Archive results for “April 2009f 2009”

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Ideas on How to Make Extra Money

I have been doing some “computer cleaning” and I came across an article that I saved to share on here but never did. It’s from January, but the ideas are still valid:

Making Extra Money Without Getting a Second Job

I like their idea about Etsy. I didn’t know too much about the site. If you are crafty, it’s a place where you can sell your crafts. Back in the day, I used to paint. My dad would sell my creations at a local farmer’s market and I’d make a few bucks from it. Of course, once I had a taste of the money I could earn, I turned my painting into an assembly line so I could mass paint to produce more sellable items LOL. I wouldn’t mind getting back into it when I have time. Overall, it was relaxing to do and thanks to Etsy maybe I could sell them online.

If you read the article, make sure you read the comments too! There are some spammy comments, but some readers gave some great suggestions as well.

NOTE: The Yahoo site was acting a little funny for me and not finding the page. I had to refresh to get it to come up.

Posted by Tricia on April 8, 2009 at 10:23 PM in Making Money | 9 Comments »
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Q&A Opportunity With Junior Achievement

I was contacted not too long ago by Junior Achievement. They were wondering if I would like to do an interview with them on here. I’ve done interviews in the past, but I never felt like I asked the right questions. So I wrote them back asking if I could ask you for your questions to have them answer (like what I did with the authors of “On My Own Two Feet). They are happy to do a Q&A with you!

First of all, I should let you know more about Junior Achievement. From their site:

JA Worldwide is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs.

I realize now, more than ever, how important it is for children to learn life skills related to money. I try to fit in some personal finance tidbits when I can with our son and we are trying to be good financial role models. Sometimes it’s tough. With the economy the way it is right now, kids are feeling some of the stress.

Junior Achievement sent me some facts to share:

14 percent of U.S. teens 15-17 years-old report the need to contribute financially to the family budget.

One-third of all teens report less job availability.

53 percent of teens surveyed say they’re choosing activities that cost less money.

More than 50 percent say they talk about the economy with their friends.

18 percent of 15 -17 year olds polled said they have lost a job due the economy.

Nearly three-in-ten teens (29 percent) said that the economy is causing them anxiety.

More than three-quarters (77 percent) of the teens polled say that their parents are talking about the economy more than they used to.

Nearly half (49 percent) said their parents had discussed family finances with them as a result of the economy.

15 percent of teens said they have reduced extracurricular activities as a result of the economy.

With that, I’d like to open up the floor to you for asking Junior Achievement any of your “kids & money” questions. Just leave your question as a comment below. I’ll keep the comments open until Tuesday (04-07-09) at 11:59pm and then I will send them over for them to answer. Depending on the response – they might not be able to answer them all.

Posted by Tricia on April 6, 2009 at 7:08 AM in Kids & Money | 5 Comments »
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A Decision Has Been Made

I’d like to thank everyone for alerting me to the new advice that Suze Orman has when it comes to building up your savings or paying off credit card debt. She used to tell everyone to pay off their credit card debt. Now she’s saying to save…save…save.

Her advice makes perfect sense. Credit cards companies have been unpredictable lately with closing accounts or reducing credit limits. If you pay off your balance, you may not have a credit card to use in the event of an emergency. I have a lot of respect for Suze for changing her stance.

I knew back in January that we were going to do our best to meet our credit card payoff goal date of May 2009. I wanted to do it without having to pull from our savings. But after crunching the numbers we can come up with $1,500 for sure this month.

Since we are so close, we are going to pay as much as we can towards our credit card debt and pay off the rest with our savings. I’m going to see how many tricks we can pull out of our hat (extra hours, selling stuff, etc.) to keep our savings as intact as possible. But as of April 30th, we want to be credit card debt-free and will pull from our savings as needed.

Let me just say that I do not recommend that you pull from savings to pay credit card debt unless you really think through everything. If it wasn’t for our business, we would more than likely have followed Suze’s new advice. As I previously mentioned, once our credit card debt is paid off I was going to retire from writing on this blog and a new blogger will begin with their debt story. The time that is used for this blog is really needed for our business to expand.

Our story is far from being over and I know some of you mentioned how nice it would be if I still gave updates somewhere. Well, you can change retiring from this blog to “semi-retiring.” I will not be posting daily, but I can post when the mood strikes when there is an interesting update. The posts will not be as detailed as before, but if our decision to use our savings to pay off the last of our debt bites us in the butt – you’ll hear about it right here.

I sure hope it doesn’t, though. The plan is to replenish the money that we end up “borrowing” the next month. We’ll kick our income into high gear and we’ll put off the home repairs that we need for a little bit longer. It will be all about our savings account for a while.

Nothing in life is ever guaranteed. You can budget until you turn blue in the face but life can never be completely planned. Taking everything into consideration, we think this is the best choice for us.

Posted by Tricia on April 5, 2009 at 11:18 PM in General Debt | 12 Comments »
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Watch Out for Recorded Calls

Jen sent me a link to an article that is a must share!

Several times in the past month I’ve received a recorded call from “Heather” with “Card Services” offering to lower the interest rates on all of my credit cards to 6.9 percent. She then instructs me to “press 1″ to be transferred to a live agent.

[Via Yahoo]

It turns out that these “Heather” calls are claiming that they can lower your interest rates by negotiating with your creditors. In actuality, you’ll receive a debt pay down book. They are asking for a lot of money for information you can get for free by checking out a personal finance book from the library.

I get a lot of those recorded calls. Most are for an auto warranty but I have received a few of these calls that claim that they can reduce your interest rates. I don’t recall if the woman in the recording was Heather or not – but it sounds very familiar to the call in the article.

My rule of thumb is to not do anything when someone I don’t know calls me – even if it is someone wanting to do a survey. I tell them that I never do anything over the phone and to please not take it personally. 98% of the time they hang up on me without even saying good bye so I’ve been following that rule for quite a few years.

Thanks Jen for sharing this article with us!

Posted by Tricia on April 3, 2009 at 8:54 PM in General Personal Finance | 7 Comments »
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The Reasoning Behind Holding Onto Our Savings

Marg asked a great question in the comments:

I have a friend who is in a similar situation (has enough savings to pay off credit card debt but opts not to based on fear of emergency). Can you explain the reasoning to me? … If an emergency arises, why couldn’t you use a credit card?

For our situation, the mathematical thing to do is to leave our savings alone. Our debt is at 0% and will be for a little while yet. So we are earning money on our savings (although the average interest rate is well below 2% right now). If we were paying interest on our credit card balance, we probably would have used our savings to pay off the last of it. We’ve paid enough in finance charges through the years and I don’t want to pay a penny more if it can be avoided.

There are emotional reasons as well. I like having money in our savings account that is ours…all ours. We use it and we don’t owe anything to use it. There is something I find very empowering about that. The other day I started thinking about how much we should aim to save up for a good emergency fund. $10,000 popped in my mind and I realized how many emergencies that could cover. That would be an awesome safety-net.

Then there is another emotional reason. I have concerns about the transition phase we will have to go through once our credit card debt is paid off. We’ll still have student loans and a mortgage, but we are going to spend some money on things we have been putting off while in debt reduction mode. There is always the concern that our old habits could resurface. Going into this transition, I think I would rather have some money in the bank in case we stumble a little bit.

Back when we started our debt reduction journey, I was anti-emergency fund. If we had an emergency, we would use our credit cards. Gradually we started up a little account then added more and more to it. It became a “financial blankie” of sorts. The economy may be going a little crazy but we have some cash in the bank. It’s comforting.

I did take a look at our finances today. This weekend my husband and I will discuss and decide what we would like to do. We will be able to pay a chunk of our debt off, but we will have to pull some money from our savings to finish off the rest. We’ll take a look at the pros and cons to figure out what is the best route for our family.

Posted by Tricia on April 3, 2009 at 12:27 AM in General Debt | 12 Comments »
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No April Fools Jokes on Me

The time stamp on this post is correct. I am a bit of a night owl tonight. I have been for the past few nights working to meet a deadline. My eyes are extremely tired and my cat is looking at me like, “Why aren’t you going to bed??” Sigh – my body is getting too old for this

My April Fool’s day was pretty uneventful. No one played any jokes on me. My son and I almost got my husband. We have two locks on our door and we were going to alternate locking them so my husband would unlock one and then we’d lock the other. He’d unlock the other and then we’d lock the first one. It was the perfect prank – if he didn’t hear us on the other side of the door. We did our best to hold in the laughter but we couldn’t do it. It feels good to laugh like that since sometimes as an adult things are so serious.

Speaking of a serious subject, I haven’t touched our finances in a few days. I had to pull some money out of our savings account for some upcoming medical costs that are not covered by our insurance. I’m not exactly sure how much it will cost, but I took out $400 to be safe. Our last debt payment really wiped out the cash we had available. At this point, I’m not sure if we will replenish the savings account before our credit card debt is paid off. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m starting to feel the pressure, though. That May 2009 goal date for credit card debt-payoff is right around the corner. Part of me is saying, “Go ahead – use the savings to pay it off.” The other part of me is saying, “Don’t do it – what if an emergency comes up?”

I think tomorrow will be dedicated to taking a close look at our finances to get my bearings.

Posted by Tricia on April 2, 2009 at 2:13 AM in Life Experiences | 9 Comments »
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What’s That Saying Again?

I seem to remember a saying about kids eating you out of house and home. I think it could be the saying that I am looking for. My son’s appetite has been growing, and growing and growing. I am having a hard time adjusting to it when it comes to meal preparation.

On a related note, I’m sure the extra cost will start to surface in our grocery spending. We’ve also started buying some name brand items due to the nutritional content. We also buy some organic items since sometimes they are less processed or they have less sugar or salt (two of the things we have to control in our household). I know we are eating a lot healthier. I couldn’t tell you the last time we had Hamburger Helper…which we used to have all the time when we could get it for $1/box. *shiver* That stuff is sodium central!

I have heard people say that eating healthier is cheaper and some say that it is more expensive. I am leaning towards the more expensive side. One of these days I would like to break it down – just to see. We do make more things from scratch, but for the things we can’t the “healthier” version is more expensive. Olive oil is a perfect example. We used to always cook with vegetable oil (which is cheaper) until we started reading about the benefits of olive oil. So we cook with that now.

Now that I think about it, we have made a lot of changes the past few years. Our financial health is improving and we are eating healthier. It has taken us a while, but we are finally getting our act together

Posted by Tricia on April 1, 2009 at 12:31 AM in General Personal Finance | 12 Comments »
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My Debt

Original Debt: $38,495.86
Added Debt: $1,781.50
Total Debt: $40,277.36
Paid: $36,084.36
Remaining: $4,193.00
Broken Down
Auto Loan 1: $0.00
Credit Card: $0.00
Student Loan: $4,193.00
Auto Loan 2: $0.00
Vet Loan: $0.00

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