Gimme Fuel, Gimme FIRE, Gimme that which I desire...

I've decided that the next expense I'm going to tackle for optimization is transportation, specifically the amount of gas I use.  My transportation expenses take up a rather large portion of my budget.  Gas, insurance, and the sinking fund for car repairs/replacement take up about 16% of my total expenses.  The "experts" recommend 10-15% and I'd like to eventually get it at least down to the lower end of that range.

Insurance is something that I've recently shopped around for and unfortunately, due to the horrible year my husband had last year, insurance is going to be a killer for at least the next 4-5 years.  I increased my deductible a little to help, but other than that I'm not sure I can bring it down any lower without drastically cutting coverage, which is something I'm a bit hesitant to do right now.  

The sinking fund is something that I always debate including in my transportation costs rather than my savings rate, but in the end, I look at it as a car payment.  It's just one that I'm making to myself.  So I include it.  It's not quite as high as I'd like it to be right now, but it's getting there.

That just leaves gas.  My commute is...well, let's just say that there is absolutely nothing frugal about my commute.  It's 30 miles each way and I drive a gas guzzling SUV (but I love her).  I live in the land of little to no public transportation.  There is a program at work to connect people with vanpools that are subsidized.  I've been on that waiting list for nearly a year now.  In fact, writing this post made me realize that I needed to reach out to the coordinator for that program to let him know I'm still interested.

Until a vanpool materializes, I'm kind of left working on being more aware of how I drive.  Specifically, I've been paying closer attention to keeping the RPMs under 2000.  As a sidebar, I found this tip on a YouTube video on "Tips to Save Money."  I don't usually find these helpful because all of the tips are things that I already do.  But every once in awhile I come accross something that I hadn't considered before.  This was one of these times.  

Doing this for the past three or four months has cut my average miles per gallon from 17 to 20.  That doesn't sound like all that much, but the math tells us that 30 miles per trip at 17mpg = ~1.75 gallons and 30 miles per trip at 20mpg = 1.5 gallons.  That means I'm using .25 fewer gallons per leg of my commute, or a half a gallon less each day.  

In two weeks, I work 9 days, so that saves 4.5 gallons every two weeks.  Gasbuddy tells me that gas is currently $2.24/gallon in my area or $2.17 if I can catch a 7 cent off promotion through one of the loyalty card programs.  Four and a half gallons less a week at those prices is about $5/week less in gas that I'm having to spend.  That adds up to about ~$250 each year.  That's just shy of 1% of my total expenses.  It's not going to get my transportation numbers entirely where I want them, but I'm a big believer that every percent is a win.

Because of this, I've been doing some reading on hypermiling, and while I maintain that some of the more extreme techniques are dangerous, there are definitely some other things I've found helpful to incorporate to my commute.  I think the next thing I'm going to concentrate on is doing a better job at anticipating stops in traffic and keeping a larger distance between myself and the cars in front of me.  Both of these things, in theory, decrease the amount of braking needed and increase fuel efficiency.  

Is being debt-free really the be-all and end-all to financial well-being?

Maybe.  Maybe not. 

It really depends on the interest rate.   Conventional wisdom says that you should quickly pay off debts with interest rates higher than 5% above the 10 year T-note rate (which was around 2% as of yesterday afternoon).  So, pay off anything above 7% should be a priority after your emergency fund and getting any company match on 401k contributions.  That’s kind of a no-brainer.  The average return of the stock market is 7%, so absolutely take the guaranteed money saved by paying off high-interest debts quickly.

Lower rate debt is an entirely different beast.  I’m pretty debt averse.  I don’t exactly have Dave Ramsey levels of debt-hate, but I don’t love taking it on.  And if I do take it on, I want to pay it off ASAP.  And credit card debt is a HUGE no-no unless it’s a calculated purchase on a zero-percent interest and I can commit to paying it off at least three months before the interest-free period ends.

Along that line, I did take on a fair amount of debt last year.  In March, a tornado dropped a couple of trees on our house.  The insurance took care of a lot of things, but for various reasons, we decided to go ahead and pull the trigger on some renovations that we’d been wanting to do and borrowed some money to do it.  In November, my husband was in a wreck that totaled the “family car.”  It was paid off, and the insurance covered the loss.  But we ended up replacing it with the same exact vehicle, only with 60k fewer miles.  We borrowed a little bit to make up the difference.  Were these expenditures necessary?  Not really.  Did it make me happy?  Yeah, it kind of did (well, I didn’t really want to replace my car…I loved her…but maybe I’ll get a few more years out of this one with the lower miles).  Both loans are very low interest, around 1-2% (I love my credit union).  The reno loan was also a 12 year loan, so payments are super low.  I never intended for it to take that long to pay it off.  My goal was 4 years and at one point it looked like we might do it in two, but OT has recently dried up.  We’ve been throwing every extra cent we have towards those for the last 10 months and have cut four years and more than $1000 off the interest that we’ll wind up paying back.

The math says that I should be maxing out my retirement accounts before paying these off.  With the extra money we’ve been throwing at them, we still have 7 years left if we only made the actual payment each month.  We have budgeted $1500 per year of base income (i.e. non-overtime or side gig income) to extra payments.  Over seven years that would save us $826 in interest.  But, if instead we made the actual payment and put that $1500 into retirement accounts, assuming that 7% return, we’d earn nearly $2500 in interest over those 7 years.  So we’d earn about three times what we’d save. 

This is where the psychology of money comes into play.  I absolutely know that following the math is the “right” thing to do.  But I hate, hate, HATE being in debt and I keep trying to convince myself that paying off debt is the “guaranteed return.”  I don’t want to make a payment every month (actually every paycheck since it’s a bi-weekly payment).  I want the liabilities column on my net worth spreadsheet to be $0.  But at the same time I want to do the thing that’s most efficient based on the math.  All that to say that I’m having a really hard time pulling the trigger on making this change.  It’s not going to make or break retirement.  By the time I can retire, that extra money should really represent only a small portion of my portfolio. 

The Fiscal Year Cycle

I can’t be the only one who has a defined cycle of my fiscal year, right?  Right?

For me, the cycle starts in about September.  September and October are when we first start getting word on stuff like how much money do we get to shelter in TSP/IRA/HSA accounts and how much the insurance company is going to screw us this year.  If we’re lucky, we’ll know whether or not we’re getting a COLA and whether or not that’s going to cover the screwing by the insurance companies (hint, it usually doesn’t).  If we’re not lucky, we get three or four more months of fuckery by Congress while they try to pass an appropriations bill. 

November means open season.  This is the time of the year where we realize that hindsight is a bitch and we’ve been paying too much.  But, there’s still time to right the ship.  In this vein, we’ll likely be switching to a HDHP with an HSA this year.  November is also the time that I realize how much I hate mindless consumerism.  And the mall.  The mall sucks. 

Late December is the time to shake off the holiday spending hangover and start making changes to my contributions, withholdings, and allotments.  By this point, I have a number in mind that my net paycheck should hit.  From there, it’s just a matter of tweaking things until I’m in that ballpark. 

January is the beginning of tax season!  I’m a total tax geek.  My first job in high school was as a tax preparer.  I was 18, and looked 15 on a good day.  I’m sure that it was unnerving to have a little girl doing your taxes for you.  I’ve considered going back and doing that as a side gig.  For my own taxes, I’ll start filling in what info I have by the first or second week of January based on last paystubs and whatnot.  But, it’s usually the middle of February to early March before I’ve got all the paperwork I need to actually file.  This gives me plenty of time to look over my taxes and see if there was anything that I could have done better and make those changes going forward. 

April and May is when I start fine-tuning my budget for the following year.  My budgeting method can best be described as zero-sum budgeting on steroids (or crack, according to my husband).  I try to have my budget forecasted out 12-18 months at any given time, so I start working on my upcoming budget right after tax season ends.  My first goal is always to cut 1% off of expenses for the year.  Some years I’m able to do so and some years….not so much.  Every cut in expenses is balanced by a cut in net pay.  Remember how I said that I had a number in mind when determining contributions and withholdings and shit?  This is where that number comes from. 

Once the budget is balanced and I’m satisfied with it, I run the working plan for the upcoming year.  This worksheet is part checking register, part spending plan, and part to-do list.  It generates a list that looks an awful lot like an old-fashioned checking register.  The transactions are all hypothetical at this point.  I juggle transactions around, as needed, until everything is being paid during the correct pay period.  Nothing’s late and I know if and when I’m going to have a cash flow crunch.  It allows me to keep as little excess cash in my checking account as possible.  I try to have that done by 1 June at the latest. 

That brings us to the doldrums of the fiscal year.  From June until September there’s really not a whole lot that needs to be done other than to just keep on keeping on.  For someone who loves playing with their money this part of the year is EXCRUCIATING!  There’s only so much planning one can do without concrete numbers.  Running a thousand different what-if scenarios will drive one up the wall.  This year, I’m passing the time by researching ways to cut down or eliminate single-use plastic and paper products at my house or at least pay less for the ones that I can’t convince the rest of the family to give up.

Grocery Shopping....Part 2

So, last week I explained my process for meal planning and grocery shopping and I mentioned that I was going to see if going out of my way to shop at Aldi was going to add value to my life.  Well, the results are in.

First of all, Aldi is a long way from my house.  Twenty miles to be exact.  It's also in the most congested part of the county.  This is a big reason why I haven’t embraced Aldi.  I lived in a third-tier city for nearly a decade during and right after college, but I’ve really started to hate traffic since moving back here.  I also drive a big honking SUV (but I love her and she’s paid off).  At current gas prices, it costs me ~$5 and, most importantly, at least an hour round-trip to make the trip.  If I go after work, Google Maps tells me that it’s only 4 miles out of my way to stop on my way home.  It sure feels like it’s a lot further than that, but whatever.

Armed with my “reusable” bags (i.e. the handful of plastic bags left from the last Walmart trip), my quarter, and my shopping list, I set off.  Of the 35 items on my shopping list, 13 were less expensive at Aldi than Walmart.  Ten items were either more expensive or came in packages that were larger than I needed.  The Duke's mayo (one of the few things I'm brand specific about) was the same price and there were 11 items I couldn't find or were out of stock. In some cases, this is an imperfect comparison due to package sizing.  For example, I had initially ordered three lbs of carrots (I swear my kid’s going to turn into a bunny), but Aldi only offered them in 2 lb packages.  And it was actually cheaper to buy four lbs from Aldi than 3 lbs at Walmart.  And some of it was a no-brainer, like milk and eggs.  It took nearly an hour to get everything and check out/bag my groceries.

However, my total savings was about $8.50, not including the watermelon and pancakes-on-a-stick that were not on my list.  When you add in the aforementioned impulse purchases, I came out more or less even.

So the final verdict is that I want to like Aldi.  I really, really do.  And if the grocery gods would see to it that one were built near my house, or at least on my way home from work, then I'd hit them up all the time for coffee, milk, and vegetables.  For that matter, I'll probably hit them up if I'm in the area anyway.  I like the smaller store format.  I love the less-is-more philosophy when it comes to everything from packaging to employees.  It's just not something that works for me right now.

Grocery Shopping.....Part 1

Can we talk about grocery shopping?  This has always been my go-to category when I needed to really tighten the belt.  But I've kind of reached a point where I'm not sure I can reasonably cut this budget down any more without resorting to my college diet of ramen noodles and Cheerios.  Between meal planning and buying in bulk when I can, I've pretty much got a system down where I can feed three people for $75 a week, though the boys do tend to bitch about not having "good" snacks.  Plus, I'm eating low carb, so that poses an additional complexity.  Here's how I do it:

The process usually starts with figuring out what the heck we're going to eat for the next two weeks.  I use an app called Pepperplate to organize my recipes and menus.  It even generates my shopping list.  I can also plan which meal to make on which day so I plan to make the meals with the stuff that's likely to go bad sooner earlier rather than later.  The "what's for dinner?" question is solved quickly as well.  It's pretty awesome.

I try to plan ten dinners for every two weeks (plus a few breakfast type things and lunches for the kiddo).  Of these ten , two of them will be meals that can be made in batches and frozen.  This week I'm making a creamy, spicy chicken thing for the crockpot.  I'll make three or four of them, eat one this week and put the rest in the freezer.

Freezer Number 1.  I've just stocked ground beef apparently

But wait, why only 10 meals?  That's 5 meals a week.  This is where the freezer meals come in.  I've built up quite the stock of freezer meals, so one night a week we plan to eat something out of the freezer stash.  One other night is what we call "Open Night."  That means that everyone, including the 6 year-old, can open the fridge, open the pantry, or (rarely) open the car door to go to the store/restaurant.  That can mean leftovers, or a freezer meal, or we can get creative with what's in the house.  A lot of times this means that the carbivores who live in my house have some kind of noodle-y creation or cheapo frozen pizza.

Next, I let Pepperplate create a shopping list for me.  I go through the house and check off anything that I already have.  This usually cuts my list in half and mostly prevents me from doing stupid shit like buying onions every time I go to the store because there was that one time I was out of onions and now it's stuck in my head that we need onions....or is that just me?  I take my shopping list (and Alexa list because I've finally trained the rest of the members of my house to put things on the list as we run out) and I plug it into an online grocery shopping portal.  I have a confession to make.  I love, love, love being able to order by groceries and then pick them up without having to go into the store.  I'm an introvert who just doesn't want to people, especially after a long day at work.  It also cuts impulse spending down to nil.

In addition to avoiding humanity, having an online order also allows me to establish a baseline price for my shit.  Because something might seem like a good deal until you realize that you'd be going out of the way to save a quarter.  It's at this point that I finally check the other stores for their weekly loss leaders.  I know this is kind of backwards from how a lot of experts say it should be done, but hear me out.  If the loss leaders are a great deal and it's something that I can store and/or use up before their expiration, I stock up.  I'll check these items against my online order and delete anything that I will be stopping for elsewhere.  If I decide it's worth it to stop for one thing, I'll also check everything else on my list.  It might not be worth it to me to stop at the little corner store that's a mile out of my way for 20 cents off lemons, but if I'm going to be stopping for $5 off ground beef, I might as well get the cheaper lemons too.

So all this is to say that, for me, it doesn't necessarily matter if chicken isn't on sale when I'm planning my meals because chicken was on sale three weeks ago and I still have a ton of it in the freezer.  I'll replenish it when it goes back on sale.  I try to keep, at minimum, a working supply of chicken, beef, and pork on hand.  Having the bulk of my groceries already ordered means that I have a good idea of how much I have to work with that week for bulk buying.  If my budget is $150 and my regular order is $117 then I know I have $33 to spend on loss leaders.  And some weeks, the loss leaders suck.  In that case, I'll either see if I'm running low on something and buy the family pack for a slightly better price or stick the surplus into a sinking fund so that if there's a smoking deal a few weeks later I can really cash in.  It pays to know your local sales cycles to know when certain things are likely to go on sale.

Now it's just a matter of ordering everything else and picking it up.  And prepping everything for storage.

BUT......................

This week I thought I'd give Aldi a real try.  It's not that I hate Aldi or think that it's icky.  On the contrary, I have liked it every time I've been in.  I really like their coffee.  But the closest one is 20 miles from my house and on a really congested intersection.  It might as well be across the world most days.  Even going after work when I'm already sorta, kinda in the area seems like it's a long way.  However, Google Maps tells me that it's really only 4 miles out of the way.  Even with my big ass SUV, that's like 50 cents worth of gas.  So, this afternoon I'm going to give it a try.  I've got my reusable bags.  Okay, it's actually a bunch of plastic bags from other stores that I'm going to reuse for this...that counts right?  I've got my quarter.  I've got my shopping list already loaded in the Walmart app so I know what my target prices are.  I'm very curious as to whether or not it will end up being worth it.  Stay tuned for part two...

Playing Poor

I just finished a book called Two Dollars a Day.  It's part of the Prime reading library.  I highly recommend it.  Honestly, it wasn't what I was expecting it to be, but it was fairly eye-opening.  The book follows the experiences of a handful of families in the United States living on $2.00 per day per person.  For the record, that is the threshold that the World Bank uses to classify someone as living in "extreme poverty."  It’s the kind of poverty that you don't expect in the modern US, but exists in shadow economies in big cities and small towns and rural areas.

It kind of hit home for me because I’m only maybe two generations out from that kind of life.  My grandfather told stories of life as a boy on the farm during the Great Depression and how it didn’t matter because they were poor before the Depression, they were poor during it, and they were poor afterwards.  He did manage to work his way out of that and into a decent mid-century, middle-class life.  I wish I’d paid more attention to some of the skills that my grandparents tried to teach me instead of having to learn them from YouTube videos.  I live in one of the 10 poorest states in the country, so the kind of rural poverty that the book talks about is something that I’ve grown up seeing in the countryside.  

That got me thinking about how I'm handling my finances.  I've been following the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement for a while now.  I don't know that I'll ever have the RE part down, unless I am offered an early out, but the FI part intrigues me.  I think it’s a natural extension of budgeting, especially for a numbers geek that enjoys budgeting and playing with my money.  

If you only count what I spend on non-savings expenses (i.e. don't count what I save each month even though those are listed as expenses in my budget), I'm spending about 75% of what is considered average in my state and only a few hundred dollars a year beyond what the expanded Medicaid cutoff would be if my state had opted in.  All that is to say that I live quite a bit under my means.  I was a broke college kid for basically my entire 20s, and I never really grew out of it.

But I'm just playing poor.  What does that mean?  It means that while I often feel and live like I'm living paycheck to paycheck, an unexpected emergency is not going to send my life into a tailspin because my entire paycheck isn’t being eaten by the daily necessities.  It means that I don't have to sit up at night and worry about money, and when I do it's because I'm trying to squeeze another 1% into savings.  It means that my kid won't have to suffer because he's sick, but the only pediatrician in town that takes his insurance is closed and I can't afford to private pay anywhere else.  I will price compare everything to get the best deal, but he will have all the school supplies on his list.  His clothes might have been bought at thrift stores and consignment sales, but he will have an overabundance of them and they will be clean.  It means that I will have what is apparently a tiny grocery budget and eat out very, very little.  But there will be more than just ramen noodles and beans and rice.  For that matter, I'm able to do that because I can afford a working fridge and freezer and stove.  And if one of those goes out, we can buy a new one, but I can guarantee that we will do everything we can to fix the old one first.  

Privilege is a hell of a thing.  For some reason, a lot of people have an almost visceral reaction when it's pointed out that they benefited from it.  Like, we get it, you work hard, but so do plenty of other people who are simply trying to keep their head above water.  They might even be working harder than you are because being poor, truly poor, is HARD.  It's expensive.  Simply acknowledging that you have been lucky doesn't take away from your accomplishments.  I fully admit that I am lucky enough to have a ton of advantages that make FI, and maybe even RE, a realistic and achievable goal.  It's great that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, but please acknowledge that you were lucky enough to have shoes to begin with.  

Confession Time

As much as I'd like to pretend that I've always had my financial shit together, I'm here today to confess that that's not really the case.  Now, I've always kind of been a saver. As a kid, I saved my allowance for months to buy the Super Nintendo and was livid when my mom made me share it with my brother who had spent all of his allowance. By college, I had managed to put up a small savings account, which came in handy when the store I worked at closed and I didn't have a job for awhile.

Then, because I was young and stupid, I married a man who was terrible with money.  There would have been fewer red flags in Soviet Russia than what he was waving.  He came from Old Money.  The kind that had long since dried up in his family line, but because he still carried the name he felt like he had to keep up with his cousins.  He thought that as long as there was money in the checking account, it was free game to be spent.  I went from having no credit cards and some savings to having no savings and a couple of thousand in CC debt.  I'm not blameless in this.  I didn't have the lady balls to stand up to him.  Any time I did, it turned into a full-on manchild tantrum and for awhile it just wasn't worth it.  

I learned a lot about budgeting and being frugal during this time.  I pretty much had to be frugal at this point in my life just to keep the balancing act going. I learned how to use coupons and stretch a grocery budget.  I knew how to work the CVS system because it was the only way I could afford milk every week.  I tweaked the budget spreadsheet into an early iteration of what became the cashflow tool.  It was the only way to juggle bills and make sure that nothing got cut off and that the mortgage got paid.

When I was 26 I left him and moved back home.  I walked walked away from the house, the mortgage, his car loan.  I figured that in seven years I could have a chance to be happier and have terrible credit that was getting better or I could be miserable and have terrible credit that was getting worse.  I knew that he wouldn't pay them and I was mostly right.  The mortgage payment I made before I left was the last one that ever got made.  The house was gone before the divorce was even finalized.  Luckily, this was at the very beginning of the housing crisis, so the bank was still issuing full-credit bids on foreclosures so there was no deficiency on it.  I suspect that things would have been much worse just a few months later.  

At that point, we had about $10k in credit card debt.  Half of it was on cards that were in my name with him named as the authorized user and half in his name with me as an AU.  The first draft of the divorce decree that his attorney sent over demanded that I cut a check for "my half" of the credit card bills and he would take care of paying them.  I'm not sure my attorney has ever seen someone laugh that hard in his office before.  Even if I could have conjured that kind of money out of my ass, I trusted him to pay my bills about as much as I trust gas-station egg-salad sandwiches.  In the end, we each got the ones in our respective names.  I had some late (very late) payments on them, but eventually got them paid off about four years later.   

He managed to keep his car for about 8 months, but it eventually went too.  It sold at auction and there was a deficiency, but I was never contacted about it.  He filed for bankruptcy a few days after the car was picked up, so it's likely that that helped me out.  I also spent several years under the radar.  On paper, I owned nothing.  I sold my car to my dad.  I lived with my parents or in my grandparents' house.  I had a checking account that was always empty because I went back to school.

I'm on the other side now.  My credit is awesome again.  I'm remarried with a kiddo.  My new husband is...better....with money.  But we still have separate finances.  He does have some issues with impulse spending that can be serious if not kept in check.  I know that if shit hits the fan that I can take care of myself and my son.  Life is good and getting better.  I'm never going back there again.

How I Got Here

It's pretty much a given that most people's financial education starts at home. Some people learn what to do with money. Some people learn what NOT to do with money. I learned a little of both.

My parents aren't exactly terrible with money. They made a lot of the typical knucklehead moves like buying a timeshare or refinancing the mortgage multiple times. They probably shouldn't have credit cards as they tend to go through the cycle of:

1.) Run up the credit card balances
 2.) Do something drastic to pay them off (see multiple refis above)
3.) Close all but one "for emergencies"
4.) Rinse and repeat

That being said, they've never been evicted and they've never defaulted, that I know of.  We never went hungry.  They didn't have to worry about saving for retirement because they both have pensions, though dad did a handful of part-time gigs starting basically the day after he retired from his full-time government job.

My maternal grandparents were great financial role models. They were stereotypical children of the Depression, though my grandfather was quick to tell you that the Depression never made a difference because they were poor before it happened and poor afterwards. They used everything they could and when they were done with it, they used it for something else. My grandmother made a lot of my mother's clothes when she was a child (and a few unfortunate outfits for me as a kid). They grew food and canned/froze it for the rest of the year. No lie, when I cleaned out their deep freeze in 2010, there was frozen corn that they had grown in 1998. And he would have insisted that it was still fine. They invested. My grandfather had a monthly ritual of calling around all the local banks to see who had the best CD rates for the one that was coming due that month. I'm pretty sure I get my love of playing with my money from him.

 My paternal grandparents were...not so great role models. Though it wasn't until they passed that anyone had any idea how bad it really was. I mean, as a kid you don't quite understand the reality of the absolute mountain of gifts at Christmas when grandma and grandpa are on a fixed income. My dad was the executor of the estate when we found out that they owed something like $40k on 13 different cards and had already taken out a loan against their house and land to pay them down. I still remember the calls, and the calls, and more calls. The scummy creditors who tried to convince my dad that it was his responsibility, as the executor, to pay them even if it meant paying them out of his own pocket.  I remember some of his very...colorful...replies to that request.  It took months to straighten everything out and, in the end, they weren't able to save the house.

From all this, I can say that I probably got my saver personality from my maternal grandparents. There are quite a few skills that I wished I'd paid more attention to, but at least I have YouTube because my mom paid even less attention than I did. All in all, I'd say that I was very, very lucky to be able to (mostly) learn from watching my parents struggle. I think that my paternal grandparents situation is the one that had the most impact on me. I was 15 when it all went down, so it was still fresh on my mind when I went to college. Because of that, I resisted the credit card companies who were set up outside the university bookstore pushing free t-shirts and pizzas for filling out credit card apps.

At the end of college I fell into the trap of being married to a super-spender.  He had both a drug problem and a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses problem.  I left that marriage with between five and six thousand dollars worth of credit card debt with a foreclosure and a car repo on my credit report.  In what is now a funny side note, when I got the first draft of the divorce papers from his attorney my ex demanded that I cut him a check for "my half" of the credit card bills.  We had similar amounts on cards in each name.  No joint cards.  Seeing as how he had never dealt with the checking account or bills while we were married and wouldn't even know where to start to pay my credit cards, I not-so-politely turned down his "generous" offer.  I'll post about the shitstorm that was that time of my life soon.

After that, I moved back in with my parents.  I took a shit job and then quickly moved on to bartending.  That was about the time I decided that I had to get myself back into school.  I saved up and paid for my first two classes in cash.  Because I already had a degree, most of my general ed classes were already out of the way and there were only a handful of my new major classes that I had the pre-reqs for.  I tended bar at night and went to class in the mornings, paying as I went.

Eventually, I landed a co-op position that allowed me, nay required me, to go to school full-time and work 10-32 hours a week, depending on my school schedule.  They paid books and tuition.  That job transitioned to full-time a week after graduation.  That was 7 years ago.  I still owe them 2 more years for all the tuition they paid, but I mostly like my job so that's not a big deal.  It's also a great paying job for my area with fantastic benefits and one of the best retirement plans available.

I'm remarried with a kiddo now.  He's not fantastic with money, but understands that and lets me handle everything.  I like it that way.

Thrifty Thursday

I had intended to start doing a feature called Thrifty Thursday today to document my absolute love of all things thrift stores.  Seriously, anyone who knows me knows that I love some thrift store shopping.  I love everything about it.  The prices.  The thrill of the hunt.  The unique finds.  I really love the concept of giving new life to old things.  Now there are a few things that absolutely draw the line at.  I don't do matresses or cushioned furniture or anything else that could bring bedbugs into my house.  I also don't do socks or underwear (ewww).  There is a grey area for me and that area is shoes.  I don't like shoe shopping.  I've been wearing the same pair of work shoes for the last 15+ years and they need to be replaced.  Badly.  So, what's the big deal?

The deal is that they are Dr. Martens and they were on the expensive side when I bought them.  And in the last decade and a half, production of them has moved from England to Asia and with the move, the quality has reportedly gone down.  Now, some production has been moved back to England, but they are significantly more expensive.  What's a girl to do?

Enter Poshmark.  It's a site to buy and sell used clothes, shoes, and accessories.  I've had very good luck with sellers over the last couple of years, so I checked them out.  I hit the like button on several pairs that were my size, made in England, and listed for a price I could live with.  I even found a pair of the exact shoes I have.  Within an hour of my liking that pair, I got an offer from the seller.  She, or Poshmark on her behalf perhaps, offered $20 off and free shipping.  Yes, please.  Now hopefully I can get 15 more years out of this pair. 

Grocery shopping basics

We are a family of 3. Two adults and a bottomless pit of a 5 year-old. My goal is to average $2/person/meal. I shop every two weeks and plan about 10 dinners per shopping trip. Why 10? Because at least one, maybe two, of those planned meals will be something that I can double, triple, or quadruple and freeze. So, a few nights a week are either something out of the freezer or leftovers. Tonite is a freezer night.

The process starts by checking out what's on sale, specifically meat. I have a list of the various grocery stores in the area and what days their sales run. Most sales cycles around here run Wed-Tues, so I usually start at least thinking about my menu on the Wednesday a week before I pick up my order.

Once I have an idea what's on sale, I start building my menu. If there's something at a fantastic price I'll pick three or four meals with that and fill in the rest with other stuff. My family would riot if we ate chicken 14 straight days, so I do try to mix it up. I also buy a little extra when stuff is on sale so that I have a decent mix of things in the freezer. Speaking of the freezer, I do also like to keep that in mind when I'm picking out the menu so that I cycle through the stuff there. Also, since most of it was bought on sale, I'm cutting my per meal price down.

To organize things, I use an app called Pepperplate. It lets you collect and tag recipes and will build a shopping list for you. You can choose your own tags, but at minimum, I tag recipes with the kind of protein it has. That way if pork is on sale, I can quickly filter down to just the pork recipes. I can also create a calendar to plan which meals go on which days. I do schedule some meals, especially for meals that have ingredients that won't last two weeks in the fridge. I try to schedule those meals for earlier in the week. I also like to schedule time-intensive meals for weekends. It helps with the "what's for dinner" dilemma.

Now that the shopping list is built, check off the things that are already in your pantry, fridge, and/or freezer. There is no use buying something that you already have, unless it's something you use a lot and it's at a rock bottom price (I'll write a separate post about that later...I promise).

Next, I put everything that's left on the list into a Walmart shopping cart. This is my baseline price. Let me tell you, online grocery shopping is a game-changer. I save a ton of money just on not making impulse purchases. Do you have any idea how much less I spend just by virtue of not taking the husband and/ or kiddo into the store? Also, there's no more standing in one grocery store trying to remember if X is cheaper down the street. I can easily see if the Walmart regular price is more or less than the advertised price at the other stores. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. Finally, I don't have to be that person standing in the aisle with a calculator trying to figure out what's the best deal (I've so been that person). And if I do go over budget, it's easy to look back over my cart to see what can go back without having to backtrack across the store.

But remember how we built our shopping list based on what was on sale? Now that the WM cart is full, I go back to that ad and see if it's really a good deal or not. If that item is still cheaper at the other store, and it's cheaper enough to make it worth it, I'll take it out of the WM cart and buy it at the other store. I'm not going to drive 15 miles out of my way to save 37 cents, but if it's a store I'm going to be passing anyway and I'd save $8 then I'll do it. This is also a good opportunity to check out all the other items in the ad. If there's something that's slightly cheaper than baseline go ahead and get it somewhere else, and take it out of your WM cart. For everything else, just pick it up.

I tend to not go to more than one other store a week unless it's just a smoking deal or it's something that we use a lot of. I've found that a lot of times, all the local stores will have the same basic things on sale at the same time, so it just depends on who has it cheaper and how far out of my way they are. As for this week, we're looking at pork loin roast and boneless country style ribs for under $2/lb and Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce for 99 cents (that's almost half the price of Walmart, y'all). I'm thinking we'll be doing some BBQ in the crockpot. for under $1/serving. That will leave plenty of room for veggies and starches, if you eat those, and still be under $2.

It was almost too pretty of a piece of meat to cut up...

Now's time to hit the sales items that might not necessarily be on your list.  I try to make it a game to see how close I can get to my allotted amount without going over.  This can be things that are on sale because of the sales cycle like ketchup just before Memorial Day or things that are nearing their sell-by date.  Today's find was a beautiful beef roast for just under $12, or $4.50/lb.  It's a little more than we would normally pay for meat, but it's a  fantastic price for stew meat.  To keep us under our $2 goal, we might use this for beef stew and only use a half pound per batch.  So, I took it home and chunked it up and froze it in a single layer.  Once it's frozen enough that it won't stick together, I'll throw it in a container that I can scoop it out of when i need it.

....Almost.  I'll get at least 4 and probably 5 meals out of this.

What are you doing this week to optimize the grocery bill?

Cutting the Cord

Like a lot of people, we cut the cable cord.  It's been long enough now that I feel pretty confident giving you all my review of the different services we use. 

First of all, we eased into streaming.  My husband wasn't really convinced, but our cable/Internet bill had become ridiculous.  It had finally crept up above $200/month and I was beyond done.  I bought a Fire Stick on sale and added it to the main TV.  We used it, along with the regular cable, for a couple of weeks.  Then the storm hit and since we were moving out of the house anyway, it seemed like as good of time as any to cancel U-Verse.  While we were living with mom and dad the rooms we stayed in didn't have a cable drop, so we had to either stream our TV or go downstairs and be sociable. 

We currently use Prime, Netflix, and Boomerang the most.  We also use PlutoTV and FreeDive occasionally.  And of course, YouTube.  So, let's talk about them, huh?

• Amazon Prime:  There's a pretty good chance that we'd have this even if we didn't stream TV, but I'm pretty sure that if Amazon ever split the video portion off into it's own separate entity a la Amazon Music Unlimited then we wouldn't bother subscribing to it.  The selection of movies and shows is just okay and the menu teases you with selections that are available "to rent" and not included as part of Prime.  I did enjoy the Mind Over Money series
• Netflix:  What can I say?  It's the original streamer.  The selection is good.  The menu is straightforward.  What you see is what you get as far as being included with the subscription price.  The bad news is that the price keeps going up.  Right now, it's still worth it, but the playing field is changing and I'm not sure for the better.  They are throwing a lot of money into original content, a lot of which is really good.  I can't wait for the next season of Stranger Things.
• Boomerang:  This is for the kiddo.  It's probably the one we get the most value out of.  It runs in the ballpark of $40/year and worth every penny.  Lots of old school cartoons:  Scooby Doo, Jetsons, Flintstones, Tom and Jerry, etc.  My only complaint about it is that unlike Netflix, it doesn't have an attention check after every couple of episodes.  It will play all day or night if it gets left on.  That's no bueno when you're not on an unlimited data plan.
• PlutoTV and FreeDive:  I'm bundling these together because they are super similar.  The lineup of content is even very similar.  This is a good way to get some of those Discovery Channel shows that I used to be such a sucker for.  Pluto does have a live option, in addition to on-demand, where you can watch their channels like you would watch regular TV channels.  We've been doing mostly on-demand for years anyway, so this doesn't matter much to us.  There is a live news channel though if you want to keep up with the news that way.  Both PlutoTV and FreeDive are free services and thus have ads.  They are pretty short, but can't be fast-forwarded through.  FreeDive seems to do a better job of placing the ads in natural breaks.  Pluto will sometimes stick an ad right in the middle of a sentence.  The content isn't super new or super vast, but it's definitely worth more than what you pay for it.
• YouTube:  Here I'm talking about just YouTube, not YouTubeTV.  I like the ease of casting a video from my phone to the TV using the app.  It's interface on the TV is kind of clunky, but it's another free option.  I like watching older shows, even if the quality is lacking.  I torture the kiddo by making him watch old episodes of Sea Hunt.  Good times.  

I'm very interested in the service Disney is planning to introduce soon.  At $6-7 a month, it is a little more expensive than Boomerang, which it would likely replace.  I have my doubts that Disney will be able to hold it at that price for very long either.  Time will tell whether or not this is something that will become part of our lineup.  There is a very real danger of adding more and more subscriptions without analyzing which ones you are actually watching.  We've been saying for years that we would like to be able to only pay for the channels we want.  Now, we're getting closer to that reality, and are finding that at $3-7 per channel, it may not be any cheaper to do so.  

One percent at a time

So, one thing that I've been really working on lately is increasing my savings rate.  At the end of last year, I adjusted my W-4 withholding, cut cable, and increased my retirement contributions by 9%.  I was able to get an additional 1% in February when I received a COL adjustment to my paycheck.  I'm currently at about 30% between my work plan and my Roth IRA.  During next open season, I'm going to add a HDHP and HSA to the mix as well.  But is there anything else I can do?

The idea of optimization is that you can make little steps in your every day life to get closer to your goals.  So, my goal has become to decrease my expenses and/or increase my income 1% at a time.  I mean, why not?  It's "just" 1%.  A few dollars a day, really.  Enough to feed one of Sally Struthers' kids.  Or buy Alex Trebek's life insurance.  But that 1% can be huge.  I'm only about 4% away from maxing out my work plan.  If I can find money that can be better optimized as savings then I want to do it. 

Because 1% seems like such a small amount, I started looking at the things that can be cut easily.  The low-hanging fruit, if you will.  So, I started reading articles with titles like '15 Simple Tips for Saving Money."  And what I found was....that I'm already a cheap bastard.  Seriously, tips like "Don't buy $5 coffee" and "Make a budget and stick to it."  In all my searching, the only tip I found helpful was one about keeping your car tachometer below 2000 RPMs to improve gas mileage.  That shit works, yo. 

So, back to the drawing board.  I started looking at what my expenses were vs. what I had budgeted for them.  I found that on average I was budgeting about $5 too much a week for gas and $10 per month too much for electricity.  Now we're getting somewhere.  When I run the 2020 budget in a couple of weeks I'll be able to budget less for those two items. 

I've also cut the amount that I spend on groceries down about $10 every two weeks.  My grocery bill is already pretty bare bones, so after this, there's not a whole lot of room to cut it down anymore.  I've got a post planned for my shopping strategy, so I won't go too much into it here. 

Finally, I took a look at my utilities and realized that my Internet company had introduced new plans.  The plan I'd been on was for 600 GB per month at 150 mbps.  The new plan was 600 GB per month at 200 mbps....for $15 less each month.  I couldn't make that change online...I did have to actually call and talk to an actual human being...the horror!  No, actually she was very nice and didn't give me any grief about switching plans. 

All of those little tweaks gave me the 1% I needed to increase contributions again.  Just three more percent to go...

The importance of an emergency fund

What a difference a year makes.  One year ago today was a Monday, much like any other.  My kiddo and I had gone to the store to get Easter eggs for his class egg hunt.  Like a lot of four year-olds, he had begged for some shiny toy and had thrown a temper tantrum when I wouldn't buy it for him.  When we got back into the car, we had a talk about stuff isn't important and how he had so many toys already (a lot of them are from my husband's childhood...my house looks like Toys-R-Us circa 1984 exploded).  Then we went home and made dinner and he asked to watch a movie before bed, so I let him put a movie on the TV in my room to start settling down.

About 30 minutes later, I got a weather alert on my phone.  It wasn't exactly unexpected because the EMA had warning of potential bad storms for a couple of days.  The dog had been pacing and, unusually, hadn't asked to go out all night.  But this was different, it was a tornado warning, not a watch.  I flipped the TV over to the legendary local weather reporter just as he was saying that there is a possible tornado heading towards my city.

And then the power went out.

That was the point where I decided that maybe we should get in the hallway for a little while.  I grabbed the kid and the blankets and pillows and set up "camp."  I told my husband to get in the hallway and gave the kiddo his tablet and turned the volume up as loud as it would go.

I've always heard that a tornado sounds like a train.  I never did really hear it over the kiddo's game noise.  I felt it.  My ears popped when the pressure changed.  What no one ever talks about is the smell.  The first sign that the roof had been breached was the overwhelming smell of pine.  At first I thought it was where the rafters of the house cracked, but when I stepped outside I learned that it was probably the 15 pine trees that used to stand in our yard.

Just as the all-clear was given, the reporter on the radio came back on and told us to sit tight because there was another one on the way.  We sat in that hallway, this time under a mattress, listening to the rain pour through the holes in the roof.  In total shock.  Thankfully, that one went north of us and caused only minor damage.  The NWS thinks that there might have been a third, smaller one nearby that night as well.  As that storm passed, the chainsaws started and they didn't stop for three weeks.

Once we were able to start gathering ourselves, and taking stock we realized that there were at least two trees down on the house.  One came down right above where we had been laying watching the movie.  It also punched a hole in the living room ceiling.  Another took out a corner of the back porch.  The car that had only been paid off for two weeks (the title had come in the mail only the day before the storm) was missed by inches.  All-in-all we were very, very lucky.  We lost 23 trees, and only two of them actually hit the house.  No one in town was killed and there were only a handful of injuries. 

Luckily, my in-laws who live three houses down were nearly unaffected.  They lost a gutter.  And they were out of town.  We were able to stay there for a couple of days until the cold got to be too much and we moved to a hotel.  We spent a total of 4 weeks in three different hotels.  And then another six months living with my parents, who also live on the same block, but were able to stay in their home.

And this is where the emergency fund comes in.  It was such a relief to be able to roll up to the hotel and reserve a week, and then another, without having to worry about what would happen if the insurance company didn't reimburse us in enough time to pay the CC bill (they did, BTW).  I didn't have to worry about whether or not I'd be able to cover deductibles.  We did have some out of pocket expenses.  And in the interest of full-disclosure, we did choose to go ahead and do some home improvement things that we'd been wanting to do.  And we chose to take on a little bit of debt to do that.  It's very low interest debt, secured by money in our bank account.  It's one of the few cases where we're not doing the mathematically "correct" thing, but instead doing the thing that works for us psychologically.

But the real moral of this story is that just because you've suffered one emergency doesn't mean that another one isn't right around the corner.  In April, the engine in my husband's car threw a rod and he decided to put a new engine in it rather than getting something new.  In November, he totaled my car, you know the paid-off one that survived the tornado.  I decided to replace it with something exactly like it.  Same year, same color, upgraded trim package, and many, many, fewer miles.  What can I say?  I believe in buying what I want and driving it for 10-15 years.  I figure that my now 5 year-old will drive it as his first car.  We paid a little more than insurance covered due to the low mileage.  Finally, last month, my husband got laid off from his job.  We're still doing okay.  Even have the ER built back up.  I'm not going to say the last year hasn't been stressful, but it's been a whole lot less stressful than it could have been.

To Fee....Or Not To Fee

Not me, but this is pretty close to my ideal bill-paying setup.

So, my kid's school has an online system to pay for school lunch.  This is awesome!  Anyone who knows me, knows that in my perfect world, everything could be paid for online (I'm looking at you, water company).  Hell, I haven't had an actual checkbook in almost 10 years now and I can count on one hand how many times I've actually had to have a cashier's check cut in that time period.

However, I've noticed a trend lately of parents bitching about how expensive the convenience fee is for this service.  Okay, so it's not exactly cheap.  It's $1.95 per transaction and if you have more than one child at the school each child has to be a separate transaction.  The beauty of it, to me, is the fact that it's a flat fee rather than a percentage.  So, if you are able to pay for the entire semester's meals at once like I did this morning the percentage is something like 1.2%.  Seeing as how I'm getting 1.5% back on that card, I'm coming out ahead.  Though, I can see how if you had more than one kid and could only afford to pay by the month where that fee would be closer to 5%.  At that point, the $2/month/kid would probably come close to outweighing the $20 to get a checkbook and the convenience of paying online.

There are some fees that I don't mind paying.  Like this one.  Or the one that means I don't have to go by the bank and get cash when I renew the car tags once a year.  And there are other, similar, fees that bother me.  Like the $2.95 fee to pay the power bill with a credit/debit card.  I've almost always paid it with a linked bank account and at this point, inertia has taken over.  In theory, whenever the bill is over $193 (which is about 5 months out of the year), I'd do better to pay it on the card.

Long Term Bills

I said in my last entry that I would talk about what I call long-term bills.  This isn't a new concept.  I've seen the idea called sinking fund, or a freedom fund.  All it really amounts to is taking bills that are substantial, due regularly, but infrequently, and putting a bit aside every month or every payday.  You may not see much point in it at first, when you think of the things that you could use that money for.  But a day will come when you are very glad that you did.  Today is one of those days for me.

August is one of those tight months for us.  Our car tags are up for renewal.  And the semi-annual car insurance bill is also due.  I spent just over $500 on Wednesday just on stuff to keep my car legal.  Before, this would have been a source of major stress and probably would have meant hitting the emergency fund.  But this morning when I sat down to pay the credit card, all I had to do was to move the money from the Long-Term Bill account to the CC Payment account.  Each month, the car tags end up being about $17.50 and the insurance about $60 (plus another $20 for the other car's insurance).  It's so much easier to put a little aside each month than to try to scramble up the money all at once.

I have several things that I use this technique with.  In addition to tags and insurance, I save a little for Christmas/Birthdays/other gift giving occasions each month.  I also have a couple of expensive hobbies.  Both tend to require large purchases during specific times of the year and it's very nice to have a fund when I need it because I set aside $20-40 a month during the off-season.  Psychologically, it's nice to have that money earmarked because I don't feel guilty about spending it on its intended purpose.

Account Setup

I want to talk a little today about how I have my accounts set up.  I have 5 checking accounts and 4 savings accounts.  Yeah, the tellers at my credit union probably think I'm nuts.  They are all connected online, so I can move my money around easily.  The separate accounts are just to keep things classified.  For those of you who are familiar with Dave Ramsey's teachings you can think of it as a digital envelope system.

The savings accounts are pretty straightforward.  There's our contingency fund, which is nothing more than an emergency fund.  It contains enough money to handle something like a broken water heater (BTDT) or blown transmission (crossing our fingers on that one).  Then there is the vacation fund.  I've mentioned before that travel is very important to us.  And while we do try to travel as cheaply as possible, we do regularly deposit money in the vacation fund.  Next is the overdraft account.  In theory, we should never have to use it, but there is enough in that to cover minor mistakes.  Finally is what we call the college fund.  It's money that we are saving for our son's college.  Every paycheck, we put a couple hundred dollars in it and then at the beginning of each year, we deposit that into a Roth IRA.  This account actually doubles as a longer-term savings account (for very, very dire situations only...think long term unemployment) because we didn't open the IRA until he was older and we are limited each year as to how much we can actually deposit.

The checking accounts are a little more interesting.  The first is the main account that paychecks are deposited into and money is disbursed out of.  That is the account that the cashflow planning tool creates.  It is the central account.  Then my husband and I each have our own checking accounts.  That way we are each handling our own day-to-day spending.  Next is the credit card payment account.  I try to treat credit cards like a debit card.  As soon as something is put on the card, the money is moved into the payment account.  Auto-pay for the full amount is set up on every card.  Are there occasions where I float a bill from one paycheck to another?  Of course.  And the planning tool lets me feel confident doing that.  If I know that "yeah, I don't have the money today, but I'll have it in  seven days" then I will do it.  I try not to float expenses that aren't already in the plan, but sometimes life happens.  The final account is the long-term bill account.  I'll talk a little more about long term bills later this week, but essentially this account is used for putting aside money to pay bills that only occur annually or quarterly or every six months.  There are two ways of doing this.  You can have one account for each bill (in which case, I'd probably use a savings account rather than a checking account).  Or you can use the long-term bill tab of the tool that will help track up to 12 different things.

Introducing the Cashflow Planning Tool

I put the instructions and link to my cashflow planning tool up today.  You can find the instructions for the tool here and it will link to the workbook on Google Docs.

Budgets are Marvelous Things...

Hey, why are you laughing?  I’m serious.  Budgets are great.  The thing is, at their core, they are just two lists.  Money coming in and money going out.  That’s it.  If the money going out is less every month than the money coming in then everything is gravy.  If not….well….we’ve all been there and there are some choices that have to be made.  And really making choices is what it all boils down to.  You have to decide for yourself what expenditures are important to you.  For me, I have a couple of kind of expensive hobbies (though I hope one will eventually start paying for itself) and I have a pretty severe case of wanderlust.  So, any extra money after mandatory expenses (and stuff for my kid) is earmarked for those activities rather than the latest electronic gadgets or clothes or shoes.  If that’s your jam then go for it.  But make a plan for them and stick to it.  

Who am I kidding?  I'm not nearly this organized...

Income is pretty straightforward.  It's how much money you have coming in.  For some people that's an easy number to figure out.  If you are salary or hourly with consistent hours then you know that will be paid X dollars every Y days.  If you are a tipped employee or rely on commission or have fluctuating hours then you're going to have to make an estimate on how much you make per week or month.  In this case, I would always err on the side of caution and estimate low.  I waited tables in college and, while it was nice to have cash every day, one bad night could blow my budget for the whole month.

Now that you know how much you have coming in, it's time to look at what's going out.  There are a couple of kinds of expenses.  Fixed expenses are expenses that are the same amount and due at the roughly the same time each month.  These are things like rent or cell phone bills.  Variable expenses are things that are due every month, but might be a different amount each month.  Things like groceries, power (assuming that you don't use budget billing), or gas.  These are things that you can, for the most part, control.  If you have more expenses than income, then this is a good place to start looking for things to cut.  The final class of expenses are what I like to call long-term expenses.  These are things that happen at a fairly set frequency, but might only happen once a year or once every six months.  These are things like taxes, car tags, Christmas or other gift-giving occasions, and insurance.  It's good practice to be putting a little money aside regularly for these.  For example, if your car insurance is $120 every six months then you should be setting aside $20 a month.  This way, when insurance comes due, you aren't scrambling to come up with the entire payment.  You know that the money is there for that bill.

So, how do you keep up with all this.  I'm here to tell you that Excel is your friend.  I'm a bit of an Excel junkie.  I have used and refined the same Excel spreadsheet for years to keep up with my finances.  Seriously, I've used one form of this workbook or another for more than a decade.  In my case, I first figure out how how how much I can spend in each category and then use those numbers to forecast my checking account 12-18 months into the future.  By doing so, I can see what affect spending extra money this month will have down the road and can make adjustments accordingly.  I'll try to get an example of that sheet up.

Bienvenue!

Welcome to Living Well, Spending Wisely.  So, what is the point of this blog?  I hope to give some you some good advice and get you thinking about your own personal financial journey.  I'll tell some tales of what has worked for me.  In some cases, I may even serve as a warning about what not to do.  Maybe I'll even entertain you along the way.

A big part of what I'll talk about includes budgeting.  Yeah, I know that people don't like to think about them.  But budgets are awesome!  Think of a budget as a plan to give yourself permission to spend money in each category rather than being something that restricts you and it becomes a much more positive thing.  A big part of Living Well means not worrying about whether or not the power is going to get cut off next month.  Look, I won't promise that you'll never stress over money again, but having a plan is always better than not having a plan.

I'll also talk some about longer-term financial planning, credit, debt, travel (budget and sometimes otherwise), and even some frugal living stuff.  I'll also talk about money and kids; everything from affordable kid's activities to allowances.  My plan is to have a well-rounded personal finance blog that incorporates life hacks.