How to make money with rhododendron leaves!

This post at Get Rich Slowly reminded me of my own entrepreneurial spirit as a kid. I don't remember this myself, but my mother says that when I was about four, I plucked some leaves from a neighbor's rhododendron and drew faces on them with a Sharpie. Then, I peddled my creations round the neighborhood for five cents each. That's a lot of money for a four year old! I probably sold pretty well since I was so cute. *wink* When I got a little older, I made paper accessories like hats and purses, decorated with Steelers stickers from my grandfather, for a toy rabbit that I had, and sold them to my neighbors for ten cents. Why I thought my neighbors would like to buy a paper purse for a rabbit they didn't own, I have no idea. But they did buy them anyway.

One of my most memorable experiences in selling was when I decided that I would sell some of the chives from my humongous chive plant in my part of the garden. (The garden was divided into four small plots - theoretically one for each member of the family, but my father and I each had one and my mother and sister's were taken over by sunflowers.) I put up a sign on a streetlight post that advertised one ounce of chives for 25 cents. I thought that was pretty good, and I would get several customers from my chive plant. Unfortunately, I didn't actually check how much an ounce is - and you may know that chive stems are hollow. So for my first customer, I pretty much decimated the plant getting up to an ounce on the kitchen scale. Oops. You could chalk that up as a lesson in accurate pricing.

I also ran a lemonade stand frequently, and one time I got really lucky - the people across the street were selling their house (which was GORGEOUS) and had an open house. Over 100 people showed up on that one day, and of course most of them bought lemonade from me as I was conveniently situated right across a one-lane street. Although the lemonade sold for ten cents, most of the adults gave me a quarter and some even gave me a dollar and told me to "keep the change." WOW!! That's a big ROI if I ever saw one. (Of course, my parents bought the lemonade mix, but who's counting.) That was definitely the most exciting day of my lemonade-selling enterprise. When I was older, I drew up plans for a wooden, folding lemonade stand with a sign and counter and everything - it would have involved a lot of hinges and probably would have weighed 100lbs. I settled for using house paint to make a "Lemonade 25 cents" sign on scrap wood which my father later hung in the living room as pop art.

When I wanted money to buy something, my parents tried to give me options for earning it, instead of simply handing it over. Once I held my own little yard sale (mostly of my parents' old things - I think I sold some records) in order to raise $20 to buy a Troll doll. (Gimme a break, I was probably seven or eight!) I also came up with my own chore chart of chores outside of my normal routine, for which I negotiated a quarter. The chart was quite specific about how many times a month I could do the chore (such as washing the dog once a month) and whether my sister could also do the chore. I don't think my sister was terribly excited, but in a few weeks I had done a couple dollars worth of (extra) chores and my parents put a halt on that, lest I come up with new and exciting chores like reroofing the house.

People love being in on something...

I'm sure you've heard about the PayPerPost people showing up at the Today Show.. all I can say is that the Today Show people seemed pretty accomodating considering that it could have devolved into a giant hullaballoo. But the audience members who helped out seemed to enjoy being in the middle of something unusual happening. PayPerPost refers to it as Guerilla Marketing, but unless they jumped those people and forced promotional items over their heads, I'd have to say it's more like "winning hearts and minds". ;) Let's just hope that not every new company tries to take this new route or we'll never be able to watch anything but reruns..

Ack! FSA!

I need to go spend about $100, fast... ;)

Well, I can probably spend another $50 on prescriptions, and maybe I'll get the proper receipts for my doctor appointments which is another $30.. and maybe I have a dentist appointment soon that I'm going to miss if I don't find that little card.. I might end up with a few boxes of sinus medication on December 29th anyway.

Saving money on my pet supplies

By far the biggest expense with the guinea pigs is the litter. I use CareFresh litter (basically recycled newspaper fluff) which is really The Stuff, because it's very absorbent, doesn't smell, and the pigs love to snuggle in it. =) I use about half a bag for each litter change, and I change them once a week, so at $22 a bag in the PetCo or PETSmart store, that adds up. What I do is go through a little loophole in the online ordering systems at those stores - you have to pay special shipping fees on cat litter but NOT small animal litter, so I wait until there's a good sale or free shipping and then buy five or six at one time. I'm waiting until the end of October (to free up space in the house, more than anything) because Petco is having a sale until then for the litter at $10.99 a bag. (The best sale price I can usually find is $13.49, so that's pretty good.) Plus, if the sale is on the site and not by coupon, I can use another coupon and get even more off. Schweet.

Wow, I actually transferred some money!

My retirement portfolio is about 75% invested in this one fund. Granted, it is a very broad fund, but it's up quite a lot now and I wanted to put some of the money into another sector. I don't mess around with my allocations too much anymore, although I used to, so I felt very brave transferring $1000 from my Equity Index (basically an S&P 500 fund) to a Growth fund. The Equity Index fund is currently pretty high and the Growth fund is priced pretty low, so I felt like I was getting some bang for my buck there. Also, I just don't like to see my entire portfolio's value tagged to whether that one fund gained 25 cents today or not. It's not true diversification as these are still pretty much all large-cap US stocks, but I'm somewhat limited in what types of things I can invest in, as TIAA-CREF only has about nine options. Still, I feel very brave for having actually moved some of that money.

Here's a non-financial topic I get riled up about...

Diamonds that come from God knows where. Diamonds have the unfortunate values of being very tiny, very valuable, and generally being mined in places that aren't terribly politically stable. Thus, your average diamond was probably mined by somebody who was not paid to do it, and used to purchase firearms or as part of a drug trade. Terrific, no? So I'm all behind the movement to purchase diamonds that you actually can track their original whereabouts, or even fake diamonds such as moissanite, that actually have a higher refractive index than diamonds. (Sparkly!) But if you're interested in a conflict-free diamond, this store BrilliantEarth has a nice selection. I think that selecting a diamond (especially one that will be worn for hopefully the rest of your life) should carry as much weight as you give to selecting an SRI or what not.

Not really getting the point...

My coworker told me that she thinks we should make more use of the kitchen (we have a fridge, microwave, and toaster in one room), noting that I do make a lot of use of it (I eat lunch out of my desk or the freezer about 4 days out of 5) and she wanted to do that too. So I was pretty happy for her since she and my other coworker mention a lot of times how money is tight, yet they buy lunch almost every day. Even chili and fries adds up! She's also mentioned in the past how she was going to try and bring her lunch too because it seemed like a good idea.

However, after her comment about wanting to use the kitchen more, she said she wanted to bring in yogurt and frozen fruit and have a smoothies day. Which I don't think is really the best use of the kitchen.. besides for how much frozen fruit costs it might be more cost-effective to get a smoothie from the place in the cafeteria, which sells them for $5 for a giant 32-oz cup. Boyfriend and I make smoothies now and then but they are cut with ice and a 2-gallon container of apple juice, not yogurt.

I also told another coworker that "I'm cheap, but I'm not that cheap" because I had to go by a Powerade - not because I actually wanted some Powerade, but because I use the bottle to make Crystal Light packets, and I should really replace the bottle more often. So I think I will make it a rule to get a new bottle once a week or so - cause I've kept the bottle in the past so long it started to smell funny, and I'm just not cheap enough to take it home and wash it. The Crystal Light is only about 30 cents a bottle, so I'm already saving money over Powerade ($1 from the machine in the basement) there, plus I drink more water and it's not as sugary.

I'll be 25 by then!

I just checked my Sallie Mae "borrower benefits" - and the only thing my loans are eligible for is a 1% interest rate reduction after I have made 36 on-time payments. However, I've got 27 more payments to go. Sigh.. I'll be practically OLD by then. (kidding! kidding!) That's a nice break though seeing as how my interest rate is fixed at 3.8% anyway, so that's more than a quarter of the interest rate. Then my loan will be paid down even faster, which is pretty cool.

Festival of Under 30 Finances, and the Bogleheads Project! How much more exciting does a week get!

Anyone can contribute to this Friday's Festival of Under 30 Finances, hosted by Debt Has Made Me Its Bitch - click here to put in your two cents. She asks a great question: What method have you found works best when changing jobs and negotiating a higher salary and/or benefits? What are the deal makers or breakers for you? For most of us, our job is our primary source of income, so maximizing it can have long-term effects on our net worth.

Up at AllFinancialMatters is the first day of the Bogleheads Project, a group blogging project wherein a whopping 23 bloggers (including me and several other members of the Honor Roll) will give their honest opinion about the new book, The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing. There's a wide range of investing advice in this book and a wide range of opinions on it. Keep an eye on this one.

After nearly four months of blogging, how are my finances doing?

I've been blogging since early June, and I've written a lot about various plans that I have made up for my future financial goals. So how am I doing, really? Well, not as well as I'd hoped - but not as badly as I could have done either.

Credit card debt - I'm in basically the same amount of debt as I was at the start (about $7,900) partially due to a temporary cash crunch. But, all of this is at 0% on the same card, whereas before some of it was at 10% and some was at 3.9%. I need to focus on paying this down, but at 0% it's not my biggest worry. Since I'm really focused on retirement savings, the only reason I'm worried at all about it is because I would like to buy a house eventually. I should actually be MORE worried about this, but again, 0%...

Retirement savings - Big increases here, but this isn't actually my doing since my retirement plan at work forces me to involuntarily contribute $225 a month, and my work contributes about $300. So this number goes up without my doing anything really. However, my Roth IRA now has $1100 in it, which I think I opened in March. Total retirement savings in June? $7900. Total in about 3 days, when this month's contribution hits: About $10,200. I think the big shift here has been in how I think about retirement. It's really become my big priority and I sometimes have difficulty convincing myself that I should pay down my debt when I haven't even come close to maxing out the Roth. I've also set a goal for myself to have $75,000 in retirement-only money by the time I'm 30, and that's really important to me. I just feel a lot more secure about the future knowing that I've got at least something stashed away.

Spending patterns - WAY better since I started reading blogs, probably not much change since I actually started blogging. When I got my job, I also had another side job which was pretty lucrative, so Boyfriend and I spent money like there was no tomorrow. We burned through about $7,000 of saved money and credit in the first four or five months - above and beyond what I brought home. Part of this was due to the fact that Boyfriend didn't get paid till October, but most of it was due to things like going to Olive Garden three times in one week (yes, we did.) Being stressed from a move and new job is NOT an excuse to spend money you don't have. I still feel aghast when I think about how much I wasted the money from that second job - that alone could have maxed out my Roth last year, and I didn't even HAVE one. *shudder* I'm much more responsible with the money that I have now, and examine my own habits much more closely.

For instance, I recently set up new checking accounts so that all the money for bills other than rent is direct deposited into not only a separate account, but one at a separate BANK. This is because I would think to myself, Okay self, we're going to leave $600 in the account this month for general stuff after bills. Then I would pay the bills and the rent and get the check from Boyfriend and then maybe we would go to the grocery store cause we're low on food and maybe we'll go to Whole Foods and buy $100 of meat and maybe we'll go out to eat cause hey I have all this money and maybe I'll buy more pet stuff cause I don't want to run low on supplies.. and suddenly everything would clear my account and I'd have $250 and be baffled. I went from having over $1500 in my bank account to $250, where did it all go? And while all the bills were clearing and we were spending all this money, I'd be paranoid that one of the bills was going to bounce if we got a little too happy at the grocery store. So now, I don't have to worry about the bills clearing since I know the money is there, I know how much is in my spending account, and the savings money has already been deposited. Much better.

I also set up a THIRD checking account which gets about $50 a month which is stashed for Christmas money and an expensive anniversary dinner for Boyfriend and I. I don't have a lot of recurring expenses so this is my version of the Freedom account that Beachgirl wrote about. I'm going to be cutting back a little on presents this year (last year was over $1000 because I thought, hey I'm a real adult with a real job and real money!) but it will be nice to know that I already have some money squirrelled away, and since it's in a checking account I can just take the card with me shopping, and not even use my real bank account.

General savings - I still only have $56 in my house fund, but it's a start! I finally got up to $1000 in my emergency fund, but I want it at $2000 before I start funnelling money into the house fund. At this point, given the outlook on actually buying a house, I might just not bother too much with the actual house fund and just work on reducing my debt and increasing the emergency fund. If I'm going to stay in this city for five more years, I think I can wait an extra six months to buy the house.

I think the biggest change for me after four months of blogging has really been my financial mindset. I know I've started a few posts by saying I'm a "bad blogger" because I now have an ideal in my mind of what I should be doing as a "good blogger" - saving my money, not buying stupid crap, and thinking of the future more than I think of today. That part, I've got down pat.