You win some, you lose some

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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...

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

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

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.