Easy Change

The adventures this weekend started with a couple of seeds, but it really just shows that it was a pretty green weekend. First there was the trip to the local home improvement store (shhh don't tell HD, but I didn't go there for my stuff, even though I own their stock yipe!). Anyway, it was a pretty good trip and about 200 dollars later I had enough supplies to nicely redo the landscaping in front of the condo. It was a good feeling once it was all done, even though it was a lot of work. The total savings by doing it by hand over hiring someone was probably easily several hundred dollars. In addition, planted some vegetable seeds and I'm hoping that they grow nicely. My neighbor is also going to plant some vegetables so we can swap back and forth. This will hopefully save some money on salads this summer/fall. We'll see. If things go really well this year, I will probably increase my efforts next year. I also managed to get one of the old computers in my basement worki...

You have to read <a href=" http://www.slate.com/id/2166765?nav=tap3 ">This week's dear prudence</a> to the end to get this question, but I totally agree here. In general, where there is a concern about how to split up a cost in a marriage, a common theme is to divide the costs proportionally to income. Similarly, there are other common schemes to avoid issues of splitting the costs of vacations and dates. This question crosses into new territory when a divorced couple has to manage the costs of splitting up a week at the beach and letting their kids stay the whole time, plus one step child from one of the couples. One of the two insists on a prorated schedule, but the other thinks that the first is being nitpicky. I had to include this because I feel like it is the absolute epitome of people crossing the line from frugal or fair into the realm of cheap and tacky. So here is my personal rant to this mother: In this case, the step daughter is a friend of the ot...

Well, things have turned out ok on prosper. After doing some checking up recently, I found that my loan that was late has been paid back. That is a good feeling for me because I was starting to get a little concerned since I expect only about a 5% default rate on my loans; otherwise it just isn't worth it for me. And now that my loan got paid, I made another small deposit into my account and I've bid on another loan. And I think that will bring the amount of money I will be investing in prosper to a close for a while. I will just continue to keep an eye on the money and if there is a significant sum, I might do another loan, but I think for the next few months my focus is going to be on paying down my personal debt.

Well, last year I decided that I'd been investing long enough that I wanted to get some real understanding of how individual stocks worked when it came to investing. I had read Jim Cramer's Real Money which was fairly intriguing, but I didn't have the time in order to really give myself over to investing stocks like a day trader. I never really felt like I would have the kind of time that Jim described in his book to make it really worthwhile. My resulting strategy was basic: buy stocks that seem pretty good over the long, long term. Expect that there could be significant losses along the way and that during those times, it might make sense to buy more. Now here we are, several months later and Home Depot which I bought in the mid thirties has gone up to around 40 and come back down. We're not talking a ton of money here, just a couple hundred bucks. But, does it make sense to buy more? Here's why I'm thinking it might: 1. HD continues to pay chunky dividends. ...

This go around, I submitted my recent post on moving back home to the carnival of personal finance: http://firefinance.blogspot.com/2007/05/101st-edition-of-carnival-of-personal.html But I was amazed at how many great articles and posts there were in this edition. My Two Dollars wrote a post on bundled phone/cable packages that hit me squarely in the face since I had the cable guy over yesterday to fix something and he was trying to give me the sales-pitch. http://www.mytwodollars.com/2007/05/17/does-bundling-your-cable-phone-internet-save-any-money/ I also liked this introspective post over at my wealth builder; it seems to speak directly to all of those killjoys at yahoo finance that expect their finance gurus to strike gold with some amazing new idea in every column they write. http://my-wealth-builder.blogspot.com/2007/05/is-anything-really-new-in-personal.html Let me know if there were any articles in this addition that you really liked.

One of the major things that I notice that people deal with in our society is the whole concept of when to move out and start to assert their independence financially. The funny thing about this is that there are some seriously split opinions when it comes to this issue. Some people feel like it is important for young people to assert themselves early by making themselves financially independent of mom and dad. I personally happen to be in this camp. I've worked since I was fourteen and since I was a freshmen in college, there has never been any extended (more than 2 weeks) period in my life that I haven't worked. And for about 90% of that time, I have worked two or more jobs concurrently. Of course, this all underlines a couple of key things about my personality. I have a good work ethic. I think that hard work is good for your self-esteem, your wallet and your soul. But on top of that, I have a sense of responsibility to myself and my family. For me, many people who are not...

I remember when I used to work at a job where I was paid bi-weekly instead of semi-monthly. For those of you who are not payroll nerds like I am, bi-weekly is when you are paid every other week. Semi-monthly means you are paid twice per month. People generally think of them the same way, but they aren't. The semi-monthly people are the ones who get the short end of the stick, in my opinion. If you are paid semi monthly, most often it is on the (1st and 15th) or the (15th and last day of the month). This means that you need to make your money last for that period of fifteen days and cover all of the bills for the next period with that paycheck. Personally, I've found that the best way to do this is using excel. Setup a spreadsheet in excel (or any other spreadsheet application) with a column for the title of your bill. The next column will be for the date your bill is due each month. The third column is how much the bill is for. Obviously, this is just an estimate since you are...

There are certain things that you just can't put a price on. For me, one of those things is my health. I am one of the *those* people who stresses out and the result is that my health goes to pot. Currently, I am juggling about 5 projects. Some things at work, some personal stuff, and also some side projects that I do in order to bring in extra money. I am not complaining, but simply writing this post to encourage those of you out there who are work-a-holics also, to give yourselves permission to say no. This past week I got a call from my mother letting me know that one of her friends had a computer that needed to be fixed and I could fix it for some extra money. And after some consideration, I gave myself permission to say no. I just knew in that moment that I had way too many commitments already and this would just put me right over the top when it comes to stress. Money isn't everything; Indeed, when you are sick as a result of stress, it isn't much at all. So I said no...

Well, it appears that I have my first delinquent prosper loan. I am wondering if I should worry. It is less than 30 days late right now and this is a person who has been paying for a little while so far. However, now I realize that if this person should decide to not pay, basically all of the profit that I have made using prosper so far is gone. I knew from the beginning that it was a risk, so I suppose that it is ok. But it makes me wonder if it wouldn't have been better to just put the money in an ING or some other FDIC insured account from the beginning. Hopefully it works out; if not, file under, lessons learned.

Since this question was asked over at No Credit Needed, I figured I'd take a crack at it. Please note, I am not a financial advisor and I don't play one on T.V. -- any advice/ideas that are presented here is solely the opinion of the author. Please do your own research/consult your own accountant/financial adviser before making any decisions based on this information. NCN asks: "Should I invest my retirement funds in ETFs, Mutual Funds, Bonds, or Individual Stocks? Depending on your answer, what should the proper "mix" be?" In general, I would rule out Individual Stocks for a retirement fund. Retirement funds in general are long-term. And most of the time, if you are getting a stock, it is because you are thinking it will go up over the short or medium term. So buying individual stocks seems a little wierd to me for retirement planning. So, that limits it back to ETFs, Mutual Funds, and Bonds. Again, I would avoid individual bonds and instead focus on a bond...

Not long ago I signed up for a paypal account. I've used the internet for years but I didn't usually buy stuff online so I didn't find using my credit card to be that inconvenient. Furthermore, I didn't really like the idea of someone else holding on to my money. It made me nervous because paypal is somewhat of an amorphous thing. But now with the advent of internet banking, I don't find it quite as concerning. Paypal has decent interest rates so I feel comfortable leaving some of my money there instead of worrying about transferring it around to get a good interest rate elsewhere. And what's more, paypal offers equifax credit alerts for free. Since I have become more and more aware of identity theft, it was only natural that this sounded like a good service. Sure, its an opportunity for Equifax to monitor me a little better and market more products, but I don't really mind. I mean, its not like they don't have my information already. As I use the servi...

When I started this blog many months ago, like most personal finance bloggers, it was so that I could keep myself accountable and also provide myself with a lasting record of how the financial situation in my life changed over time. It is not an easy journey and I realized how frustrated I was with the amount of money I had. It wasn't that I didn't make enough money. That isn't to say I didn't want to make more, I mean, who doesn't? But it simply means that I found myself unable to really feel comfortable about where all of the money was going. It was at that point that there was a bit of a breakdown and things started to change. Over the past six months, I have made between 300-500 dollars per month of side income. But I think that the key about this money is not that I have made it, but that I have not started counting on it. So today I just cashed another check for about 160 bucks. This is good because my business money is in good shape and I've already put a...

With the amazing work that the market has done - and thanks in large part to the retirement accounts, household net worth for this month tops 50k. It sounds crazy, I know, but I am quite pleased. There is a ton of work still to do and the debt just feels like an albatross around my neck, but I think that progress is going as well (if not better) than can be expected. Another major boost comes from the fact that I had not updated the amount of debt that is outstanding on student loans and car loans. I cannot even begin to say how excited I am that these will be paid off soon. I think that my car will be paid off by the end of the year, so that is really exciting. If you want to see all of the gory details, you can check it out here. http://www.networthiq.com/people/EasyChange