September 18, 2015

Craigslist selling: how our crap becomes someone else’s treasure

If you’d asked me, I would not have believed that we’d unload any of the stuff clogging up our closets and nooks and crannies. It’s perfectly good stuff but none of it is that high-end, high-value stuff that Personal Finance for Beginners exhort you to sell to make some Quick Cash!

This is one money-related bet I would have lost.

All of this sold like it was in high demand:

• Miscellaneous bike gear
• Random auto parts
• Used shoes
• My old rainboots that never quite fit
• My old but in near-new condition sports watch (btw, this was a surprise sale. Maybe a general rule should be to TELL your spouse before you sell stuff out from under them!)
• Still in the box, old navigation system. Ah useless technology gifts.

PiC is the Craigslister in the family. I just collect the proceeds, log them into Mint, for which he calls me Judy Jetson (Please tell me you remember The Jetsons). Harumph! Oh, and also I provide the free service of fretting uselessly while he’s out, every time, as if all Craigslist buyers are serial killers on the hunt for their next hit.

… What? That’s not normal?

ANYWAY. He once walked me through some of his tips and tricks. I’ve never used them because this is his gig and he’s great at it but it’s good stuff nonetheless.

Writing your ad

• Be very clear in your description of the Thing and Thing’s condition. Don’t assume people have seen the Thing before or that they can view the pictures easily.
• Include some pictures taken in good light.
• Include dimensions or sizing if that’s relevant or useful. It’s always useful for furniture items. Not so much for books.
• If you’re open to offers, say so. If the price is firm, say so. Don’t waste your time with hagglers if you’re not willing to move on price and don’t lose opportunities to unload the Thing if you’re willing to accept an offer.
• Always refresh expired ads, a lot of selling is about the timing. Buyers for Thing may pop up 4 weeks after you list the first time, or in one case, 11 months.
• Always state in the ad: Thing is available if this ad is still posted. Remove ad immediately after a confirmed sale.

Making the sale

• We ignore all stupid inquiries: “Is it still available?” for one. “Does the $20 printer come with ink cartridges?” for another. Historically, those inquiries never bear fruit.
• CL buyers in our area are notoriously flaky. Never promise to hold an item for anyone. It’s always first come, first serve, unless it’s a very big ticket item and you’ve already met, haggled and agreed on a price.
• Safety, safety, safety! Please meet in a public place. Don’t do it in the dark if you can avoid that. The one time PiC did a sale after sundown I insisted on dragging my super-pregnant self along to protect him because that made sense.
• If it requires two people to lift and move, make sure you know if your buyer is going to handle that themselves (some bring a friend), or if they expect you to lend a hand (some will ask).

As regular Craigslist buyers ourselves, we do our best to be a positive part of the ecosystem by only making inquiries when we’re serious, paying in cash (duh!), arranging our own pickup, and of course, if the price isn’t firm, we do haggle! Obviously.

It really can be as easy as posting an ad, fielding calls or emails, and then pocketing some hard cash for things you don’t use anymore! Or won’t use, ever. As always, I record our sales in our tracker here so y’all know, it’s possible to make real money even if you have really weird old stuff.

September 11, 2015

Credit card churning: a plan!

or in ye olde Fatwallet lingoe: App-o-Rama! The last time we did this was for a handful of cards at once, in 2013, before our wedding.

We just finished the minimum spend ($3000 in 3 months) for a United mileage card earning a 50K mile bonus but we need at least another 40K miles to book flights for the family so I’ve lined up a second United mileage card with another 50K mile bonus. It’s taking forever to reach us. *taps foot impatiently*

I’ve also decided to make this an actual routine rather than taking it as our trips are dreamed up. My nerves can’t take wondering if we’ll hit the right number of award points or miles in time to book before the awards rooms or flights run out.

Our regular large expenses that can be charged on a card are mapped out in a spreadsheet so that we can line up our cards for churning against our regular, required purchases so we don’t find ourselves “needing” to spend oohhh say $500 just to hit the bonus and find ourselves the proud and chagrined owners of, I don’t know, some ridiculous thing we wanted. Right, that’s not likely but one can get caught up in the chase for awards.

I’d love it if we could charge our property taxes but I’m pretty sure the city or county still charges some silly non-insignificant percentage if you pay by credit card and that narrows our profit margin on the bonus too much to be worth it.

Instead, we have regular auto, property, and life insurance policies that come due in the fall and the spring. In fact, one just came in the mail! Hello, bill. Also food. We eat a lot of food. Food will go a long way to meeting our quota.

Leigh & Mrs. Crackin’ raised excellent points in the comments: look for cards that waive the annual fee for the first year and don’t pay with CC over cash unless the rewards are overwhelmingly profitable.

September 9, 2015

Can we retire in 7 years?

Seeing our net worth climb a little, even after a few months of reduced income, I got really optimistic about possibly hitting some of our goals, like a milestone net worth and maybe being able to target retirement in oh, say, 7 years? I totally pulled that out of thin air, because why not?

This here spreadsheet will tell you why not!

I don’t like what Version 1 tells me, maybe I should go to Version 2!

I played around with J.Money’s early retirement spreadsheet, the simple one, because I just wanted a quick snapshot without messing around with all the detail of version 2.

There’s a lot to be said for reducing your annual expenses. There’s more to be said for putting away more money, though, as I notice reducing our annual expenses by 10,000/year didn’t produce any drop in retirement age, whereas increasing our investments by $5,000/year dropped it by a year.

The assumptions

Income produced: Originally J used an 8% return rate, while I’d rather be more conservative and assume a 7% return.

Annual expenses: If you’re thinking “you need HOW much per year???” Yes, our expenses are high. We pay for the living expenses of 4 adults, 1 child, 1 Seamus, save cash (saving to spend) and save for retirement. Should I drop the expected expenses? I say no. Because even if our own personal expenses drop any substantial amount, we have huge variables: raising LB, or Dad’s eventual failing health, my crappy health. These could cause huge spikes in expenses even should we drop them a good amount. Heck, they could put us over the $90K mark, who knows!

Annual investments: I’m committing us to maxing out a 401(k) and an IRA every year but now that I look at the numbers, I want to add an IRA for PiC too.

Age now: I took an average of our ages. Maybe not the best idea, maybe I should just take one age and go with that.

This doesn’t take into account our rental property but since that income isn’t disposable income yet, that’s fine.

Looks to me like I’m going to have to get creative (or strike it rich through a solid business plan) to hit all our spending and saving and early retirement goals.

ER’s a fantasy in the world I came from where even retirement isn’t certain but it’s a luxury I’m happy to aim for. While I enjoy working, my health is always kicking me in the shins. I want to be around for LB for a long time and am finally conceding that my health improves when less stress and less work sucks up the lion’s share of my energy. So why not make that a goal?

September 4, 2015

What I wish I’d known about Swagbucks

I’ve been using Swagbucks for a few years now but Rookie Me relied entirely on Search and Earn in the early years. Naturally, earning was hit or miss and the whole enterprise was unsatisfying.

This summer, I finally got my act together! When I’m paying attention, I can earn an average of 30-60 SBs per day with minimum effort. At the higher end, about 1800 SBs in 30 days is 80% of the way to the monthly discounted 2250 SBs/$25 gift card redemption. With a little more effort, say qualifying for a few surveys a month, we’re regularly getting one GC redemption a month. It’s mostly been Amazon cards since we use it regularly for diapers and wipes but if I ever get enough saved up, I can switch over to PayPal and that’d be all savings. This isn’t a steady income by any means but it saves a tidy sum over time.

I’m probably not the only one who floundered getting into Swagbucks so I’m sharing what I do or have done. There are lots of ways to earn, though, these aren’t the only ones.

Because some SBs can only be earned on one or the other, I’ll break it down by Desktop and Mobile.

Desktop

I spend a lot of time in front of the computer for one reason or another, so I either run this stuff in the background or on my (really old, first generation) iPad. It just depends on what makes life easier for me.

• First, the Daily Sidebar for regular points: hit the Daily Poll [1 SB], the Daily Offers [2 SB], and sometimes the Daily Crave works too. It doesn’t run smoothly on my computer but it’s worth doing if it does for you. Daily Crave cannot be run on mobile. [average: 3-8 SB].
• “Most Popular Ways to Earn” section: there are usually a few Watch & Earn activities (Watch & Earn, nGage, Take a Discovery Break) that are worth 2 or 3 SBs per activity. Some of them only require one or two clicks. Since I’m busy, those are the ones I go for. If I’m just puttering around online waiting for something more important to happen, then I do all of them. There have been times these made up a full day’s haul up to 80 SB from one activity alone! Take a Discovery Break works on the iPad but the others aren’t mobile-compatible. [average: 2-12 SB]
• Surveys: Qualifying for surveys can also be hit or miss but it’s worth giving it five good tries because even if you don’t qualify at all for any surveys, you’re still getting 1 SB per DQed survey up to 5. If you do qualify, you can earn anywhere between 50-200 SB per completed survey. It’s possible to do surveys on the iPad or even your phone but I’m not a fan of doing it on the phone. Too hard to see. [average: 5 SB-???]
• Play: If you pick your game right, every 2 games nets 2 SB. I like Swag Jump and Swagasaurus Run. I’m weird. Make it quick and don’t get sucked in!  🙂

Mobile

I finally downloaded the Swagbucks and Swagbucks TV apps on my phone – it’s well past time for this smartphone to earn its keep!

• SB Mobile TV: This has been my bread and butter.  It doesn’t always tell me what the earning limit is but it can be anywhere between 36 SB to 100 SB. I just set it and mostly forget it: 5 videos earns 2 SB. At some point, it’ll say you’ve earned everything you can, but once in a while, it says you qualify for a Bonus, so let it run even longer and rack up those ‘bucks! [average: 36 SB]
  • Hints: I keep the screen brightness down to save battery life and keep the phone plugged in when possible so that it can just keep going and going and going.
• SB app: You’ll get notifications of where to find Swag Codes. When they’re doing a promotion, this can be up to 30+ SB for just entering a code on your mobile app. On days when I’m running around like mad and don’t have time to look at Swagbucks, this can save me from a zero earnings day.

Other things

• Shop and Earn: I think you get better cashback, most of the time, from Mr. Rebates and Ebates, but from now until November, your first purchase each month through Swagbucks Shop and Earn will net you an extra 500 SBs, in addition to the per dollar SB payout. There is fine print which Abby summarized so clearly I’m quoting her:
  • Your order needs to actually generate Swagbucks
  • The bonuses won’t appear until December 1st and will expire on December 31st
  • You can’t redeem them for GCs less than $5: remember that your first $25 GC of the month is now discounted to 2,250 SB. Meaning that if you have all five months’ bonuses (2,500 SB) and you redeem them for a $25 GC first thing, you’ll end up with 250 SB that you can’t use.
• SwagButton: This is an extension you download and install onto your browser. I have problems with my computer so I avoid adding any extensions to it but some Swag Codes are only redeemable through the SwagButton.
• Setting your browser: They’ve done a few big pushes to get people to default their search engines to Swagbucks. I’d wait til they have another promotion for this, personally.
• Swaganigans: They run activities on the blog where you can compete for prizes. Usually it involves some kind of clever or witty thing, like this. I’m too lazy busy for this.

Bonus ways to earn

• Team Challenges: These come along every few weeks or so. Keep an eye on the upper left hand corner of the home page – they will promote the link to the sign up for Team Challenges there. Sign up for a team first thing and then go on your merry ‘bucks earning way. SBs you earn during the Team Challenges counts toward the team total and you get the teams that earn the most together gets bonuses.
• Daily Goal Bonus: When you hit the daily goal of earning per day, it kicks in another set of SBs depending on what the daily goal was. It looks like the minimum goal is 30 SB which earns 3 SB, 40 SB earns 4 SB and so on.
• Referrals: You earn 10% of whatever your referred person earns, not counting bonus SBs. This is pretty awesome, even if I only have a couple active referrals. Since my own earnings have been robust of late, the person who referred me ages ago is getting a nice 10% bonus. I can’t remember if I signed up through Donna or Abby, but I’m hoping it’s one of them. At least I know they’ll put the earnings to good use!

Go forth, friends, and rack up the Swagbucks!  And if you haven’t got an account and would like to, I’d surely appreciate it if you were to use my referral code to sign up.