Archive results for “October 2007f 2007”

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I’m on a Money-Making Kick

I haven’t been around much lately the last few days. I’m not even sure what to talk about today on here. So I guess I will give an update as to what is going on “behind the scenes.”

Lately, I’ve been on a money-making kick. More income will greatly help our debt reduction progress. Here’s what I’ve been doing:

Listing for sale domains that I purchased but never developed – I am hoping that they will sell, but you never know. It depends on if someone else thinks they are as neat as I did when I purchased them.
Reading more about eBay – I have quite a few things that will sell well on eBay if I can get the courage to just do it. I’m so nervous about selling on it for some reason.
Looking through Craigslist for gigs – I say “gigs” because I don’t want another job. I’m happy with mine. I’m just looking for little things I could possibly do to bring in a few dollars here and there.
Looking at the WAHM forum for gigs – It’s another good place to look besides Craigslist.
Keeping an eye out for contests and entering them – I’ve had some decent luck lately with contests. I won a $200 gift certificate (to be used for Christmas) and I won a book. Might as well try for any other ones that I come across.
Studying for increasing my education with my full-time job – Okay, I haven’t actually started yet…but it’s on my list!

So, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been working on making some more money. I have a thirst for debt reduction that cannot be quenched (<- not sure where that came from…must be because I’m pretty tired right now!).

With that, I am going to take care of a few things and go to bed.

Posted by Tricia on October 31, 2007 at 12:47 AM in Making Money | 22 Comments »
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Final Words on My Prosper Borrowing Experience

Those of you following my blog for a while know that I used Prosper.com to help lower the interest rate on some of my credit card debt. Not too long ago, I paid it off in full, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a final post on it.

At first, I wasn’t even sure Prosper could help someone like me (for those unfamiliar with Prosper, it is a people-to-people lending site). I tried going to banks before to try to consolidate our debt, but they fell short of laughing at me. We had too much debt and not enough income. The appeal of Prosper, though, is that it is regular people funding your loan. They have the ability to see the reasoning behind the numbers and not just the numbers.

After taking some time reading about Prosper, I made the leap and created a loan listing at Prosper. In seven days, I had a fully funded loan for $3,500 at 9.9%. A total of thirteen lenders contributed to my loan.

If I had to do it all over again (if our situation was the same), I would. It was nice to have a debt payment that was the same amount every month. They even automatically withdrew it from our account! There was no worrying about our rates increasing and I knew my money was going to regular people. I didn’t blog too much about that loan after it was funded because it was on auto-pilot for repayment. That was nice.

If you are thinking of trying Prosper.com for debt consolidation, here are some of the tips I’ve written:

Tips for Using Prosper for Debt Consolidation
My List of Tips for Listing a Loan on Prosper
Resources for Prosper Borrowers
Reader Question: Is Prosper.com Trustworthy?

As with anything, always learn as much as you can. I read about Prosper for months before I finally decided to list a loan. I also talked to others who were already involved with them.

If you have any questions about Prosper.com and my experience, feel free to ask in the comments or contact me.

Posted by Tricia on October 29, 2007 at 10:36 PM in Prosper Borrowing | 31 Comments »
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The Get Real Girls and Keeping Up With the Joneses

First of all, if you are stopping by here from the Get Real Girls radio show out of Minneapolis…Welcome! I was humbled when they asked me if I wanted to be on their show this week because they had me on back in April as well.

This week, we discussed keeping up with the Joneses. As I mentioned on the show, I have a weak spot when it comes to family visiting. We live quite many miles away from our family and we get a visit from them about once a year. Before we started on our debt reduction journey, as soon as I heard that someone was visiting I hit the stores.

We got new clothes, new sheets, new decorations, new doormats, etc. It ended up being a huge shopping spree that was financed with our credit cards!

I know why I did it. I wanted it to look like we were doing well. In fact, though, we weren’t doing well at all. I was trying to keep up with the Joneses – that imaginary family that lives the “good life.”

We had perfectly fine clothes in our closet. Our sheets were fine too, although they don’t all match. The decorations in our house were plentiful enough and we didn’t need a fancy doormat. The spending that I did was just putting us more into debt and we ended up with a lot of stuff.

I have learned a lot since those days. A book that helped me greatly was Debt is Slavery. That book led us to having three garage sales this summer and I am still finding things to get rid of. We clearly did not need to purchase all of those things and we clearly didn’t need to go into debt for it. I am so much happier now that the clutter is gone and I have a better understanding of what I value in my life. It’s not about impressing others…it’s about my family and making sure we are financially secure.

If you’d like to know more about me, I just updated my about me page. You can also keep updated with what is going on by stopping by or you can subscribe to receive automatic updates.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks to the Get Real Girls for having me on!

Posted by Tricia on October 27, 2007 at 12:47 PM in Spending Money | 5 Comments »
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Teaching Kids About Money

My son is only five years old right now (soon to be six, though!). He doesn’t really understand many things about money, but I’ve still been trying to do a few things here and there to help him grow up to be responsible with money. We are going to give it our best shot to give him good money management skills.

Thanks to another blogger holding a contest, I was able to get a Money Savvy Pig for my son for free. This special piggy bank has four slots where kids can put their money: Spend, Save, Invest & Donate. It has been fascinating to watch my son divide up his money. I thought he would put everything into the spend slot, but he has put money into all of them. He’s a little confused as to what it means to donate (he keeps trying to give Mom and Dad the money in the Donate slot LOL), but hopefully with the Christmas season soon upon us, he’ll understand it a little bit better. We’ll give him choices as how he can donate his money.

I’m also planning on giving him a special extra bonus when he loses his first tooth. Along with a gold dollar (if I can get a hold of some), he will get a $25 savings bond from the tooth fairy. When he’s older, he can see how much money that savings bond grew into.

Probably the hardest part (but also the best part) is to teach him about spending money wisely. He often sees toys on TV or in the store and says, “I want that!” Times like those, I try to point out similar items he may already have at home. If it’s construction related, that is pretty easy to do. Other times I may try to show him similar items that are more affordable. Another thing that I do is to point out things I would like, but I do not buy them. I try to show him by example that sometimes there are things Mommy and Daddy want as well, but we do not buy them. I also now talk through my thought process when comparing what items to buy so he can listen in and be an active participant.

This older article from Forbes agrees about the role model part:

“As a parent, the best way to teach a child about finances is to be a role model,” says Edward Powell, chief consumer officer at LendingTree.com in Charlotte, N.C. “You should show restraint with money. Your child should see you budget, comparison-shop and make regular contributions to a savings account. It’s not enough to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk.”

[Via Forbes] (thanks Amy for the link!)

There is a balance, though. While you want to make sure your children understand spending limits and budgeting, I don’t think you should let them in on your specific financial situation. For my son, he has no idea right now about our debt situation and he likely won’t know about it for some time. He still has the right to be a kid and not be burdened by our financial problems.

For those of you with children, is there anything special you are doing to try to teach your children about money?

That reminds me, it’s almost time to do a little personal finance interview with my son again (we did one when he was four and did another one when he was five). I love hearing his answers

Posted by Tricia on October 27, 2007 at 9:59 AM in Kids & Money | 11 Comments »
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Fun at the Carnivals This Week

This week has been a busy one for me. My time spent after work has been used searching the internet for jobs for my husband. He’s been working on creating a killer portfolio of his work as well as doing many projects around the house. Now that we are open to moving, we have to get done some of the repairs to the house we have been putting off. We won’t do all of them (because we don’t have money to do all of them), but we are choosing the ones that have the greatest impact on being able to sell the house. There are so many houses for sale in Michigan, and in the relatively low populated where I live, there are almost 500 homes listed on the local MLS. It’s a tough market.

I’ve also been working to catch up on all of my emails. There are a few of you still waiting for a reply, and I’ve been going through them the past few days. My goal is to clear out my inbox by the end of the day today. What that also means is that I will be writing quite a few articles today pointing to some articles of interest that readers have sent me.

Since I’ve been pretty occupied, I haven’t had much time to cruise the blog-o-sphere. So this week I will let you know about two carnivals. There is plenty of reading there if you are interested:

The Carnival of Debt Reduction is over at The Amatureist Financial Journey this week. I submitted What Happens When the Tooth Fairy is in Debt.

The Carnival of Personal Finance is at Dough Roller. I submitted Five Words That Sum Up Our Debt Payoff Success.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Posted by Tricia on October 27, 2007 at 9:08 AM in Blogging Buddies | Comment First »
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Emergency Fund Update = $1,500

I really didn’t expect us to reach our next emergency fund goal so soon. I checked and double checked my numbers and there was no reason why I couldn’t contribute to our savings account to bring it up to $1,500. So I went ahead and did it tonight.

Two things really helped to make that happen. We finally sold the old truck in our garage and my husband also got payment for a project he’s been working on (separate from his temp job). The rest we were able to contribute from regular earnings. The way things are looking, we’ll also have some more extra money before the end of the month.

Now it’s time to decide what to do with it. We could put more to savings or put some towards our debt to reach that wonderful halfway mark for paying off our credit card debt ($18,807).

It’s weird, because as much as I love paying off our debt, I also love having money in our savings account. I’ve become addicted to stashing money away.

I almost thought about flipping a coin, but instead I will take the extra money that we will have and split it in half. Half will go towards our debt and half will go towards our savings. With doing it that way, I feel like it’s a win-win for both goals.

Posted by Tricia on October 25, 2007 at 11:06 PM in Saving Money | 22 Comments »
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