December 12, 2014

No Spend Challenges? No thanks

Saying “challenge” was always like waving a red flag in front of me, or firing the starting gun at a race. It’s nigh on irresistable, that  knee-jerk Get In There! reaction.

These days, though, my contrariness has decided to take a new turn: if I tell myself I can’t spend or have something, it’s more like telling me not to think about the pink elephant in the room than a wave-off. Instant fixation (just add water…).

Is this a bad thing? It depends. What’s the point?

It’s a useful tool for someone who’s new to getting their spending in hand to really see how easy it is to spend, day in and day out.

It’s a handy way to harness the power of solidarity. Like Tonya’s Health and Wealth Challenge (which I think sounds like a lot of fun), knowing you’ve got others out there working on the same challenge helps.

It can spark some creative approaches to getting through the challenge period. Theoretically you’re not just waiting on making purchases until you can buy them all at the end of the challenge, you’re learning how to make do or learning what you truly need versus just what you want. (On the other hand, it can wonderfully focus your mind on that thing you really really want.)

It’s not the worst way to force yourself to consciously spend only on your bills when you don’t have disposable income.

My problem is …

Other than the fun of doing a challenge with other people, I don’t need to remind myself not to spend for the sake of spending. There have been plenty of lean months and years to train that right out of me.

What I really need to learn is how to spend in moderation, not bouncing from the one extreme to the other.

I have disposable income now. In the grand scheme of things, I have a TON of disposable income. Rent, utilities, groceries, eating out, gifts, and travel are already covered by the household budget. My allowance is just for me. As in, to spend at will. On anything. ANYTHING. Ten years ago, my allowance was for any groceries, eating out, gifts, charity. It never stretched to paying for things I wanted.

When my broke college student mentality is in residence, that allowance tends to be hoarded. Then I break out in “I want everything” hives. You’d think it wouldn’t be such a problem figuring out how to spend in some normal, moderate, way.

Or I could just keep on either spending $0 or all the dollars. One offsets the other, after all.

November 15, 2014

Big steps, little steps & the Side Money Tracker!

A five minute geeky money chat with J.Money inspired this post. Most of the time, I just take our savings as a routine thing and forget that creative stuff to bring money back in that’s not just job-centered is fun.

Yes, I’m still all about the big wins in money:

• Increasing salary (then increasing it again).
• Building a solid professional reputation that helps catapults you from one serious promotion to another.
• Slashing costs for things like cell phones, cable, internet.

Over 15 years, spanning retail to professional office work, busting my butt on those bullet points resulted in killing off a huge pile of debt and then making savings happen. This is Excellent.

But I absolutely do not scoff at the little money. I’ll take a minute to:

• Ask for a discount.
• At checkout for items that are imperfect.
• Get a refund on a late fee or whatever fee.

That stuff adds up quickly over time if you ignore it which is antithetical to my policy of My Money is My Money. Note: Fees are no longer the absolute devil BUT if I’m going to pay one, it’ll be for something of value like a travel rewards credit card that makes rewards redemption easy and is stellar at handling disputes.

While we are somewhat conscientious about not buying crap we don’t need, over time, you find that “need” was really a “want” or that people gifted you things they thought were needs but were really “eh?” etc.

And so Crap Accumulates. In getting rid of it, mostly I’m happy to donate the little things but we have a lot of bigger things this round, and so PiC took on the job of Craigslisting. Craigslist is where he lives on the internet.

So add to the list, for entertainment’s sake:

• Earning via programs like Swagbucks and CC rewards.
• Craigslisting!

Y’all, that man has been on a ROLL unloading the stuff we unearthed during The Purge (still ongoing).  He does all the work, brings me the cash and I log it in Mint. And now I’ll log it here!

We didn’t set anything like J. Money’s Craigslist Rule (List 1 item for sale on Craiglist every week) since this is more of an EVERYTHING MUST GO approach.

Benefit #1 is the cash coming in, of course.
Benefit #2 is the space it’s clearing up.
Benefit #3 is the demonstration the cost of buying things (new) that you don’t actually need. Resale is not what you’d generally call competitive. Though, probably just to needle me, PiC decided to call it “renting” goods. *scowl*

After setting this page up, I was inspired to add a couple tables of my own.

For those, on a much smaller level, I’m recouping some change by selling little things and earning non-taxable gift card rewards as part of my daily routine.  As much as buying discounted gift cards saves some cash for important things, so does earning gift cards outright for those piddling household things that add up. As much as the masochistic part of me likes to wander through say, Target, and gawk at things I really don’t need, we’re all better off if I spend that time doing something else.

November 11, 2014

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

Actually, I don’t mean Guy Fawkes Day at all.  That just reminds me that it’s November which, for us, means the days of open enrollment!

I used to do a comprehensive analysis with pen and paper: comparing all possible copays and deductibles, estimating the cost of possible treatments and coverages, etc, etc, etc. We always ended up signing back up with the HMO.

This year?  Hell with it.

I know what our HMO covers for medical services and it’s fine. I’ve never had trouble getting a referral to a specialist when I need one and they have a pretty awesome (read: they have one at all) department that specifically deals with chronic pain. Don’t use them much but they’re there to provide support.

I could have wished to go with a provider who would let me have my regular OB deliver LB but it’s way the hell too late to worry about that and besides, I’d really want that because I LIKE my OB. She wouldn’t be available if we went with a PPO.

Our prescriptions are made as easy as I could ask for generally, except if I forget to order a medication refill far enough in advance for mail order delivery, then I just have to wait a few more days. Prescriptions are basically $10 or less without fighting over getting this brand or that generic. I don’t have to deal with approvals and the hassle of hit or miss,  inept retail pharmacies, we get pharmacy folks who are dog people so they understand the plague of the paw-licking dog, and remind us that people are kind of ridiculously stocking up on wound cleanser in their fear of Ebola. (What the hell is a wound cleanser going to do for you if you get Ebola?)

Our dental coverage is the more expensive one but it’s good for our needs as far as treatments being covered. They are really stupid at billing, sending us bills that say we owe 100% but I ignore those and three weeks later, I invariably get a zeroed out bill.

We have basic vision coverage for literally less than $5 a month and this is sufficient to keep PiC in glasses or contacts every other year.  I have been lucky enough only to need my eyes checked for medication side effects (none) and have thus far avoided glasses.

So we’ll keep the same coverage options. With the projected increases in medical and prescription premiums for 2015, and then a new one to cover, we’ll be paying an additional $857 annually for the privilege. Yay.

Edit: It could actually cost us $1457 extra depending on one thing out of my control right now. ARGH.

Have you made your elections for the upcoming year? Are you looking at some serious increases?

September 29, 2014

Newly Minted: Managing Married Money

Mint.com: A review

For most of the early money blogging years, right around the time I started using credit cards in earnest for the rewards, Yodlee was my account aggregator of choice.

It was unsophisticated but did the job: kept me apprised of all my banking and credit card transactions in addition to the manual tracking I’d do and keep me honest and firmly atop bill paying. When it started running into all kinds of updating problems because of added security at the banking end, I had to give it up.

There were a few attempts to get into other software since but they were halfhearted at best, and I retreated into the relatively safe haven of spreadsheets. It just doesn’t work for us together, though, we maintain our own legacy spreadsheets and they don’t merge well, they don’t let us do aggregated reporting well, and it’s hugely time consuming. We won’t have the luxury of spending three hours at a time recording transactions soon.. heck, we don’t really have that time now!

Once, long ago, I’d started working with Mint in its early days but since Yodlee was still working for me, I quit. Now it’s time to venture back and see how it might work for us.

Our requirements: It has to be both dead simple and require very little time or brain power to set up and maintain. As much as I love spending time with my money, this has to be the low-maintenance solution.
We both need easy access to it.
It should automatically pull transactions for us.
We should be able to add manual (cash) transactions.
We need to be able to reconcile and categorize spending.

Early observations: the interface

We get weekly updates that might tell us we’re overspending in a particular category, versus how much we normally spend, or that we have upcoming bills.

Good: This is a great way to keep us both on the same page.

Bad: I wish that they’d send up both all the notes. Because we don’t have joint everything accounts, I’d have to sign in to see what’s been charged on his card, whilst he would get the email notifications, and vice versa. We recently had an incident where a merchant charged a purchase as a cash advance and were dinged with a $10 fee. Only he got the notification for that.

We can access the interface as long as we have an internet connection; we don’t have to share files manually.

Good: Being in one system is great, and so is not having manually shift files and cells and whatever else about.
Bad: If you don’t have internet, you’re out of luck.

Early observations: hiccups

I’ve had the worst trouble signing in, sometimes, it wouldn’t even let me past the log on page for a few days, once and their Help folks took about seven emails to understand that. They still didn’t fix anything, it just actually started working again. I do NOT like that.

Accounts are constantly requiring my attention – there’s always one or more banks that require me to re-enter the password or what have you, even though nothing has changed in the last five days. Occasionally, it’s for a legitimate reason like it’d like to confirm that I want to close an account.

I know some of you are Mint.com users: any tips or suggestions for making the most of it?

July 29, 2014

Do you have money fears?

If so, what are they? @SingleMa posed this question on Twitter the other day and I thought it was a good one.

I still have … concerns.

She and I both worked our way back up from just about rock bottom, so you’d think we’d feel the same way about this, but we don’t and it was interesting digging into why.

I don’t have the sort of nightmare-inducing, heartgripping, horrifying fears that I used to, feeling just half a step away from ruin as the only breadwinner for a family of four, suffering from chronic but undiagnosed health issues.

That, thankfully, has passed with a combination of good financial habits, good salaries (TWO of them!!), and a pretty healthy savings account. I’m looking at building our wealth, not avoiding poverty and ruin, and that’s a huge difference in mindset.

Even so, I’d be lying if I weren’t still looking over my shoulder askance.

What’s the next problem to blindside me?
What’s the next disastrous accident or occurrence or loss?

The wheel never stops turning, Badger.
That only matters to the people on the rim.
– Firefly

After some discussion, it makes sense. My rock bottom situation was nearly entirely due to other people.

It wasn’t my overspending, my overcommitment or rash decisions that led to 100K of debt. I didn’t have piles of designer clothes or expensive cars or .. well, anything to show. Anything at all, as it turns out.

Ed Note: This is NOT to say that SingleMa’s situation was due to those things at all – I was thinking solely of my family who’d done those things.

I did choose to stay and help instead of leaving home to make it on my own, but the entire swamp of sucktastic was down to their crap luck, their business decisions taking bad turns, their unfortunate job losses followed by other bad financial decisions while dragging their debt behind them like a lodestone for more bad.

Add to that the severe health problems that plagued mom, my parents’ refusal and inability to rein in my Sibling while he wasted money and refused to grow up, and you basically had the perfect recipe for awful.

And now?

Well, PiC and I are doing really well, in comparison. We can’t do everything but we can support everyone without feeling stretched beyond sanity, and we can do some good for others.

And yet, since Dad won’t stop smoking, I have to wonder when his health is going to fail, and how badly? When and how much is it going to cost me to supplement the lousy state health insurance?

He recently thought he was helping by paying off his traffic violation tickets instead of doing traffic school at higher cost, only that caused the car insurance premiums to double. They’ll stay high for THREE YEARS until those violations fall off his record. *headdesk* What else is he going to “help” with?

Meanwhile, who knows what foolishness Sibling’s going to pull. Until I’m willing to put him out on the street to live or die, he’s our albatross. That day may come but until then, he’s still family and that’s the way it is.

Difficult times may come again, and I’m capable of working our way out of them more than likely, but it’s clear that I’m far more concerned about the choices that other people make that will adversely affect our finances and our wellbeing far more than anything we do.

Is it any wonder, then, I’m such a control freak over anything within my power to affect??

Tell me, do you have money fears? What are they?