chunks over the next several years, which was the original plan. However, it's been more than two weeks (maybe three?) and my online statement still shows all my money in the Roth. I don't have much confidence that they did it correctly, since the guy on the phone first didn't know what a recharacterization was, or that you could ever roll a Roth back to a traditional, then didn't know that you had more than 60 days to do it, and then didn't know (though an online rep had told me so) that you could do this over the phone. So I'm betting there's a good chance that the paperwork wasn't processed correctly.

Another little project of mine

2009-02-04T22:02:00.002-05:00

For Christmas I received a very nice scanner from Boyfriend's grandparents (I am apparently now an honorary grandchild.) This scanner has text recognition software. So I used it to scan in a little book that I had gotten from a friend, that I had intended to type up during my unemployment, but did not get farther than a couple of pages once I decided that typing that much with no one paying me was not worth it! I did used to be a transcriptionist in college, but while that wasn't terribly exciting, it did pay $14/hr, so one gets used to it, and I would pull 12 hour days during the summer.

Anyway, the little book is called Harmony in Marriage, and I thought it was interesting because it was published in 1955, but has some pretty progressive ideas in it for the time. Or at least what I perceive to be progressive, having not actually lived in 1955.

There is, interestingly, a good segment of the book devoted to finances. And I think this reflects something that people today don't like to talk about, and so "money gurus" bring it up again and again: people in relationships fight about money as much if not more than anything else. This is theoretically supposed to surprise us. But this guy in 1955 saw that this happens, and set out to provide some of what seems to me as very basic personal finance advice. But he lays it out in the spirit as, this is just part of what you need to make your life and your home run smoothly, and it cannot be ignored or the rest will be derailed.

Here are links to the sections (the chapter is interestingly called, How Can Money Hlelp or Hinder?):

Choosing Goals
Financial Teamwork
Shall Both Work Outside?
The Budget: A Plan for Spending
Overcoming Insecurities

Much of the rest of the book is somewhat vague - but it's interesting that he's pretty direct here.

Something I'm rarely accused of, outside of comments

2009-02-02T20:14:00.004-05:00

One thing has struck me, when looking at the comments that spam-posters make. These people want you to think they are real posters and have actually read the posts and have something to say about it, while conveniently slipping in their own link. But they continually say that I'm doing something that I rarely if ever do.

Which is provide useful information.

Now I don't claim to be totally useless, but this blog pretty much is "whee! look at me go!". I don't really report anything useful that's going on in the world, or provide a reference for much other than how much my pet surgeries costs. But the commenters seem determined to see me as useful.

Today:

This is really an informative post, and I have to say your blog is really giving my knowledge in the financial industry a boost which is a great help as I run several bad credit sites, making it very important to get all the important up to date finance info that I possibly can. Good luck to everyone in the new year.

P.S. I definitely recommend subscribing to this blog's feeds, they are a wealth of information.

Sept 2007:

this report is fantastic, the infomation you show us is really interesting and very important. Do you want to see something more? you can visit too:

Great investment opportunity in Costa Rica: jaco beach real estate, map jaco beach, hotel in jaco beach costa rica. Visit us for more info at: http://www.jaco-bay.com/

July 2007 (from someone who evidently didn't notice I don't have a PR of 2)

I saw your website and all the blgs are very good, so you have the opportunity to sell space ads on you blogs... And i can't find another way to contact you,sorry...

i receive 72$ every month doing nothing, there is just 4 links at my website)))And you're website is much more better then mine.
Payments via PAYPAL and CHECK!!

http://(deleted)

No matter what language your website or blog has. No matter how many visitors a day visit your website, it's only depends on the PR!
PR MUST BE AT LEAST 2!!!!

IF SO YOU CAN EARN MONEY!!! LOT OF MONEY!!

try them...

After you'll sign up here write to me... and i'll tell you how to optimize it for well... and give you several good tips...

April 2007

Hello I want to congratulate to them by its site of the Web of the exelente looks like entertained and very good very to me it elaborated. I invite them to that they explore a little on my site of the Web.
Costa Rica Real State (blah blah more about costa rica for several sentences)

And then of course there are comments left by real people, which I cannot decipher anyway. This person posted twice, apparently because she thought the first didn't go through..

this was a gr8 post n i do agree abt the adding comments thing
i madly wanna start my blog
infact i had gone half way .........but then adding titles confused me in blogger....
i had thought title means the headline for the specific blog
but having written that it asked me 4 a heading ....
anyways even i m interested in informal blogs n thanx 4 d information
i just hope i can b a gr8 blogger cuz all my net friends luv d way i write

this was a gr8 post n i agree wid u
i m lookin 4ward 2 startin my blog
but how is it that someone can have newones under their wings............
all i know is probably signing up 4 blogger n then u need 2 write a blog straight there
n how do ppl post their emails as their blogs?
is there any way 2 poat the same thing everywhere .......in blogger thoughts etc?
i think informal blogging is very interesting as we can relate wid so many other ppls thoughts
btw thanx 4 d post !!!

But no post has ever received more comments than mine on how to start a blog. It does well on searches and seems to have inspired a number of people. And to think I thought I knew so much after having mine for.. uh.. six weeks? Yeah. I don't follow a lot of my own advice (for instance, I basically never edit, and my posts are right off the top of my head) but most of it still looks pretty good, and it still gets a lot of traffic.

Feeling much more in control of things.

2009-01-30T22:05:00.002-05:00

When I first started my new job I tried to map out exactly what would come out of each paycheck, and made an Excel list to try to keep track. I thought $100 a week would suffice for all random expenses and sent the rest to debt and savings.

That didn't last very long. There were of course expenses that I did not plan on (such as a $39 per month prescription) and I kinda sorta flipped out. Since a large chunk of my income is going to debt repayment and to emergency savings, and I didn't want to cut back on either of those things, I got very upset about how I was going to be able to afford the things that I want, and how I would save for anything other than the emergency stash.

Part of what I was flipping out about was that I hadn't planned my deductions very well and sent too much money to debt and savings, and didn't really think about the recurring expenses other than that. So I pulled out my Quickbooks CD and made myself a ledger (business name: Me) and started entering all transactions. It's been about a month and I think I'm doing well with it. It's nice to know how much I am able to spend, and I also enter in transactions ahead of time that I know I'll have (for example, entering in the cell phone bill weeks ahead) so I don't get any surprises. (Except of course for Maggie's dog daycare place, which seems to pride itself on never cashing a check that isn't two or three weeks old. Don't you people want my money?)

Today I went the extra step and set up automatic bill pay for all credit cards, and my student loan, and automatic transfers to the two savings accounts (one for actual savings and one where the bills money stores up.) So now on payday all of that will disappear and what's left is the money that I can use. Chase is very useful in that regard, because you can pay bills to nearly anyone and set up a weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc schedule. I'm also counting on the fact that biweekly is not quite twice a month to help pay things down faster.

Switching to this wacky every-two-weeks thing is weird for me, since at my previous job it was once per month. That was super easy - just pay everything on payday, and you're done. But here's hoping that doing everything automatically means I won't get behind on anything. (Plus, I'm terrified that I'll accidentally miss a payment and get hit with universal default rates on everything - which is about the worst thing that could happen, financially.)

One odd thing I did notice - my paychecks are apparently not exactly even, because it alternates between $1240 and $1239.99. =)

On the other side of things, I'm trying to increase my discretionary money by making more and cutting expenses. Maggie's daycare got the ax, going from five days a week ($75 per week) to two days ($40 per week). They sell discount packages where you buy 10 or 20 days at a time, and once I have a little more in savings I'll buy her a 20 day package to save money on the average price of a day.

I've also been signing up for more mystery shopping - I did a dozen alcohol compliance checks last weekend for $8 a pop (plus lots of snacks!) and signed up for a restaurant shop ($35 reimbursement at a place that that usually covers the bill - not making money, but hey free steak!) and several grocery store shops. I use a free job site right now, but I used to have a trial subscription to a paid one that I'm thinking about renewing. It's $60 a year for a silver membership, but there really were a lot of shops on there that never show up on the free one. So that might be worth it. Perhaps another thing to wait until I have more in savings.

I also tried a new avenue - back in October I worked a one day event, and the company had the damndest time getting me paid. First they never sent it at all, and when I called to check where it was a week later, she told me that she didn't have my address. Really? But you had my telephone number, so that seems easy enough to get. Then (theoretically) she FedExed the check to me, but mysteriously FedEx failed to find my house - twice. I find this suspicious as we've never had any other package unable to be delivered, and she wouldn't give me the tracking number, or say if I could pick it up at the facility. Finally I just came to the office in person and she left me a check. Which, naturally, bounced.

I called the office and talked to her and she was very apologetic and said she'd get me a money order. That was, um, four weeks ago. I've tried her cell and the office several times since then as obviously no money order has been forthcoming. This is especially sad since the office is literally two doors from a post office. So I finally got fed up and sent the check to a bad-check processing company (who monitors the bank account and re-processes it when there's money.) So hopefully that'll come through soon as it was for $109 and that's nothing to sneeze at!

I also applied to grade tests online but don't know when I'll hear back on that - that would be nice, as I've done it in person twice before, and certainly have plenty of free time!

The best purchase I made last year.

2009-01-27T21:55:00.006-05:00

The last year was not good to me financially. This year looks to be shaping up much better, thankfully. In 2008 I worked at four different jobs (that gave me a W-2), and continued working on my own business, but was basically unemployed for more than half of all working days last year. (Although I did get unemployment from mid-July to December.) This was a pretty depressing time for me personally and financially and I am pretty in the hole now from covering living expenses and household things with credit.

If I could re-do anything I did financially last year, it would be only through the magic of 20/20 hindsight - I'd cut spending back more, and also I'd apply for unemployment sooner. Last year, I kept almost getting jobs - to the point that it became farcical, and I was wholly surprised when my new job that I'm at now actually came through. I had multiple other jobs that I almost got (one's grant fell through, one's company instituted a corporation-wide hiring freeze, a few loved me except that I won't draw blood, etc) and so it seemed like the entire time I was unemployed, I wasn't worried about spending because it always seemed like a job was right about to start. (Plus I did actually get a job in June, but it was horrible and I was fired after three weeks. Thank God for getting fired or I would have quit.)

But there is one purchase that I made which required significant and continuing outlays all year, and usually when I was least able to afford it. I made this purchase of course right before I started to become aware of the circumstances that would force me to quit my last (full time) job in February.

And that purchase is my dog Maggie. Picture at the bottom to avoid spoilers. :)

Now those of you who have read this blog in the past (or cheated and read the archives) know that my pets seem to have a special ability to come up with terrible health problems that incur large veterinary bills. (For the newbies: I have two guinea pigs, both of whom have had uterine cancer, one of whom has recurring kidney infection problems, and the other has recurring cystic growths that occasionally need removed. I also have a cat which had to undergo bladder stone removal and several accompanying diagnostic tests of various types.)

The dog is no exception and she incurred her very first vet bill the day after we got her, because she was coughing and we though it was kennel cough but it turned out that she had scratched her throat eating a biscuit. This summer she also required about a thousand dollars in emergency care because she ate something at the park that caused her to not poop for a week. (Somehow the vet students at the hospital decided erroneously that my thin dog who doesn't like to eat had Cushing's disease, an endocrine disorder which causes you to eat a lot and gain weight. Luckily our regular vet said that wasn't so, and gave her stool softeners and IV fluids and she was just fine the next day.)

If I had known when I got the dog last January 24th that I was going to be unemployed for a good chunk of the next year, I would never have taken her. Because I would have known that that was an expense that I shouldn't take on when my income is about to be slashed. While she is a healthy dog other than the abovementioned, she still goes through kibble, special dog food sticks, lots of treats, a bzillion toys, and (recently) homemade dog cookies.

But having my dog at home with me really kept a bad period from getting much, much worse. Having Maggie in the house meant somebody to talk to, somebody to go places with me. Because a girl wandering around in the park by herself in the middle of the day might be a weirdo or homeless, but a girl with a leashed dog is obviously out for a stroll. And realistically I probably would have never gone to the park and never taken a walk without the dog. Going to the dog park gave me a chance to interact with others, and also gave me something to talk about with them. Having a dog also meant I had someone to think about other than myself - what she would like, where we could go, what should I feed her. She gave me something to think about and a built-in activity during the many days where nothing happened, and no one called.

I do feel a little annoyed with myself that I didn't put my time off to better use - while I did do a lot of mystery shopping, I didn't start any of the new businesses that I've been mulling over, I didn't take up running and get in shape, I didn't keep the house tidy or get everything unpacked after the move. But I'm pretty sure that without Maggie, I would have done a LOT less.

Here's a picture of Maggie, taken the day we brought her home. She is at least half husky (perhaps part Border collie?) and is now four years old and approximately 50 pounds. For the curious, she cost $95 at the Capital Area Humane Society.

Here is a crappy picture I took with my cell phone when she was in the river at the nearby park. She really likes going in the water and never gets cold. This was probably in August.

Annoyed but also amused by Chase. And other notes.

2009-01-21T21:21:00.003-05:00

So I logged onto my Chase account a week or two ago and found that they had reduced my credit limits. To within a couple hundred bucks of my current balances on each card. This really pisses me off - the thing I'm working towards most right now is to get each card below 50% utilization so my score will improve. I tried to apply for credit cards about six weeks ago, to try and get a balance transfer for the higher rate cards, but no one would bite. Which is really upsetting to me because I've never had a problem getting credit in the past, and I've never missed a payment, and I do have an income now. So shaving thousands of dollars off my credit limits on my two highest balance cards means that it's going to take practically an extra YEAR to get everything down.. especially since I'd bet you that they will reduce my limits more as I pay it down more. I guess I should be grateful that they didn't reduce my limit below my current balance. None of the other cards have had the credit limit reduced although no one wants to take balance transfers right now. Unsurprisingly I do get cash advance checks sent to me in the mail, but yeah I am not going to pay the high interest on that.

Amusingly though, Chase sent me my 1099 for the $125 reward I got for signing up for a checking account - and apparently, they've already sent $35 to the IRS on my behalf to cover it. This wasn't mentioned and if tax was required to be withheld I would have assumed they would have made a bigger deal out of it (ie made it a $160 promotion, with some diverted, as opposed to a $125 promotion that people might not even find out about the $35 credit until months later.)

In other news I am trying to find a few days to make the ol' budget a little roomier.. I did a lot of mystery shopping while unemployed, and because I am young I can do compliance checks. I only do alcohol - while I neither drink nor smoke, I don't feel stupid trying to buy a can of Mike's Hard Lemonade, but I feel like I would be picked out instantly as someone who's never bought cigarettes in her life. Lately I have only done restaurant shops (free food!) but I applied for 11 shops to do this weekend. I did 23 in 2 days in August, that was fun. =P So I'll get $8 per, plus $1 for a candy bar or whatever (basically so I'll get a receipt) and try to buy alcohol without an ID. I get $8 per shop, so $88 plus 11 bags of Fritos. Or whatever. I try to vary it so that between Boyfriend and I we should eat all of it.

I also applied to grade tests at home with one of the test-grading companies I've worked for in the past - it really sucked to work 20 hours a week after work at their facility, but it does pay decently. Although it probably sucked mostly because I didn't have a car - so I got on the bus right after work and spent about an hour and 15 minutes on the bus to get out there. I did have a ride share home, but I'd basically be gone from 8AM till 10:30PM, and that was for about two months straight. Grading at home, especially since I can do it on the weekends, will be a lot better and I'd be able to put in more hours. But I won't know if I'm going to get put on a project or not until at least the end of February.

And one that was a little humiliating for me, but I thought it would be at least worth it to ask - I emailed my dog's daycare (yes the dog goes to daycare be quiet) to ask if they would be willing to trade my working there on Saturdays for her fees during the week. I haven't heard back from them yet, although it's hard to say if that's because they don't want to, they're thinking about it, or because nobody checks the email very often. But I don't think I can keep paying $75 a week for her to go every day and make any headway in savings. So if they don't want to do that, I am going to cut her down to two days a week and take her to the park more often. (Which would also be immensely helped by nicer weather which I hope we get some more of soon.) The daycare's fees are on a scale where the more days you go, the less each day costs - so $75 for five days, but $40 for 2. I'm probably going to get the 20 days package though, where you can buy 20 days to use anytime in any combination, which is $18.50 a day, and that would last us ten weeks.

I'm also (as usual) cooking up new business ideas - I have a couple I've been kicking around but I guess we'll have to see when I get the money to pay somebody to program the sites for me! If Boyfriend ever gets laid off, he has said he'd be willing to do it, so at this point he'd have months of backlog of ideas I've had that he could code for me. :) I guess I am a child of the Internet generation - pretty much every idea I have involves a website, and those that don't, involve specialized computer programs to make the business run more efficiently. I sort of think from the website up.. although not a bad thing I guess as I tend to stick to ideas that don't cost much to implement other than getting the dang thing coded.

In which our heroine realizes something patently obvious.

2009-01-10T14:22:00.003-05:00

I've been in the habit these past few years of keeping a number of different checking accounts with money earmarked for various things. I had an account just for the gas, electric, and phone bills, one for fun purchases such as online music and new books, etc. Also there were several separate savings accounts that I would put money into each month to save for whatever the account was named for. I did this because I wanted to make sure that whatever was left in the main checking account was what I could spend without having to worry, am I going to have enough left over for the gas bill?

Since I have been out of (steady) work for about nine months non-consecutively and have just started to have normal income, I'm working with a lot less money than I used to, and am trying to pay down the accumulated debt with it. Also, I'm now getting paid biweekly instead of once a month, which complicates things in my eyes. So I made up a list of what I would pay each paycheck - half of what I wanted to pay each month to the credit cards, half of the estimated bills, half the rent to Boyfriend, etc. Since my previous method of having a bzillion checking accounts involved keeping some slush money in each account, I decided to bite the bullet and do things the way most people do them - that is, having everything paid out of my main account, so I wouldn't have to continually transfer money and have that much slush - when I was working before, I usually had $500-600 in the various accounts beyond what was needed.

I was worried, however, that I would spend too much without knowing and overdraw the account.

Then it occurred to me: As long as I stay within my budget, I won't overdraw, because I have planned out how that money will be spent. So as long as I don't spend more than $100, I know that I've got enough. (Plus I have a savings account attached to the checking, so I can transfer some money in if I need to spend more one week.)

I realize that most other PF bloggers have probably realized this a long time ago, but I feel much better now.

All is, er, well-er.

2009-01-05T22:47:00.003-05:00

I started my new job December 8th (my birthday!) by getting on a plane and going to Kansas City, MO for training by the pharmaceutical company for three days. I like to travel but was a bit sad at spending my birthday on it. I did take myself out for sushi though.

The project is a bit slow to start up but I have been amusing myself by learning about multiple sclerosis, reading lots of articles and websites. I created a bunch of documents that I'll need - but before anyone can see them, Legal and Marketing have to review them, and with everybody gone for the holiday it's taking some time. So I really hope things get going this week because I'm getting pretty bored.

On the upside, I'm generally left to my own devices. Which is nice because I don't like to be micromanaged, and I pretty much know what I'm doing regarding my own job. On the downside, I had to ask around to find out such things as how to use the telephones and what sort of training I should do. My manager is in another city, so there's a person here that's helping me get everything done, but I also don't think it's actually her job to do these things - she's just picking it up because no one else is! I appreciate it nonetheless.

People actually seem pretty happy, which is a nice change from, well, everywhere else I've worked. Everyone seems quite enamored of my plant, Rupert, and came over to see him - since we're all in cubicles, you can see the plant over the top as it's 3' tall. (Three years ago, he was a 8" money tree plant.) Somebody left me a holiday treat bag and someone else left a candy cane. I came in a tad bit too late for the Christmas party, but there was a day with free cookies, which helps!

I'm also excited about having health insurance again. I'm very glad that nothing bad happened while I was off it. :) Now I have to choose though between going back on the Nexium that I had been on while working (which will cost me $38 a month, can only get 1 month at a time, and I have to go pick it up from a not-very-convenient location), or stay on the generic Prilosec I've been taking ($3.91 per month, can get 3 months at a time, and it's mailed to me.) However, the birth control is very cheap at $12 a month despite being a non-generic - clearly it occurred to someone that birth control is less expensive than a pregnant employee.

More updates

2008-11-30T15:45:00.002-05:00

Well, now I've received word that I will NOT be an independent contractor, I'll be a real employee. However, I still have no idea when I'm going to start, which is really starting to aggravate me. It is nice though to have the prospect of being a real employee, because on the day that I found out that they were going to pursue that line, I also found out that I had been denied for health insurance. So being a real employee will get me health benefits, although it comes with less money. But it equals out, especially since I have no idea where I would have gotten health insurance - I've been turned down twice, once for my preexisting condition (heartburn - seriously, people?) and this time for being overweight, despite being perfectly healthy other than heartburn which is well controlled on OTC stuff.

Here's hoping I actually start this job sometime soon - I'm hoping that since they do hire people on a regular basis, they can get that accomplished faster than trying to write up a contract. I was supposed to go for training on Monday in Kansas City but that didn't get set up before the person who was supposed to train me left for vacation. I just hope things aren't this badly confused once I actually start working.

Finally some news!

2008-11-16T11:51:00.002-05:00

I feel bad about not updating but when there isn't anything to report, I don't feel the urge to share. Now however I do have news to report. I've been offered a position in my field, at a company I really like, and I have accepted and am waiting for my contract to be emailed to me. Now you may say, contract?? Yes, I will be an independent contractor for this company and not a real employee. This was not the world's best situation, but due to the nature of the position it was what the lawyers ended up with. Basically the job is a partnership between a mail-order pharmacy and a pharmaceutical company. The pharma wants to conduct a study on people who use certain medications for multiple sclerosis, and the mail-order pharmacy has people in their rolls who are taking those medications. So the pharma is paying for research coordinators at three different mail-order pharmacy companies, and the pharmacies will provide the patients for the study. So I'll be physically located at the pharmacy's offices, but doing work for the pharma. It's an interesting setup.

The good thing about this setup though is that they did agree to give me more money than had been offered before, when it was going to be a regular employee position, to cover health benefits and the additional self-employment taxes. And they did come through with plenty of money to cover that, which was nice. Now I'm just waiting for the dang contract. This apparently has been held up in the pharma's legal department for some time as they haggle over it. So I am getting a little annoyed that I haven't been able to start work (and start getting paid) as I was supposed to start last Monday, but the contract wasn't done. Now I am supposed to start maybe Wednesday of next week, but since they need a couple days after I send the contract back, and I don't have it, it might be pushed back further. And then next week is Thanksgiving, so all the people who need to train me may be out of town. Sheesh.

This is going to be an interesting position - I'm essentially the only person at my location working on this study, and while there are other coordinators working on this project at other pharmacies, and people above me to advise me and train me, I'm not really sure that I'll have coworkers, per se. There are certainly other people working at this location, but I'm very interested to see if I have a real office, what the facilities are like, how much interaction I'll have with others, etc.

I'm going to restrain myself from making a five page post here so I will try to spread out my musings about the ramifications of going totally Schedule C over a few days. Plus more adventures in homeownership and more animal health issues. Stay tuned!

Adventures in Homeownership

2008-07-30T22:15:00.002-04:00

So we're all moved into the house.. we had the floors sanded and refinished, the electrical system redone, fence installed, painted several rooms, to the point that the house doesn't really look like what we bought at all, and definitely feels more "ours". Truly, this house could have a million things wrong with it, and Boyfriend and I would be fine with that, because we can actually FIX things around this house. Our rental was a nice property but it was never really maintained, and there were so many things that, if fixed, would have made it much nicer. I guess we won't really have the shock of "but our landlord used to fix that!" because they didn't fix anything, so we did end up just living with a thousand little problems. Now of course we have the to-do list that's a mile long.. much of which costs money, naturally.

We had our first minor emergency - the central AC and the fan unit that's part of the furnace that runs the cold air through the house were both leaking water. Like lots of water. Considering that an air conditioner should not produce more than condensation, this was Bad. Luckily, we did get a home warranty on the place, and called in for that. Apparently we were very, very low on Freon. I am not certain that that alone would cause This Much Water, but if it doesn't fix it, we can call the contractor back within 30 days and not even have to pay the deductible again. So that's nice. The AC seems to be working fine now and isn't producing much, and we will watch it for the next few days. If it turns out to be a big problem, the warranty will cover replacement, at any rate.

In other news, I now have two sick animals - one of the perennially ill guinea pigs has a kidney stone causing a bladder infection, so she's on antibiotics for that while we wait for her to pass the stone. She was pretty cranky last week and seems OK this week, so I'm really hoping she already peed it out. She goes in next week to get an X-ray to see what's going on (another $90 for that alone.) I really, really, really hope that she has, both because with being still unemployed it would be painful to come up with the $700-800 for the surgery and inpatient stay, and I also really don't want her to have to live in a cat carrier for three weeks and get antibiotics and pain meds and be cranky. We've had quite enough of that thank you. The dog incurred her first vet bill (other than the first visit after we got her) since she helpfully let us know she wasn't feeling well by peeing on the couch. While sponging it up, I saw that it was pink, and off to the emergency vet room we went. Luckily we live very close to the Ohio State veterinary college, which has 24/7 care, and we weren't even the only ones there. I said when we came in that I thought she had a urinary tract infection, and $250 later, plus a pack of pills that we already had some of at home, they confirmed this. Sheesh. Hopefully that will be it for her and she will feel better soon. I also hope she didn't pick it up at daycare, since she went for two days while we were moving. The cat and dog have always been the cheap pets - luckily Kitty has never come down with anything more serious than hairballs.

In job news, the woman I interviewed with a few weeks ago is very interested in me and said that it would take about three weeks for them to create the position. It is hourly, which is nice, and I asked for $21-22 plus benefits, which I think is pretty reasonable considering that I will actually be performing three different tasks for them, all of which I am fully qualified to do. I called earlier today to check in but my contact person was gone.. hopefully she has good news tomorrow. It will be three weeks next Tuesday.

I also applied for unemployment - why the heck not - and do not seem to be excelling at the system. My social security number apparently didn't match my name (I don't have a middle name, which confused the computer) so I have to send in some documents to prove that I am who I am and they should give me $365 a week. Which, I have to say, seems like a lot of money to me because I am not paying my own rent or buying much of my own food, but if I were, dang, that's tiny. I mean, it's more than Boyfriend made while in school, but not much when you have a house, sick pets, dependent significant other, etc.

I have spent much of the past few days unpacking and contemplating the sheer volume of STUFF that we own. And also contemplating the fact that the cheese drawer in the fridge, by cubic feet, was one of the most valuable boxes we moved (minus laptops and flat-panel monitors.) I like my cheese.

In Which Our Hero Encounters A Ton Of Bad Things

2008-07-14T20:55:00.002-04:00

So.. about that new job.. it turned out to be a really, really terrible place to work where everyone is unhappy and dreads being around the top doc. I got fired, but since I was about to quit anyway, it kind of works out. This was definitely one of those situations where it is not worth putting up with crap like that just for a paycheck, and I could not see myself there long-term. I had trouble envisioning myself there the next DAY, each evening. Your job should not be something you withstand.

Anyway. So, unemployed again. I do already have an interview tomorrow though. Someone called me half an hour after I had accepted the previous job, and I had to decline the interview. However, they were very very interested in me, and offered to beat whatever I was getting there.. but it's not a terribly good idea to turn down a known quantity for a potential, is it? They then said "well, if it doesn't work out, give me a call." So that I did, and I'm going in tomorrow. They're still very very interested and it at least from the outside appears to be a much better opportunity.

The big hang up for me in getting jobs in my field is that I am not willing to draw blood. For my own part, I would rather have my blood drawn by a nurse with years of experience than by some girl who just tried it out on her coworker once. However, for some reason, my not wanting to do this is rarely taken seriously. The example I usually use is that if you were afraid of the water, no one would ever suggest you learn to swim and become a lifeguard, but if you don't want to stick needles in people, most healthcare workers will just say, "oh but it's so easy! we can teach you and it's not a big deal." Few people actually respect that I really, really don't want to stick needles in people's arms. If I didn't have this hangup, I'd probably be a nurse. But unfortunately in some situations blood-drawing skills are an absolute requirement of the job. I had an interview some time ago with a place that seemed otherwise great, but the coordinators were required to do various tests on the patients and draw blood, and while I am perfectly willing to perform an EKG (which is pretty easy actually) I was not willing to draw blood, and by the end of the interview both me and the interviewer knew that I would not be back because of this. I don't apply for jobs that state in the description that phlebotomy skills are required or preferred, but it's often the case that they don't say one way or the other. So I'm really hoping that it won't be required, but it would not surprise me if it were, at this place I'm going tomorrow. Here's hoping not.

Of course, this has come at the worst possible financial time - we just got our gas meter read for the first time in months and the catch-up bill is $330, my car is in the shop for a bunch of bad-sounding things and who knows how much that will cost, we just went to visit both sets of relatives this weekend (hotel $100, car $300 since I am under 25 and they charge a LOT extra, plus I had to keep it for tomorrow because my car is in the shop), and on top of all that one of my guinea pigs is again peeing blood and went to the vet today, and is staying overnight. She has already had lab tests and an X-ray ($90 for 2 shots) and will require at the very least a bunch of medications three times a day for the next two weeks and then perhaps surgery after that. (she has kidney stone sludge in her bladder, which she may pee out, and if she doesn't, she will need surgery, but she is also pretty weak at this point since she also recently had to be spayed because of uterine cancer and she hasn't regained any weight yet. And that was $1100 too.) So in all likelihood, the 3 1/2 weeks of pay that I will get from my short-lived stint at That Place will all go to cover all of this recent stuff and I still won't be able to save any money or keep from going further into debt. Hooray. At this point I can't even begin to fathom how I am going to get back to where I was before. I have pretty close to a negative net worth despite having saved what now feels like a fortune in retirement money. It is somewhat tempting to think that I could just cash it all out and pay everything off, but the power of compound interest makes me leave it there. All of my debt is at 5.9% or below (much at 3.5% or 0%) so I know that is the smart thing to do.

In other news, we (or I should say Boyfriend) successfully bought the house and will take possession Wednesday, upon which we will start paying a bunch of other people to do a bunch of stuff. At least since I am unemployed, I can do the painting myself and save some money there. Might buy a paint sprayer but I have never used one and am wary of spending $100+ on something I don't know how to use. I do know how to use a roller on a stick. I will try to do what I can on my own - although some things are recognizably beyond my ken, such as installing chain link fence.

Phew.. a lot can happen in a week

2008-06-23T21:02:00.003-04:00

It's been a bit busy. I started my new job last Wednesday and things are going pretty good. There was actually some back and forth about how much I was going to get paid.. I talked to Top Doc on the phone who just said, come in and talk to the office manager. So I showed up Wednesday morning and he had a very fuzzy recollection of me - apparently he had gotten about 15 seconds with Top Doc who just said, she's coming. So they had not had a conversation about my salary. He says he'll talk to her, and then for the next few days, I can never find him, plus I keep shuttling between two of the offices. Finally on Thursday evening before I leave, I sent him an email listing what I wanted to talk about (salary plus a couple other things) and said if I couldn't get a hold of him I would call him. I finally got him on the phone about 2PM on Friday and he said that they'd set me at $40k. Which is fine, I told them $40-45k in the interview, and while it is a little less than I used to make, I probably would have accepted less, but it does seem like bad form to cheap out on someone who's already BEEN there three days.

Something that is definitely a bonus though is that instead of working at the main clinic, which is out in the suburbs and is about 20 minutes of highway to reach, I'll be assigned to the downtown office, which is literally about five minutes from my house. So that's pretty awesome. Unfortunately it'll be longer after we move, but definitely not bad at all - about 12 minutes, none highway. If I REALLY wanted to, I could take a bus, with only a few blocks' walk to get to the stops at each end. But that's $41 a month for the bus pass, and I don't know how much the garage pass is going to be, but unlikely to be that much, and 12 minutes drive in each direction is pretty good on gas too. I'm also excited to be downtown because it's actually in a hospital, which means there are a lot of resources (like a cafeteria, a lot more bathrooms, gift shop, etc, as well as being able to schedule tests for my patients onsite.) Downtown also has a lot of lunch restaurants and some street vendors, so I could go out and get all kinds of good stuff.

(for those who used to read regularly, yes, I do now own a car. It is a 2002 Chevy Cavalier with about 9823498 dents, which is why it was about $2700. But it hasn't required much in the way of maintenance and I'll probably drive it into the ground. Driving is WEIRD but fun.)

One really awesome bonus though is that they FEED YOU LUNCH on Mondays and Tuesdays, and sometimes Fridays. Today I actually got two lunches, because I was in the suburban office in the morning when they were passing round the menu. Apparently the drug reps pick a restaurant and we all get to choose what we want off the menu. Most people got an appetizer or dessert in addition to a meal. So I picked out coconut shrimp (which they ended up not having) and chicken parmesan with pasta. Then at about 10:30 I got a call saying that there was someone to see down at the downtown office. I am meeting with the most experienced coordinator down there frequently for training. So by then the order was already in, and I went downtown before lunch arrived. And what do you know but they had Panera boxed lunches. Five kinds of awesome. So I got Panera for lunch, and my chicken parmesan was there when I got back to the suburban office. Hooray for free lunch! I am totally going to milk that. I don't think they do the menu ordering at the office I'll be at, but free food is still awesome.

In house news, we did our inspection on Tuesday, and there are of course a few problems. The ones we were most concerned with were the wiring and the hot water heater. The house is about 100 years old, so the wiring is pretty old, but it looks like someone rewired the downstairs but not the upstairs. The upstairs is not grounded at all, and there is knob and tube wiring in the attic that is under a foot of insulation. How this was explained to me as bad is that knob and tube has nice big copper cables, which can be good because they are much thicker than wires used today, and usually enclosed in a wall with air all around them to let heat escape. So being under a foot of insulation means the heat can't escape and this is a fire safety issue. So that's bad. The other big issue is that the hot water heater's air outlet is not drafting properly. The house has two chimneys and the air is supposed to go up one of them, and it's not. This might be because the chimney is full of leaves and crap, or it might be that the chimney has collapsed internally. Who knows. Not our problem. It's a safety risk. So we asked on our request to remedy that they replace and ground the upstairs wiring, and that they fix the hot water heater so it's drafting properly and the basement doesn't fill up with carbon monoxide. That's bad. We're waiting to hear back from them probably tomorrow about what they're going to do.

We also went in early this morning and Boyfriend signed lock papers. We are locked in at 6.25% paying half a point of discount (probably covered under what the seller is paying) and given the way the markets look now, that's probably the best we'd be likely to get, even given what our mortgage person was up to. When we first met she had said 6.25% with no points, but this is acceptable given that we are putting so little down.

In completely unrelated news, I've also been spending money on clothes. This is kind of new for me, and I forgot how much I actually really enjoy having nice clothes and looking like an adult. At my last job I kind of fell into wearing the same pants every day with different solid colored t-shirts and long sleeved t-shirts, and I felt like I was starting to look my age. (this is not something you want when you are as young as I am in the professional world where people have to trust you are providing accurate, potentially life-altering decision-making information.) So I spent some time at the outlets on Tuesday and spent about $250 on clothes, and for this got six dresses, a couple tops, and some assorted other items. Went to a different store a couple days ago and spent $75 on four dresses. Kind of getting into dresses now, to some extent. But like the commercials say, feeling like a grown-up at your new job: priceless. I'm going to try to weed out some of my older, less attractive clothes and slowly turn over my wardrobe. At this point, if I can't wear it to work, there hardly seems a point in buying it since I already have plenty of t-shirts and shorts, and you can wear black pants any day. I do need to buy some black closed toed shoes that I can wear barefoot, since I a) hate pantyhose b) bought a bunch of knee length skirts and dresses and c) you can't wear open toed shoes in a hospital. So that might end up costing more than my outfit on any given day, but hey, no one said looking like a grown-up was cheap.

Employed once more!

2008-06-16T17:55:00.005-04:00

Hooray, today I actually got not one but two jobs. Had to turn down one. But this is great news. I had signed up with Spherion (temp agency) a couple weeks ago and they were very excited to talk to me, being that I am a college graduate with computer skills, phone experience, and can speak easily without saying like or ain't. Yesterday they called me to come in and take a Word and Excel test and a drug test for a potential full-time temporary administrative-type position with the bakery branch of a local grocery store chain. So I went in and did that today. The secretary thought I was great and told me semi-confidentially that she pretty much figured I'd get the job because the woman who interviewed me had suggested me individually for this position (the secretary read me the email - the gist was, start with her and you won't need to check 4 other people.) So that was pretty exciting, having been without normal full-time employment for 3 months now, and at home for the last three weeks. After a number of phone calls, they confirmed that I had the position, and I was to start tomorrow morning 8AM sharp. This meant that I would miss the home inspection on the new house but they did not seem to be willing to negotiate starting time. So everything got lined up, and I even got the dog a doggy interview at doggy day care tonight so she could start tomorrow.

THEN I come back from the grocery store and there is an email from the head doc at the private clinic/research organization I interviewed with last Tuesday, who liked me bunches.

Hi Kira --

please give me a call

I'd like to talk with you about a job.

So I call, and Top Doc says, are you still looking for a position, and I say yep, and she says, we're still looking for someone to fill our open spot, and I say, what an amazing coincidence! and she laughs. She asked if I would like to start tomorrow and I asked if Wednesday would be OK so I could go to the home inspection, and she said that was fine. (This is also beneficial because I could totally see the staff getting notice that I'm coming about 5 minutes before I show up. They know that I'm coming in general, but probably not specifically when. So this will give them some time to, say, find an extra desk.) I was so excited I forgot to ask her how much they were going to pay me, but the office manager had asked what my salary expectations were and I said $40-45k so if they're within shouting distance of that, that's great.

These people are as sane as medical clinics get, and just seem like reasonable human beings. I am excited to get back into the thick of things. They have a matching 401k and a health savings account medical plan, so I can bet I'll be posting about that when I get that set up.

Off I go to take Maggie to her doggy daycare interview - there's several doggy daycares in the area, and this one is about five minutes from our house so she won't throw up in the car. (Motion sickness.) It's $75 a week to take her every day, but I'll probably only end up taking her two or three days a week.

This is also excellent timing in that both of my guinea pigs have been seriously ill in the last few weeks, and I'm literally just today not going to be squirting medications and food into either little mouth five times a day. So it's good that I was able to be home to give them more frequent care when they needed it, but also good that when I won't be able to, they won't need it.

Hooray for money! This is exciting!

Not amused

2008-06-13T09:33:00.002-04:00

So although Boyfriend's name will be on the title and mortgage of our new house, I'm pretty much handling everything. He doesn't really have the inclination to gain more knowledge about house hunting and everything that involves, so we've only seen houses I've picked out with the realtor I selected and gone to the mortgage person I contacted. Mortgage Lady seems to not be terribly on the ball though and it may have just cost us several hundred more dollars. Our offer on the house was accepted on Wednesday and our realtor sent her the contract. She called me about 2PM on Thursday to tell me that rates had gone up a little from when we saw her last Saturday (we are getting an FHA loan, and the rate at par then was 6.25%) and that we could choose to pay a half point to get it back to 6.25% or we could take 6.375% without the half point. I asked her to email me the Good Faith Estimates for both scenarios and I would discuss it with Boyfriend and get back to her. I said I would do that and call her in probably about an hour. Then I called Boyfriend and asked him to check my email in half an hour and look at the estimates. By 4:30 I still had no email so I called and left a message. She had apparently left for the day - had not bothered to call me when she didn't hear from me - and I didn't get the estimates until 8:15 this morning. I checked email at 9 after finishing force-feeding one of the guinea pigs who has some bowel issues (she of the multiple tumors) and got the estimates. Boyfriend and I gmail-chatted about them and decided to go for the 6.25% with paying the half point. This scenario wouldn't have cost us the full half point, because part of our offer is that the seller pays $3300 towards closing costs, and it was looking like the costs weren't going to be that much, so the extra would go towards paying for the half point.

So I email her back to say that we'd pay the half point, and she replies saying:

Hi Kira,
Well.......................please don't shoot the messenger. About 1/2 hour
after we talked yesterday, our rates were suspended because the market took
a bad turn for mortgage rates and are still suspended this morning. I will
have new rates around 11:00 then I'll call you as soon as I know we still
have that, ok? Keep your fingers crossed that Friday the 13th will be a
good day and I'll lock you in at a good rate.

Ok, now why exactly didn't she say that when she sent me the estimates at 8:15? When she ALREADY knew that these estimates were no longer valid because she had no idea if we could get the rates or not? (Note: she works for a quasi mortgage broker place, they use internal funds on some loans and then sell all of them off. So I assume she means their internal bank's rates, or something.) I looked on Bankrate and the national average is already up to 6.29%, which means we probably will be quoted 6.5% or worse.

Now if she'd sent the emails on time yesterday, we could have locked in already and not had this rigmarole.. she already had issues sending things to Boyfriend by email because she didn't listen when I spelled it for her and tried to send it to juno.com and not gmail.com. So I'm thinking maybe we need a new mortgage broker.. and it would have to be fast, because the closing is scheduled for July 8th. But also, at this point, the rates have already gone up, and I don't know if anyone else could get us a better rate anyway. Grr.

Oh, and for the wildly curious, our offer was full price minus $3300 in closing costs, for closing July 8th and the tenants moved out by July 15th. They accepted with only minor revisions (the realtor asked for home and gasline warranties to be purchased, but they already have them.) The house has students in it and is owned by one of the students' parents, so they are flexible on the whole tenants-rights issues, although we have always given 24 hour notice and are giving 30 days notice for them to move out, plus allowing a week after closing (in case it doesn't happen.)

Boyfriend is understandably pissed. I would not be surprised if he wants to vote with his feet and we go to someone else.

Long time no see! An update

2008-06-12T08:40:00.002-04:00

Here's an update on my life, for the curious. I decided I missed the pfblog community so I'm going to try to keep up on Penny Foolish.

Job: Between jobs currently. Left my previous job in March as it was not much fun anymore and I was not happy. Boyfriend is no longer a student and has a FT job. So it works out financially (at least someone is paying the rent, that much I am sure of.) On the upside, this means I have had some time to work on a new business, which is still far from complete - mostly because it costs a pretty penny to get custom PHP programming done, and I don't want to spend much until I get another job. (Funnily, if Boyfriend hadn't gotten a full time job, he might have done it on the cheap.) However, since I left, I was able to roll over my 403b into an IRA, so I may convert some of that to Roth if my taxes are going to be quite low this year, so that's sadly convenient. I am anxiously waiting to hear right now, actually, whether I got a job at a place I interviewed on Tuesday, which I really really liked and they seem quite sane. I happened to have interviewed there a year and a half ago, and they did not hire me because I didn't have experience in their specific medical field. Lo and behold, that field is where I got my next job, so I'm well qualified. It's mostly a matter of me (Ms Personality) vs someone else (Ms Way More Years of Experience) but it's definitely making it a tough choice for them so I feel good about that. Also, when I did the initial phone interview and mentioned that I'd interviewed there before, the head doc commented, "We should have just hired you then!" So fingers crossed on that one.

Life: Spending a lot of time with the dog, Maggie (acquired in January 2008) and the guinea pigs (both of which have now cost me an additional $1k or so since they both got uterine cancer and one of them appears to have an abdominal mass. Fun times.) The cat is perfectly healthy as always and is enjoying his new five-foot-tall cat tree which I got for a steal at a neighborhood-wide yard sale. ($25, and you know it's a good deal when 3 other people try to buy it in the 15 minutes while you are going to fetch your car.) Still working on CashDuck, and have recently opened CashDuck Global for the UK, Canada, and Australia. Working piecemeal on the new business. I had a temp job for a while grading the Ohio Graduation Test short answer essays, and as every generation has thought about the next, we are in trouble if this is the future of our country. :) I am cooking up a few other business ideas as well. I had planned on trying to get into business school to get an MBA, but basically if I don't work for the university, it'll cost buckets. So at this point, I figure I don't need an MBA to be a mogul, Andrew Carnegie didn't have one! Perhaps if it takes off and I need help, I will recruit from among my loyal readers like I did for CashDuck. :)

Home: Still living in a rental, although Boyfriend has put in and had accepted an offer on a real house, that we will hopefully move into by the end of July. Due to the inconveniently timed job loss, this was just the way it worked out best. We were also a little nervous (although willing) about being on the mortgage and title together if we weren't married - very messy if we parted ways. I am excited about finally owning something though, because now we can actually fix things when they go wrong, instead of having our landlord's maintenance men half-fix it and then cause a housefly infestation. (In the bathroom.) The house is quite reasonably priced and is right on the border of where the taxes double, so we get a nice neighborhood with low taxes. Although we might have been able to qualify for more, especially if I were working or did stated-income with the CashDuck income, I feel a lot more comfortable with a mortgage/taxes/insurance payment that is about or a little less than our current rent payment. Plus, there are several remodeling projects that we are planning that should significantly raise the value of the home, and its value as a rental if we choose to go that way in the future. Boyfriend also seems to have caught the homeowning bug and is anxiously awaiting being able to finish the basement and put his office in it.

Finances: And now the part you've all been waiting for. Since my quitting coincided nicely with Boyfriend's full time job, we haven't had too much trouble in the cash flow department. Unfortunately I got into some debt from when Boyfriend was unemployed for three months (he didn't make a lot, but it did help) and mostly from taxes (self-employment income is a crap ton of money, and I have essentially paid for the economic stimulus checks of Everyone I Know.) But my retirement kitty has been untouched since we had some savings and I chose to do some balance transfers rather than dip into it. I will need to take out a little, since I am providing the downpayment for the house, but that's 3% of a not very expensive house so it won't be too much. But since I am not on the mortgage, it doesn't much matter how much debt I am in, and while I'm in more than I'd like, it's all on balance transfers at 4-5% interest, or on the 0% for 1 year card I got before quitting, so I'm not overly concerned about how much interest I'm accumulating. Cross fingers that I get this new job - with both of us having full time jobs, that would literally be like rolling in money. Does it mean I'm still a finance blogger at heart if the first thing I think of is, we could save so much money!!

Pottery Barn credit card bonus

2007-09-05T21:13:00.001-04:00

Whilst perusing the latest Pottery Barn catalog, I noted that the fine print of their credit card bonus program is actually pretty sweet. If you spend $750 during the six-month "program cycle" (which appears to be the first six months of the year, and the second six months) you get a $50 gift certificate to Pottery Barn. Plus, if you spend $100 in the first month, you get a 5% rebate certificate which you could use to make the gift cards go farther. If I spent $750 on my American Express card, I'd only earn $7.50 in gift certificates, so that seems like a good deal to me. To totally dork out, $100 in gift certificates just for spending $1500 with the card (and it doesn't stipulate anything about balances, so you could pay it off right away) gets you a 6.6% return on your money. If you don't want to shop at Pottery Barn, you could sell the gift certificates on eBay or get 70% of value without hassle at GiftCardBuyBack.com or a similar site. (Most of the time eBay'ed gift certificates will get at least 85-90% of value, but it's more time-consuming and you have to pay fees.) I'm probably going to do some credit card arbitraging once my current 0% deal expires and I pay it off, so I'll apply for this one too and get my free gift card.

Details: http://www.potterybarn.com/cust/ccsplash/cust.cfm?cmtype=fnav

A new direction for my net worth this month...

2007-07-07T21:59:00.001-04:00

I compiled my net worth statement this month and wasn't too surprised by the results - I'm down about $5,000 - because I finally decided to spend some of my damn money. :) This August, Boyfriend and I will be taking a week-long trip to Rome! I love to travel and Boyfriend took Italian all year, so it works out well. I am so psyched I cannot even begin to tell you.

I am doing pretty well on my "save all my salary, live on business earnings" plan - I am getting a little chicken though, since with paying for the Rome trip I'm down to only (gasp) two or three months worth of living expenses in the emergency fund. You can tell how chicken I am.

I've taken a new philosophy over the past six months or so - I'm finally realizing that I do in fact earn quite a bit of money, and that money isn't any good if you don't use it to get what you want. At first what I wanted was assurance of financial security, now and in the future, so my focus was on building up an emergency fund and retirement savings. Well, I have over $10,000 in cash, albeit earmarked for different purposes, and as of now I have a smidge over $40k in retirement savings. My outlook on savings could best be described as "starvation mode" - you can never have enough. But I am relaxing some, and not saving every dime. Another facet of my realization is that I am spending a good deal more now on restaurants, entertainment, movies, etc, and often paying for my friends (most of whom are students) because I've realized that one thing that I want is to go out and have a good time with my friends, and there is No Good Reason to not use my money to accomplish this end. :)

Next month I will be moving into a more expensive apartment (it's a duplex) and I am also really excited about this. We need more space, and I want a backyard very badly. (My guinea pigs haven't been outside except to go to the vet in a year and a half.) Boyfriend is getting a grill, partially because it is entirely my idea to move as he's perfectly comfortable in our current apartment, and he is putting up graciously with my shenanigans. (Of course, he also has a room to himself as an office, while my desk is in the bedroom.) Now we'll both have an office, and a very nice kitchen and dining room area, which we use extensively. Of course it is more expensive than where we live now, but this is yet another arena in which I need to remind myself that I can well and easily afford this. There is quite a difference between living below your means, and living vastly below them to the point of unhappiness.

I fully expect my net worth to reverse next month, as I am paying off the Rome trip in a lump sum. I also need to contribute more to my SEP IRA, but I have until April 2008 to do that, so I'm not in a hurry.

Going once..

2007-05-30T20:59:00.000-04:00

I posted before that I am looking to see if someone else would like to take over running the Under 30 Honor Roll and Festival of Under 30 Finances as I don't have the time to develop it into something better - if anyone's interested, please let me know!

Bah, oh well

2007-05-21T20:10:00.001-04:00

So we went to take a look at this house.. and I must say, I was a little taken aback. While I was fully prepared for the cracked kitchen tile and lumpy, painted-over siding, I was not prepared for the several joists in the basement holding up the central floor beam, nor for the fact that all the floors are sloped and a little spongy. Least of all was I prepared for the ladder made of 2x4's that is the method for getting into the attic (which is actually finished quite nicely and is, by the reports of Boyfriend, the nicest room in the house - I was too scared to go up the ladder since it leaned backwards somewhat.)

So just from our initial trip 'round the house, we decided this was not for us. I had been prepared to put $30,000 into this house, but not $60,000 or $70,000 - especially with the damp basement and potential house-sliding-into-one-corner problems. I had been under the impression that the house had been a rental for a few years, but apparently it had been rented out for TWENTY - and it really looks it. There are lots of repairs (like the 2x4 ladder) that look like a cheap, quick, not-particularly-durable solution to a problem. The roof similarly looked like it had been put on by an amateur with cheap materials - it wasn't evenly spaced, and we found part of a shingle on the ground. It's too bad because the backyard was pretty great for this area (yes, you really can buy a house on 1/50th of an acre) and it might be a nice house, if I had $70k. The real deal breaker though were the upstairs bedrooms, which are all quite small, and only one has a normal sized closet. One had a closet literally ten inches deep, and the third had no closet at all. So I backed away from this house - maybe in another few years. :)

So now I'm looking at places to rent, since I do want a bigger place. I found a place that looks great on paper, but I want to talk to the landlord and see what experience they have since I get the impression it's just some guy who owns a house and felt like renting it out. From the county auditor's site, I found that it sold in 2005 (presumably to this guy or someone he works for) for $228,000 - and you can do the math that the rent of $1200 is not going to cover that mortgage. So who knows what the deal is there. I also have my eye on a few other nice places, so hopefully they don't get rented out before I make the final call! My lease is up August 15th so that's a bit early for around here (most things are Sept to Sept) so I'm hoping to get someplace for August 1st, so we have two weeks to move.

In other news, CashDuck is quite busy now and I have added another person to my crew. :) At this point she's mostly helping me catch up on tasks that have been long neglected, and taking only a little workload off of me and my other crew member. Ah, such is business.. it grows faster than I can manage to hire people to take work off me. But things are going quite well. My wonderful ducklings raised $350 for breast cancer research with this month's promotion so I'm pretty pleased with that too! I am pretty much ducking when I am not eating, sleeping, or at work though. Yesterday, I took an hour to relax, which I am not good at, and watched some TV.

In other news, I fear that between my work and CashDuck and attempting to have a real life, I do not have time to administer the Under 30 Honor Roll and I'm not doing it proper justice. So for any fellow Honor Roll members, if you are interested in taking over the Honor Roll and making it the best it can be, drop me an email.

Eee!

2007-05-05T14:44:00.000-04:00

OK, so I know I keep seesawing back and forth on this issue of should I buy a house. I had thought about it but eventually decided that I couldn't afford anything that was in the area that I wanted and had the amenities I wanted (like not sharing a damn wall with a neighbor) so I started looking at renting a larger place instead. Today we even went to see a potential new place to rent which was pretty nice.

Well, I got home from that tour and visited the Craigslist ads as I always do, and then for a lark went on the Prudential page that I use to look up local properties. And..

There is a great house for sale. It is a wee bit more than I wanted to pay, but I can afford it on my salary, not counting any CashDuck money or contribution from Boyfriend. It needs work, but I do have money coming in that I can use (plus if I put a nice downpayment down, I can take it back out as home equity in the short term.) It used to be a rental, so all the guts work, it just isn't terribly pretty. Very nice big backyard (which is pretty rare for the area) and a big deck. Plus, it is empty right now, which is important because I only have three months (approximately) to get this done. Boyfriend doesn't have intensive classes during the summer, so he'd be able to oversee the work a little bit, and my mom is retiring in June and really wants to help out too.

So.. I put in a request to see the house tomorrow, and for a quote from a mortgage broker (an Upfront Mortgage Broker, thanks Searchlight Crusade!) and maybe we can get this puppy going. Although it is a bit higher priced than I would like, it's going to be the only thing we can get a mortgage for in this area - and I'm pretty much guaranteed to get back all the money I put into it when we sell as all the other houses in the area are at least $50k more, and most are pretty nice houses.

As my mom said, you were meant for this house! But then, as I said, I just have to make sure no one else is meant for it too. :) Definitely be updates on this soon.

Edit: I just pulled my credit reports and scores, I have a 697 (???) at Experian, but a 749 from Equifax and a 740 from TransUnion. So I feel pretty damn good about that.

Head above water

2007-04-28T14:36:00.000-04:00

This month has been a particularly crazy one for CashDuck, hence the long silence. But I am doing pretty well with it all, though it does mean I don't sleep quite as much as I'd like. Or blog, or clean the house, or feed the cat. (Sorry, cat.) Recent thoughts:

Taxes - Ouch. I paid about $4,600 between federal, state, and local (plus I paid some 2007 estimated taxes for local). H&R Block decided that I should pay a penalty for underpayment of estimated taxes - however yesterday I got a letter from the IRS (which did cause some consternation when I saw it) in which they stated that I didn't actually need to pay the penalty and they were going to send it back to me. Awesome! Albeit in 30 to 60 days. Still essentially free money. I signed up for the federal estimated tax payment website, and am waiting for my packet on that, and attempted to sign up for the state program but it is rather confusing so I need to sit down and try to figure that out. Local taxes, I just fill out a little coupon and mail that in with a check, there doesn't seem to be an online method. If the state and federal systems weren't so massive that I'm afraid that a paper check would get lost, I'd do it there too as it's simple, but unfortunately doesn't leave much of a record.

Housing - I am really getting the itch to get a bigger place. Our current apartment runs $695 per month plus electric/gas which is another ~$115, so it's pretty easy for me to swing. This is a two bedroom apartment and currently Boyfriend has the small bedroom (it's pretty small) as his office, and I have the remaining space in the large bedroom that isn't actually taken up by the bed. I would really like to have my own room though (especially since then I could take a larger home office deduction if I had a whole room instead of a 5x8 area) and I really need more storage space for all the duck stuff. Second, I would really like a backyard that is fenced in and that dogs haven't been pooping in so I can take my guinea pigs outside. I used to do that all the time when we first moved here but then our second year here several dogs moved into the neighboring apartments and their owners allow them to crap right off the pathway, so I can't let my guinea pigs eat that grass for fear of getting an infection. So some space outside that I can absolutely know dogs haven't crapped on would be great. Third, we need more storage space - we had a great big closet that fit everything, but then (although this is both good and bad) our landlord put a washer and dryer in it. Plus, I am storing most of the unpacked CashDuck duck stuff on a giant shelving unit which is oh-so-lovely right in our living room. So I am really thinking about moving, but have to weigh more room and nicer space against paying at least $400 more per month for what I want. I found a nice place that's a block away, but despite the fact that I walked by this morning and the rent sign is still up, the landlord said it had been rented already. So I've emailed about another place that's a little farther from where I live now, but closer to where I work, but is available in May (and our lease here is not up till August). It won't be a tragedy if we have to stay here a little longer, and then maybe our current landlord will have something that I want available, since we really like our landlord. But I am just getting a little frustrated with how crowded our house is - the rooms are all pretty small or full of furniture.

Savings - I have successfully put Plan Not Living On My Actual Salary into effect. I will get paid $338 on Monday, split 80/20 between the bills bank account and the fun stuff bank account. I already sent off the rent check from my ING checking account (hopefully it will get there on time as I forgot to do it till yesterday so it won't go out till Monday) and transferred some extra money into my bills account. I also didn't get around to making my normal $500 Roth deposit in March so I will put in $1000 in a couple of days for March and April, and my 403(b) will get the $2500 from my salary, plus my regular nonnegotiable contributions, so I am pretty excited about this massive influx. I will also probably put some more money into the Fidelity SEP IRA that I set up - I put $4600 in during early March sometime, of which only $1000 was for this tax year, so I should really put some more in. Part of the logic of not living on my salary is that pretty much one way or another there is not any way for me to get out of paying self-employment tax on my CashDuck earnings, and how much I can save of that is limited to 25% of profit, so I might as well sock away as much as I can with my 403(b) and then put away whatever I can in the SEP afterwards. Also because I can continue sending in money for 2007 to the SEP until Apri 2008, but I can't do so for the 403(b). If I continue not living on my salary for the rest of the year, I'll nearly max out the 403(b) and 457.

MBA - I've been thinking about what kind of advanced ed I should get (as I have intended to get something or other all along) and I'm really leaning towards getting an MBA. The university where I work has a really great part time MBA program which you can get done in as little as two or as many as five years, and is very flexible, and all the classes are at night. The thing that worries me though is whether I will really have the time to do it with both working full time and doing CashDuck. I finally broke down and got someone to help me with CashDuck, but I would really need more help or more time to be able to do this. So the options there are, hire someone else to help me, or go to 32 hours or less per week at my full time job. Option 1, I don't know how helpful that would be because there is so much that would be really hard to spin off, and would require a lot more sophisticated of a structure in order to keep all of the gears running together. The person who helps me now is doing tasks that can be done anytime and don't really intersect with other operations, so it doesn't matter that I don't keep tabs on her. I have a few other things that could be spun off that are similar, but she doesn't have unlimited time or unlimited space for duck prizes at her apartment. :) Option 2 might be the way to go but I think I will wait until I have been there long enough that I am too valuable for them to say "no" to me going 80% (since it would then be 80% of me or 0% of me.)

In the back of my mind there is also option 3 which is to get a different, less demanding or less than full time job, because where I work now seems pretty dysfunctional and unless things improve I might leave too. I do like the work but the management stinks. Everybody keeps asking me why I haven't quit my job to work CashDuck, but the short answer is that I would become very neurotic working at home and having nothing else to think about. Plus I need the psychological security of having that income (even if I'm not living off it) and I wouldn't feel safe quitting my job without having large, large sums of money stashed away. Third, I'm young enough that having that kind of gap in my resume might be disastrous later on. ("You were in research and quit to run a website and now you want to do research again?") So I don't feel it's wise. I mentioned this to Boyfriend the other day and he told me that he would think I was nuts if I quit my job to run CashDuck, for pretty much the reasons I outlined above, but mostly the neuroticism.

A parting thought.. Anybody else notice that ING put in a total deposits amount at the bottom, that shows how much money you have among all of your accounts? I find this to be dangerous as I am practically a compulsive saver now, and I am going to be very unhappy to see that number go down when I have to pay CashDuck estimated taxes soon (since I park CashDuck tax money and general savings money at ING), but I do like seeing that nice big number (though more than half of it is CashDuck's money anyway.)

I will try to keep to a once weekly blog update as I feel very squeezed for time right now - if you saw my house (and desk) you would understand.

See Me On The Tee Vee

2007-03-24T18:23:00.000-04:00

Check this out! They actually didn't use very much of my footage.. but I'm glad they pronounced my name correctly. :) And they didn't use any of the shots of the guinea pigs which I think were definitely way more interesting than me talking.

Taking the big plunge

2007-03-23T01:13:00.000-04:00

Today I filled out the paperwork - effective as of my payday at the end of April (since I get paid once a month) I will have about 86% of my salary deducted pre-tax and put into my retirement accounts. I have plenty of money in liquid savings, and will have more by then, so I know logically it will be perfectly fine even if I don't bring in another dime from CashDuck for at least six months, but it's still a little scary to only draw $500 of salary a month! (That is, before my deductions for my insurance premium, gym membership, and FSA.. that's why it's not 100% of my salary.) So I might only bring home $200 a month. I went in to my TIAA-CREF account and put in some allocations for it - I am hoping that the gibberishly named account that doesn't have any money in it is the 457. (All the other gibberishly named accounts have deposits from which I can figure out whether it's my involuntary contributions, voluntary contributions, or the Roth.)

I also signed up with Citi to get the $50 signup bonus (read about it here) but I forgot to put in the code. I was supposed to take out the code that was there, and enter another. Oh well, I can always use more bank accounts. :) I wonder what the original code was supposed to get you.

Yay!

2007-03-20T23:40:00.000-04:00

TIAA-CREF found my thousand dollars. All is well again.

I'm more heavily thinking about sinking most of my salary into the retirement plan.. I am going to pay SO MUCH in taxes this year that I am trying to stick as much of it into tax-sheltered accounts as possible. (Still filling the Roth though, since I can't retroactively fill it five years from now when I am in a lower tax bracket.)

Life is just chugging along. I am really incredibly busy with CashDuck.. and of course I am not making it any easier for myself by advertising so much and getting lots of new users, and working on new site doodads. :)

Now is the time for the twiddling of thumbs

2007-03-10T20:01:00.000-05:00

It seems like the days right before the 15th, when I get the bulk of the money and can start making payouts and transferring money and ordering cards, are longer than other days. The 15th is always a busy day for me - all the cards get ordered, and all the checks are written. So I'm looking forward to that.

Unfortunately, the other thing that goes on just before payouts are reversals - usually though if I don't feel that the member did anything wrong, I don't reverse the member's credit. So far this month I have gotten at least 10 Foreclosusre.com reversals and 4 Advertising Web Service reversals, and lots of CallWave signups were put "under review".. hopefully there won't be too many more reversals, but the bulk happen between now and the 14th, when the invoice is finalized.

O where o where has my thousand dollars gone

2007-03-09T23:44:00.000-05:00

So I upped my voluntary retirement contributions for February, and they were duly taken out of my paycheck. However, they didn't show up in my TIAA-CREF account. This is bad. They always arrive at the same time as my work's contribution and my involuntary contribution, but this time something seems to have gone amiss and I am missing $1000. I notified TIAA-CREF and they are looking into it, and I notified my HR department and did not get a response. Let's hope one of them finds something soon.. I'm a little disappointed that I missed the really low stock prices day - TIAA-CREF said that when they credit the money, it'll buy shares at whatever price is current that day, not the day it was supposed to credit. (Dangit.)

Me And My SEP

2007-03-05T21:16:00.000-05:00

So I just set up an SEP-IRA for myself, partially because then I can contribute for last year, and knock a good chunk off the taxes I owe, and because I came across this wonderful bit of logic from Five Cent Nickel:

As I noted above, you can contribute to your SEP-IRA as either the employer, the employee, or both. In the case of the latter, it counts against your annual IRA contribution limit, so it reduces the amount that you can contribute to a traditional or Roth IRA. But in the case of the former, there’s no effect on your annual IRA contribution limit. Thus, it seems that you can use employer contributions to your SEP-IRA as a way of legally exceeding the IRS contribution limits.

Brilliant!

See, an SEP can't be set up as a Roth, but you can still deduct it from your taxes, and you can contribute up to 25% of what your business makes each year. So I can contribute my money to either the SEP or into my workplace accounts, and it doesn't make any difference. This is attractive because depositing into my workplace accounts can't exactly be done when I have a bit of spare cash - I have to fill out a form and hope they process it before my next paycheck. ALSO, I could roll it over into a Roth whenever I pleased, and I'm not limited to waiting until I leave this job. So I could have my 403b, my 457b, my Roth IRA, AND my SEP IRA.. drool. (I'm definitely in the savings-is-addictive club.)

Gonna be on the tee-vee

2007-03-03T15:23:00.000-05:00

So about two weeks ago, I was contacted by a journalist who was looking for someone to be interviewed on camera about the new ING checking account. Apparently, I was the first person to say yes. A camera guy came to my house and filmed me talking about the account, at my computer using it, and then about 15 minutes of footage of me feeding the guinea pigs (including a couple minutes of extreme closeup, where his camera was almost touching the cage and they were eating a piece of celery right in front of the lens.) No idea how this will turn out, but I hope that gets in. :) This story is essentially going to be sold to a bunch of smaller networks, who will have their local news anchor read the copy and dub it over, so hopefully it will start appearing on the Web in late March. I'll post one if I find it.

Oh you temptress, TIAA-CREF

2007-02-25T21:48:00.000-05:00

So I wrote previously about how I am trying to structure my contributions to cram as much money as possible into my retirement accounts this year. Well, TIAA-CREF just sent me a letter about this year's contribution limits for my 403(b).. and my 457(b). What what now?

Apparently I have BOTH a 403(b) and 457(b) set up for me through my work plan. I am not sure what a 457(b) is, but it appears to do the same thing that I am doing with my voluntary contributions to the 403(b). And my maximum limit on it is $14,740. Which means, total between the two, I could put away $30,240.

This has opened up whole new possibilities of cramming money into the account! I am tremendously excited. (Especially since I found out that you can only change your allocations once a quarter, and thus must plan more carefully.) So I think I will wait and see how things shake out in the next couple months as there may be some changes in my life going on, but I might be able to get a whole lot more money in there! (This would also save me a fortune in taxes, given how much self-employment income I have.) Very interesting...

Positive net worth!

2007-02-23T13:58:00.000-05:00

I updated my NetWorthIQ page a day or two ago and it looks like I finally have a positive net worth! Click here to see my NetWorthIQ profile.

OK, so it's only $367 above zero, but it's a start! (Although I am currently only including my retirement contributions, not the actual value of the account, so if I used actual value it'd be about $2000 more.)

I have some pretty audacious savings goals for this year. I'm already trying to max out my retirement savings and I want to get up to a $10,000 emergency fund (right now at $4000 and change) as well as save up the money to pay off my 0% balance transfer when it comes due in December (I'll need about $4600, have about $2700 right now) so I've still got some work to do. I have some other goals to meet if I can do those, but those are the first priority.

I'm really not worried about paying off my student loan though - it's fixed at 3.9% and I'm getting 4.5% at ING, so it makes more sense to save right now than pay down the debt.

OK how dorky am I...

2007-02-20T22:18:00.000-05:00

I got all excited because Boyfriend asked me if I would do his taxes. Normally he mails his things home to his father, who has an accountant do them. Which is really silly, because Boyfriend has exactly one W-2 and an interest statement. It took us about half an hour, at least ten minutes of which was consumed by such activities as trying to get TaxCut to open in a browser (doesn't work in Linux or Firefox) and printing out the sheet he has to sign and mail in because he doesn't know his AGI from last year (which is what TaxCut asks you for to prove your identity.) We then went to the Ohio e-file site and filed that - hells no I would not let him pay thirty bucks to let TaxCut do it! He's getting a couple hundred back which is pretty nice. I have also been telling several other people that I will help them do their taxes, because I just don't see the point in paying a couple hundred for someone at a tax place to do what will take us and the programs in Free File half an hour. And maybe some chips. I do like chips.

I won't file my own until April, although they are done, so I can hang onto the money a little longer.. plus TaxCut still does not have the Ohio form that assesses me a penalty for underpayment. (I probably should have looked into this earlier, since the estimated tax payment deadline was Jan. 15th and I could have made that and saved some bucks. But, since I have no idea what they are going to charge me, I might actually earn more in interest than I will pay in penalty.)

Free camera when you sign up for Key Checking

2007-02-17T14:00:00.000-05:00

I got a Nano with their last promotion - now you can get what is actually a very nice camera. Click to check it out. You have to open a checking account and:

* Set up Direct Deposit and/or Automated Payments and complete two transactions each of $150 or more by June 1, 2007
* Or, use your new checking account to make 20 transactions - from ATM withdrawals to online banking to writing checks - and be approved for a new Key credit card by June 1, 2007

I'd personally go for the first one as it doesn't involve opening a credit card. I've always had great service from Key and they'd be my primary bank if there were a branch close by. Right now I use them as my bill paying account and things have always gone smoothly.

Someday I hope to be this guy, without the beer

2007-02-14T20:46:00.000-05:00

Click if the image is unclear.

This is from PVP Online, a comic that I like to read. This character won a whole lot of money in the lottery and now spends his days drinking beer and playing video games with his friends.

But seriously, I have been thinking (not in a morbid way) about where I would leave my retirement money when I don't need it anymore. One thing I think would make a big impact on people's lives is to dispose of it to a foundation associated with the hospital I work at. This foundation generally pays for things like cab fares and hotel stays and other little things that are important to getting your cancer treated just like the doctors and nurses are - after all, if you can't afford to get there and you have no place to stay, life is going to be a lot more difficult. I know there are a lot of foundations that support research - and seeing as how I am in research, I certainly appreciate it - but the best drugs in the world will not find you a sitter for your kids while you are in the hospital, or drive you here from two hours away when your car is broken down.

Shameless plug - Get a free Fandango movie ticket

2007-02-13T19:12:00.000-05:00

Join the Johnnie Walker email club and get a free movie ticket from Fandango! I believe this will only be open until Feb. 15th. If you prefer, you can also join CashDuck and earn a dollar for completing this offer - but a free ticket is pretty good too. =)

A better plan

2007-02-12T19:44:00.001-05:00

The more I thought about the plan I came up with yesterday the more stressed I got that it might not work out (like if they don't process the paperwork to return my contributions to a normal level in time!)

So what I am going to do instead with the extra savings is to max out the Roth now, and change my monthly contribution to $1000 from $500. That way I won't feel much of a pinch since I won't be contributing the $200 per month (which sadly since I am now in such a high tax bracket, I would only get post-tax about $300 from the extra $500).

Also I figured out that I would only be able to do the whole-month thing twice before I hit the cap on my 403(b) contributions. What a dilemna to have, eh? ;)

So if all goes as planned, I will contribute the following amounts to my 403(b) during the year 2007:

$3990 - involuntary contributions
$500 - already made, voluntary
+ $11000 - will make, voluntary
----------------------------------
$15490 - juuuust squeaking under the maximum voluntary contributions

Also: $5784 - employer contributions
$4000 - Roth IRA

Total: $25274, maxing out both the IRA and the 403(b).

I am extremely pleased with myself. =) Maybe I will hit my retirement goal before 30!

Machinations

2007-02-11T23:41:00.000-05:00

I'm feeling very pleased these days about my retirement contributions. With the new job came a healthy pay raise, and since my involuntary contributions as well as my workplace's contributions are done on percentage, they've gone up 30%, to $814 per month. I'm also putting in $500 per month myself, so I'm now getting nearly as much in retirement contributions as I am living on. This is astonishing to me.

I've got an automatic contribution of $200 per month to the Roth, and I'll max it out by the end of the year. And I'm now saving plenty of money. So I'm casting around for ways to get more money into my retirement accounts. I don't want to contribute so much every month that I have to rely on other money to live, but the 403(b) is the only other option after maxing out the IRA to get more money into a tax-sheltered account.

So here's my plan. I use about $1800 per month to pay all the bills, rent, groceries, contribute to the Roth, etc. So my plan right now is that once I have a comfortable amount saved up, I'm going to change my retirement contribution amount for that month from $500 to $2000 or $2500 - essentially my whole paycheck after about $470 in pretax required deductions - and live on my saved-up money for one month. Then I'll change it back the next month and save up my money again. Then when I get another $2000 or so saved up, I'll have another "no-income" month and put it in the 403(b).

This sounds pretty good to me but I'm also kind of chicken about not having the money coming in. But I think I can prep ahead of time and make sure the bills money is in the bills bank account, and the living money in the living expenses bank account, and I've got my ING debit card in case there is an emergency. So perhaps next month... :)

Saga of the pennies

2007-02-08T20:34:00.000-05:00

So the desk I have at my new job was inherited from a nice lady who is friends with my mentor lady, so I know her pretty well and have spent a lot of time with her. I have returned several things that I found in her desk that I thought she might want. Today, I went to ask her about the pennies. Lots and lots of pennies.

See, in my desk drawer I have a tray, and in the tray are some rubber bands, binder clips, bits of paper, and about 100 pennies. It seems that she just dumped all her excess pennies in this tray, and pushed it to the back. So when I went to give her something that I found in my area today, I asked her about the pennies and if she would like me to bring them to her.

She made a face and said she did not want them. Apparently she really, really doesn't like pennies.

So I put them in a zip bag and brought them home to put in my piggy bank. Hey, it's 100 more pennies than I had before!

And if you were curious, yes, I also pick up pennies off the sidewalk. That's also one more penny than I had before.

Now up to 6 ING accounts...

2007-02-06T20:25:00.000-05:00

I am a huge fan of ING Direct and have been for a long time - I joined in June 2001, the summer before I left for college, and my first account was named the "oh shit fund". (It is still called that.)

Well, I am now up to six accounts with them, having opened an Electric Orange account a week or so ago, and yesterday opened yet another savings account in order to hold my credit card payoff money. I have about $5700 on a 0% balance transfer and decided to just save it up and hang onto the money until it expires next December to earn a little more interest. Once it's paid off, I may start doing some 0% balance transfer arbitrage stuff to earn more, but we will see. But to keep that money separate, I opened another account. You can open as many savings accounts as you want under one customer number, and give them all different names, and they will have different account numbers so you can direct deposit into specific accounts. So right now I have my "oh shit fund", a house fund, a credit card holding account, an Electric Orange checking account, and two accounts for CashDuck which hold tax money and business savings. This should be enough accounts for me in a while.. I just do so love to have every dollar in its place!

Why I don't carry cash

2007-02-04T23:13:00.000-05:00

Cause I took out $90 a week ago and have.. um.. $49 left, and no clear recollection of where it went. I know I went out to eat, bought some little things for my mom, a couple snacks, a bagel sandwich for breakfast, um..

See, I needed cash because I have to take a cab tomorrow and wanted to have cash on me to pay for it. And I figured I should get $90 so I could get closer to the actual fare than I would with only $20s. Then I thought I should get some fives and broke a twenty.. then broke a ten to get singles.. and now I have five $5 bills, nine $1 bills, and one twenty left. And that twenty was supposed to stay in my purse as emergency money.

Oops. I guess I have to go to the bank again.. but this time only take out $20!

Pluses and minuses

2007-01-29T20:25:00.000-05:00

Plus: I got my $50 National City gift card in the mail today - it was a Sharebuilder bonus for signing up through my National City account that I have for CashDuck. So that's pretty cool. Sharebuilder bonuses are awesome. (I invested my $6 in an S&P 500 index fund. It is now worth $6.14. How savvy am I?)

Minus: I got two W-2's that I had forgotten about - one for Pearson, which was a test-grading job that I had for about a month in April-ish ($988) and one for Kaplan, where I worked for exactly three days during the July-ish period when I decided I needed a second job and then decided that I really wanted to go home after work ($81). So that's about $200 more in taxes to pay since neither had much withheld. And it also makes me wonder where the thousand dollars went??

Plus: I finally am able to see information about Electric Orange, the new ING checking account, and I am ALL over that. They have a payment feature where you can send someone an email, they put in their banking info, and voila they get money! This is so cool I can't even begin to describe. Plus about 3% interest on the money you have sitting around in the account. I am so opening one for CashDuck!!

EDIT: I originally wasn't happy about this feature because you had to know their account info - but the description made it sound like you didn't have to anymore. On further investigation, it's the same. So I guess that makes this a neutral?

Minus: I went to Target on Sunday with a pocketful of coupons, spent $91 and walked out without remembering to actually hand over the coupons to the Target lady (about $10 worth.)

Plus: I got a prescription filled and actually had one of the free-gift-card-with-prescription coupons (which I did use) from Target, so I got a $10 gift card from that.

Plus: I get my first paycheck from my new job on Wednesday - and $500 of it is going into my 403(b). So, from my calculations, about $1340 will actually be deposited between my employer's contributions and my voluntary and involuntary contributions. Which is about as much money as I use to live on and pay bills other than debt. So I think that's pretty cool. If all goes as planned I may have to raise my goals of how much retirement money I want to save by 30! =)

Check out this edition of the Festival of Under 30 Finances!

2007-01-27T23:36:00.000-05:00

Golbguru asked a really great question, and got some interesting answers.. I bet you wish you'd contributed now, huh? ;) Go look!

Because I am a dork...

2007-01-23T20:42:00.000-05:00

I started doing my taxes tonight. (Despite the fact that I know I will owe thousands and prefer to keep the money in the savings account until the last minute.) Why? Because I am a huge dork and like to do my taxes. I use H&R Block, although now I make enough that it won't be free anymore. But it does nice things like import my information from last year.

Unfortunately, it seems that the form which you use for the telephone tax refund won't be available for two whole more days, so I can't finish. =) Not that I was going to.. but again, see the dork thing.

Upcoming Festival of Under 30 Finances!

2007-01-23T18:22:00.000-05:00

Submit your post to this Friday's festival and answer this question:

Assume you are an average 25 year old with $25,000 debt (on account of your student loan) You have been given a lump sum $10,000 and the following four choices:

1. Invest it for your retirement funds.
2. Save/invest it for your future home.
3. Save/invest it towards your child’s/children’s future college education.
4. Pay part of your student loan debt.

You can pick only one of the above choices towards which you should use the entire $10,000. Which one will you pick? ..and Why? Assume that the rate of return on the three investments choices is the same and the student loan charges you an interest rate that is equal to this rate of return. Would your answer be any different if the amount was $25,000 instead of $10,000? Again, you can pick only one of the choices.

Click here to submit! You have until Wednesday at midnight, so plenty of time to mull over your choices...

The penny pinchers club

2007-01-21T01:09:00.000-05:00

I think the lunching situation has been resolved - basically, it seems like I will be able to eat lunch with the other two new girls each day, although one of them is only over in our building temporarily to be trained, and will be permanently working about five minutes' drive from us. We've decided to go out to a Mexican place that they both like and I haven't been to - but we have all agreed that spending money on lunch is wasteful. One of them actually said, you know, if you spend $25 a week on lunch, that's $100 a month! (Which is of course something regularly said in the PF community, but I would have felt like a big dork saying it myself. =)

The three of us have also had long conversations at lunch about how people spend their money wastefully, and how people try to convince us to spend more money. (Both girls have significant savings despite holding essentially student-wage jobs previously.) They also both described themselves as penny pinchers. So I feel like I have found financial kindred spirits and I am quite satisfied.

They also serve as a kind of financial conscience - I know that I will feel wasteful if I bring in restaurant leftovers for lunch three times in one week because then they will know I ate out three times for dinner. ;) So that's going to keep me in line there too!

I did feel kind of bad on Friday though because my mentor lady didn't have anyone to go with because the lady we usually ate with is not there on Fridays, and I was going off to eat with the other girls. She did eventually find someone who would go with her, but if I hadn't said I was going with the other girls then it would have been just the two of us and she could have gone to lunch when she wanted, instead of waiting for someone else to come back to go with her.

Eatin' fancy on the cheap

2007-01-15T14:49:00.000-05:00

Check this out kids.. I am very proud of this latest cheap dining escapade. I usually try to use a coupon or something every time we go out (to the point that, when Boyfriend wishes to go out, he asks what coupons I have handy) but this time I was especially skillful. I've taken quite a shine to The Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant that's unfortunately rather expensive. We went there for our anniversary and the bill including tip was over $120 - so not someplace you go everyday! But I got a $50 gift card (by cashing in 5000 points that were awarded with my Amex Gold which I got for CashDuck) and also signed up for their Fondue Club which gave me a coupon for a free chocolate dessert (about $14 normally.) But this time we knew what was going on (as the menu can be complicated) and got a cheaper package, as well as the gift card and free chocolate. So I present to you my eating on the cheap:

I left a tip of $25 and change to make $40 even - which is about as much as we'd spend at the Olive Garden, for a very swanky evening out.

Update on the lunching situation

2007-01-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

I brought my lunch on Thursday and simply took it with me to the diner - I felt a little silly so I got some fries too. (They do have good fries.) Then on Friday I didn't have enough time Thursday night to make the lunch, so I ended up spending another $7 for pizza. But there are also two new people who want to go to lunch with us (although we have not been able to locate them at the proper lunch time) who both bring their lunch, so I think between all of us we will start a movement here! Part of the problem is that there is no real place that we can sit in the office - there is a kitchen but it doesn't have any chairs and the table is covered in crap. They have co-opted another department's lounge though and that seemed to be OK, so perhaps we will do that next week.

A bit stressed about the job at the moment - my supervisor has been on vacation all this week, but over the weekend before she left she sent me an email about what people's thoughts were, and apparently people got the impression that I was not particularly excited to be there. I am not naturally a hugely effusive person, and I didn't think I came across as terribly excitable in the interview, but they were concerned that I wasn't interacting much with the patients (exactly what am I going to tell them?) or with the other clinical people when we were up on the hospital floors (who don't know me - and if you've ever worked in that situation, people are generally so busy that you chit chat and then as soon as the conversation is over, you mutually ignore each other and get back to work. So if the chit chat is just "hello, nice to meet you" then it's over pretty quickly.) My supervisor brought up in our meeting on Friday that there were other places that I could move to if this wasn't a good fit - at the time I thought she meant to a different working group (groups are arranged by type of cancer) but now I am wondering if she means out of my position entirely, and into doing data coordination or regulatory, which would involve no patient contact or even leaving the room much. So I don't know what's going to happen - I feel overwhelmed because I have to learn so much, and I don't think it's really fair to make my first week dictate that I should be moved immediately. I realize they don't want to waste time training me if I won't be any good, and my supervisor said that if it's too overwhelming and I'm not happy then I won't stay very long and that's not what they want, but if I get moved to another position that I end up hating, well, then I won't be there very long either.

Festival of Under 30 Finances up at The Finance Journey!

2007-01-12T19:46:00.000-05:00

Click here and go check it out. Several bloggers wrote full length articles on this week's question, so you get to see a really in depth response.

Upcoming Festival of Under 30 Finances!

2007-01-09T23:50:00.000-05:00

Click here to submit your post. This edition's question: Where do you see yourself financially in 10 years?

Do you think ten financial years will be gone in the blink of an eye, or do you think you'll be closer to your goals? Submit your article and your answer for us all to see! This edition is hosted by The Finance Journey.

My $70 Night Out (at a potluck in someone's house)

2007-01-09T17:53:00.000-05:00

On Saturday, Boyfriend and I decided that we would make a Philly cheesecake for a potluck we were going to that night. So we went to the store and plunked down about $20 for ingredients (as we didn't own any graham crackers, five boxes of cream cheese, etc etc.) and took it all home. I put everything together, got the crust baked, poured it and baked it. Boyfriend took it out to cool and about half an hour later, we were going to put it in the fridge. He said, I wonder what it tastes like? So I took a spoon and took a little piece out of the corner. It was, how shall I say, yucky.

On further perusal of the recipe, it was discovered that I had left out the cup of sour cream. Which I guess you need.

So we went back to the store and spent another $10 or so buying a small frozen cheesecake, and an extra frozen pie since the cheesecake didn't seem big enough for ten people. I made the raspberry stuff for the topping (ie putting a bunch of frozen raspberries and melting them in a pot on the stove - they will liquefy) and we went off to the party.

There is no real parking around this friend's apartment, so we parked on the street. Illegally. (Sort of.) And were ticketed, which was $40.

So much for a cheap night out with friends! =)

Eating up my salary - and me being a party pooper

2007-01-04T20:28:00.000-05:00

The first day at my new job, I went to lunch with some of the ladies, and I thought that was nice - they wanted to do something special and get out of the office so they could get to know me. However, it actually seems like they eat out every single day. Yesterday we went to an actual sit-down diner, and today we went back to the expensive cafeteria. (There are two cafeterias at the hospital - one is pretty low key, with sandwiches, soup, entrees of the day, salad bar, etc. I can usually get whatever I want for five bucks or less, including fries. The other one is actually several retail food shops, sort of like a mini food court - we have a Wall Street Deli, Mark Pi's, some Italian place that serves pasta and pizza, and a coffee bar/smoothies place.) No one has mentioned going to the regular cafeteria (although they have just as much variety, are somewhat closer, and are cheaper - and the ladies seemed to know an awful lot about the menu at Nick's Diner. (One of them had a fully punched buy-nine-get-tenth-free card, and said it was her second one. She's only been here a year and a half.)

So I am wondering what I should do. On the one hand, one of the ladies is basically going to be my mentor and I will be with her all the time, and I do like her so I don't want to miss out on lunching with her. Plus, I hardly know anyone else. And two, I don't really want to sit at my desk and eat like I did at my old job. That was very sad. But on the other hand, I don't want to drop six or seven dollars a day on lunch. Previously I usually brought in frozen dinners or Chunky soup, but there is no microwave at these locations (although there is in the cheaper cafeteria!) - so maybe I will start packing sandwiches or something that can be eaten cold? I gotta figure this out before I hemorrhage lunch money!! I've been paying for lunch with a $25 Visa gift card I got for Christmas from a family friend so I'm not hurting yet.

One thing that I think is interesting however is that my mentor lady was talking about how she's basically perennially on the edge of bankruptcy ever since adopting her children - the adoption cost $50,000 for both children, and they haven't had much extra money since. But, and this is a big but, she then went on to describe the lavish birthday parties she throws for them. Her kids just turned four, and she didn't do anything for their first birthdays, but each birthday since then they have each had a huge to-do with tents, decorations, full costumes for everyone, etc, to the tune of about $2,000 each. So two children, three birthdays each at $2,000, that's twelve thousand dollars! She also admitted to being a huge shopper - so between the shopping, the huge parties, and the eating out every day, I am not surprised she has money problems. On the way back from the diner I had to go to the bank and deposit some checks, since they are now open only while I am at work (as I am now working real hours) and my mentor lady asked jokingly if I was in the zero-money club too. I just kind of laughed and didn't say anything, I did not want to say that I was in there depositing six checks for a total of $2500, most of which came from CashDuck, and was going to my Roth IRA. I don't think they would have been laughing much after that.

Question for the rest of you - Do you feel like you are a big stick in the mud because you are financially responsible? How do you keep from raining on others' parades (even when that parade is running them into bankruptcy?)

Dividends Yes Yes I Love Dividends Yes!

2007-01-03T19:54:00.000-05:00

Evidently TIAA-CREF declared dividends when I wasn't looking (Dec. 22nd, to be precise) and I got a bunch o' free money!

TIAA-CREF Small-Cap Value Index Fund - Retirement Class $0.02
TIAA-CREF Small-Cap Equity Fund - Retirement Class $0.06
TIAA-CREF Mid-Cap Blend Index Fund - Retirement Class $0.09
TIAA-CREF Small-Cap Value Index Fund - Retirement Class $0.28
TIAA-CREF Small-Cap Value Index Fund - Retirement Class $0.48
TIAA-CREF Small-Cap Equity Fund - Retirement Class $0.54
TIAA-CREF Small-Cap Equity Fund - Retirement Class $0.61
TIAA-CREF Mid-Cap Blend Index Fund - Retirement Class $0.62
TIAA-CREF Mid-Cap Value Fund - Retirement Class $0.69
TIAA-CREF Mid-Cap Value Fund - Retirement Class $1.38
TIAA-CREF Mid-Cap Value Fund - Retirement Class $2.70
TIAA-CREF Small-Cap Value Index Fund - Retirement Class $2.75
TIAA-CREF Mid-Cap Blend Index Fund - Retirement Class $4.15
TIAA-CREF International Equity Fund - Retirement Class $12.60
TIAA-CREF Mid-Cap Blend Index Fund - Retirement Class $15.80
TIAA-CREF International Equity Fund - Retirement Class $36.35
TIAA-CREF International Equity Fund - Retirement Class $91.84

$170 of free money!! I love it. Not sure why all the parts were declared separately - maybe from separate purchases? - but each type used the same share price for each instance. But I'm pretty happy. My net worth will get a nice bump when all activity goes through for this month - I sent in money to fill out the rest of my Roth (about $2600) and with the whole balance transfer fiasco, Discover only ended up giving me a credit like of $6k so I am just going to pay the rest off, rather than pay the default 10% on the BoA card. Plus my retirement contributions for the month don't generally hit until the 5th-9th, which is why I wait to update my net worth till then. Can't wait for my new higher contributions to kick in at the end of this month!!

End of my first job, start of my second

2007-01-02T21:46:00.000-05:00

I guess I have to change my little profile in the corner now, huh? Thursday and Friday were my last days at my old job, and wow that was boring. My computer was reassigned on the Friday before, for no apparent reason except that it was to be done by Wednesday, but I was taking Wednesday off, so it had to be done on Friday instead. I had planned on using my laptop to at least access my email and do some data entry, but I could not for the love of Pete get it on the wireless network. So I pretty much did nothing on Thursday, helped a coworker do some things, and then really did nothing on Friday other than take my plant and a box of my stuff over to my new job. At 11:30 my former supervisor told me that I could just go as there was clearly nothing for me to do (I was using a student computer and my office was stripped) so I did, at about 12:30.

Today was my first day at my new job. It's a bit disappointing that I don't get to have my own office anymore, but I realize how unusual of a luxury that was these days! We live in basically a humongous room which is divided up into six smaller sections, which then have desks in each of the corners, roughly. So I have a corner. It's reasonably nice though for a giant cubicle and the ladies in it are all great. I was instructed by one of them that I would be attending lunch with them - they didn't want the new person to have to eat lunch alone on the first day from not knowing anyone. =) They actually have a schedule set up (of sorts) for training; I will be having apparently about ten half-hour meetings with various people throughout the department so that they can tell me what they do. The first two weeks are pretty laid back and then I will start shadowing people for about another three weeks, and then I will be working on a protocol with someone else to get the hang of it before I am given my own. It is still a little weird to actually have work to do, but I suspect that I will get used to it. My work ability however is limited by the fact that apparently it will take two WEEKS to transfer my computer account over. If you are a new user, they can make you one in a day, but since I am an internal transfer this is apparently Rocket Science and has to be performed by a specialist. Or something. So I can't even use Word or anything, much less do the online courses that I am supposed to complete. Email luckily will not require much transfer, although I can't check it at work.

Also, I told a couple of my coworkers about CashDuck, although not in great detail - I only told one at my old job, and that was only recently. I felt like I was hiding its existence although I don't know really why I felt it was necessary to do so. Everything with CashDuck is going pretty swimmingly; it is now to the stage where I do not have to babysit it constantly. I think it wouldn't have done so well if I'd not been able to check things during the day for the first month, when there were a lot more questions and a lot more site issues, but it's OK for eight hours without attention. (Although people seem to take hour-long lunches and work 8 to 5 here, so I'll probably check my email on my lunch.)

Well, that's an improvement

2006-12-30T14:53:00.000-05:00

Previously I wrote about how I spent a bzillion dollars on clothes. Actually, it was $175 for clothes and $125 for a pair of clogs. Well, I checked the Dankso outlet page today (danskooutlet.com, for the curious) and they had the exact shoes I wanted for $40 less! So I bought those and am going to send the other ones back. Hooray for abusing Zappos' free returns policy ;) I like Zappos but most everything I want there seems to be full price. So I'm pretty satisfied with my mad shopping skillz - although I would have been more satisfied had I checked the outlet page BEFORE I bought the other ones!

Festival of Under 30 Finances up at Beachgirl's Budget Blog

2006-12-29T10:28:00.000-05:00

Check it out here! This is our last festival of the year but there are many more great things to come next year.

Sweet Fancy Moses I'd Better Never Need Any More Clothes

2006-12-28T20:54:00.000-05:00

I just spent $175 on clothes!

This is a lot of money for me. I do not, as a routine, spend very much on clothes. Most of my shirts were $10 or less, pants $15 or less, and bought in bunches when Old Navy has a sale. But I am beginning to realize that as a grown-up I should own more grown-up clothes for work, and thus I purchased: two tops that could be worn out in the evening or to work, two pairs of nice pants, a nice skirt, a long-sleeved shirt, and four bras. (BTW, if any other ladies are shopping, Lane Bryant has a buy-2-get-2-free bra sale, and with the coupon code 050001521 you can get $25 off $75, $50 off $150 or $75 off $225.) This is in addition to four pairs of nice pants that I recently bought. So I feel pretty well stocked - nearly every shirt I own is solid colored, so I think I am OK in the shirts department. My coworkers were making fun of my pants though since they are a mite too short and I look like I grew out of them a little.

I am also going to buy a pair of Dansko clogs, since it has been pointed out to me that frugality has apparently made me mismatch (all of my pants are dark colored and the shoes I wear at work now are grey, and this seems to be bad.) So I am going to bite the bullet and buy FULL PRICE shoes. I do so love my Dansko shoes though, so I am not going to cheap out and buy something else as they will indeed last for a bzillion years.

On a random note, if you have switched to the new Blogger, what has your experience been? I just see notes about blogs going down when they switch, and that also seems bad.

Maybe they think I deserve another

2006-12-20T13:08:00.000-05:00

I just got a call from KeyBank asking if Miss Booykin was there.. We won't get into the last name mangling. It was another guy asking politely if I'd received my Nano from the promotion some months ago. This is odd because they have already called me twice, once just to say "hi" and once to ask if I'd gotten the Nano. I wonder what they would do if I said I hadn't gotten it - send me another? Do they have extras?

Finally, Pinecone pays by Paypal

2006-12-20T10:47:00.000-05:00

Last night I got my very first $5 payment from Pinecone by Paypal. I'd been hoping that this would happen for a while - partially because when I get those little checks in the mail, they tend to be subsumed into general spending. But most of the money I get for various activities (PayPerPost, surveys, etc) by Paypal goes into my savings account - I don't think I'll miss the odd $5 here and there, but my savings account notices them!

Got a National City account? Get a $50 Visa GC for opening a Sharebuilder account

2006-12-19T14:56:00.000-05:00

This was in my "messages" on my CashDuck bank account online - they have a promotion with Sharebuilder for a $50 Visa gift card after placing one trade. I always forget about the Sharebuilder bonuses and always mean to do another, so I went ahead and did it now with $10 of money from the CashDuck account.

Just visit www.NationalCity.com/GiftOfStock

and enter the code: ncgift06 if it isn't already entered.

Verdict: Paying $15,000 to parents is OK, $170 per month to boyfriend is bad!

2006-12-19T12:52:00.000-05:00

Having recently posted about how I'm planning on paying back my parents for $15k in student loans, and about how I'll be paying about $170 more of the rent for my boyfriend once I start my more lucrative new job, it seems that parents win hands down. However, if you read the tenor of the comments on both posts, it's a little unsettling.

Giving $15k to my parents in a short period of time is evidently commendable, such that someone will be along to give me a prize any moment now, but giving my boyfriend $170 a month is dangerous to my health and may actually kill me.

Just an observation.

I Tried A Bunch of Advertising Methods, and Surprise Surprise Some Of Them Don't Work

2006-12-18T11:34:00.000-05:00

I've been advertising for CashDuck for about six weeks now, and I thought I'd post my thoughts about what methods worked and didn't work, both in terms of how many people signed up and how much it cost. The only way I know where people come from is what they put in the "How did you hear about CashDuck?" spot, so efficacy is more or less estimated.

1. PayPerPost

Yes, I actually put up some post offers on PayPerPost. I did it in two batches for a total of eight bought posts. I offered $4 per post - the total, including fees, was $20 for 3 posts and $30 for 5 posts.

Was it worth it? Um, not really. The first round was very disappointing - one of the posts got it all wrong on what the site is about, and another post literally just copied the explanatory text and added some stuff. (Including the part where I suggested that they put up a referral banner and earn 10% of anyone who signed up under them - I intended that they would do that in the post, since the first time I didn't require a picture.) Only one actually was any good and I think I got a few users out of that. The reason I'm so annoyed about those is that I emailed PayPerPost to say that those posts were unacceptable, and they told me that they would reject them, but not to worry since their regular quality control should take them out anyway. They're still there.

The second round was somewhat better, and I got some users, but it was underwhelming writing to say the least. The big downside of PayPerPost is that a lot of these blogs really do seem like they were started just to do PayPerPost - or they have so little traffic it's hardly worth it. The posts went up two weeks ago and two of the posts in the second round have only 15 views! So considering how much it cost ($50) I don't think I'll be doing PayPerPost again.

2. Google AdWords

This was relatively easy to setup, and with a monthly budget of only $15, I think it's been reasonably worthwhile. I have a cost-per-click of about 40 cents for the words I chose, and although I can't precisely track whether they actually used the AdWords link if they state that they found it through searching, I have noticed a lot more people saying that they found it on Google. Given the low cost I think it's worth it to keep on, but it's not the best bang for my buck.

3. Ask.com Sponsored Listings

I actually was called by a rep from Ask.com pushing this product - it's basically Google Adwords, with a slightly longer area of text for the ad. You set a daily budget and when you run low, they auto-charge your credit card. Big downside - there doesn't seem to be a way to just cancel the campaign and use up the remaining funds. I was going to take it down, but then I got auto-charged another $25, so I guess I'll wait to cancel the campaign until it gets close to empty again. I have a budget of $2 a day, which is usually about 5 clicks. I don't think this has worked particularly well, but I could also have chosen better keywords.

4. Project Wonderful

This is really a cool site. Basically what you are doing is purchasing ads (tiny ads, regular span ads, and skyscrapers) on various sites, many of which are comics or something similar. I imagine as they expand their advertising base, different kinds of sites will come in, but right now it's pretty much advertising for the 18-to-30 market. You bid on ads on a cost-per-day basis, and whenever your bid is the high bidder, that's when your ad runs and you get charged. So if you bid twenty cents a day, but someone else has bid a maximum of 30 cents, you won't be the high bidder right then - but you will when the 30 cent bid runs out. You can set a time for the bid to expire, or a maximum cost. I like to put up bids for ten or twenty cents, with a maximum of $1 or $2 - since there aren't a lot of paying advertisers on the site right now, you could probably get an ad on more than half the sites for ten or twenty cents a day. I got the biggest boost in traffic from one site - I noticed a lot of people were coming from this site, which was one I'd actually bid 50 cents on. I went to the site and lo and behold, the comic owner was so happy that I'd paid for his hosting for the next two months that he'd gone to CashDuck and written a little review about it, and encouraged his users to try it out! So that was definitely worth it, and I was happy that he was happy for my patronage. I found a post on a forum where people were bitching about my ads (apparently they look "old-internet") which kind of took the wind out of my sails, but I am back in the game now. You can also post ads for free, if you're the first to bid. I've spent about $75 at Project Wonderful so far and been quite pleased with the results.

5. 50,000 banner impressions at Keenspot

Keenspot is a consortium of comics - when you buy impressions, your ad shows up on all of them. This was at a rate of $1 per thousand so I spent $50. I think this has been pretty effective, I've seen several people mention it in their signup, but what I think will really pay off is the fact that I'm reaching groups of people who weren't already out looking for ways to make money. (The issue sometimes with using things like AdWords is that I get lumped in with sites that are actual scams - and then it rubs off on me.) So since it's not presented that way, I think they are more apt to get into it and tell their friends, which will have ramifications beyond just those initial signups. This was also very easy to setup - they have an insertion order form right there on the website so you just give them the banner, the link, and the money, and it starts running.

6. 50,000 banner impressions at Blank Label Comics

Blank Label Comics is another comics consortion - can you tell what kind of demographic I'm going for? ;) This is also $1 per thousand so I spent $50. This has been somewhat more successful at initial signups than Keenspot, since the sites are somewhat higher traffic, but I'm probably burning through those impressions a lot faster.

But the ultimate winner of the ad-off is...

7. Regular banner ad on a single site for one day

I purchased the right to the top spot on SomethingPositive.net, a popular comic which I read regularly, and so do about a bzillion other people. (They get about a million hits a day.) I commissioned a banner ad from the artist and he did a great job, see here:

I thought that was just the funniest shit ever, and apparently so did a lot of people, because I got more than a HUNDRED signups off this ONE ad. This was run on Dec. 12th - I immediately signed up for a day in January and one in February. I'm still getting a few scattered signups that state that's where they saw it. Cost for this ad: $40 for the artist to draw the banner, and $35 for the actual ad space. The extra two days is another $70, but I think it'll definitely be worth it.

Well, I am pleasantly surprised

2006-12-15T14:18:00.000-05:00

Last year I got a $200 Target gift card from the surgeons as a holiday gift and so did everyone else. I thought that was very nice of them as apparently they didn't do this before a couple years ago - the department used to give everyone something but stopped, so our division is picking up the tab instead. I was kind of curious though as to whether they'd give me one this year, since I'm leaving in two weeks - it's basically, is this a thank you for past performance, or for future performance?

As my coworker put it though, "I think it's just about Christmas."

So I'm glad that they did give me a gift, since there was some issues with getting a free hat (on a day when everyone who works here was supposed to get a hat) for a different coworker who was actually in the process of being let go at the time. You would think that they'd give her a damn hat at least if they won't retain her job, but there were issues. So I am glad that stinginess didn't win out this time, and they didn't think, oh, we don't have to give her a gift because what do we care if she is happy since she is leaving.

Now of course, what do I buy with it? I feel a little silly buying household necessities with a gift, but I already bought all my Christmas presents and recently bought new clothes, and we were just at Target and spent $50, and we already bought the wedding present for the wedding that we're going to soon. I guess I'll just tuck it away.. although I feel pretty certain I could spend it easily if it were, y'know, absolutely necessary that I do so. ;)

Festival of Under 30 Finances up today!

2006-12-15T11:49:00.000-05:00

Check out today's Festival of Under 30 Finances hosted today at Money and Values. She's also starting up her own carnival on ethical considerations related to personal finance, so stop by and see!