I need your help

When I started this blog, it was to help me get my mind around my money. We didn't have much, and I had to work hard to make the numbers work, and I had so much to learn.

Then at some point, I didn't have so much to learn anymore, and so I got bored. I felt like I was repeating myself, like it had all been said, like anything I wrote on here was just so obvious.

But now I'm realizing it's only obvious to me.

In the past few days I've had a few really dear friends tell me that some money advice I gave them - which after all these years seems intuitive to me - was life changing. And I can't think of anything more gratifying. So I would like to start writing here again, and to use this blog as a vehicle for sharing what I've learned and what I know, for helping other people to get their money under control. And to be perfectly honest, I could use it too, to get my fired up again and make some real progress on our money goals.

But I need your help. Because I don't know what to write. So here's what I need from you:

• Questions - what do you need to know about money? We can have an "Ask story's money" feature, or a longer series on specific issue.
  
• Challenge ideas - want to do a challenge with me? Like a grocery challenge, or an extra income challenge, or a savings challenge?
  
• Guest posts - Got a financial success, or even a problem, you want to write about? Send it over.
  
• Any other ideas for what to write about?
  

Let's get some pep back in this blog and talk about our money.

When frugality stops being flashy

Five years ago, I had just gotten engaged, quit my job, and moved halfway across the country to be near my honey. It was the first time I had really had any major life change so dramatic (but not seemingly, the last time), and I was riding quite the natural high. At the same time, I suddenly had a ton of time and not a ton of money. Although I had some money coming in, I was majorly committed to finding ways to make my savings stretch and last.

So I started doing research. I went online and read every frugal blog I could find. I read Dollar Stretcher every week. I checked out The Tightwad Gazette from the library and read it cover to cover. I baked my own bread and made my own ketchup and salad dressing. I unplugged my chargers and turned off my water heater during the day. I was on a mission and it was all so very exciting.

But here I am now, all these years later, trying to remember where I found that love. Frugal people are still awesome and I love reading inspirational writing on frugality, but when I read tips I feel like "Yeah, yeah, been there, done that." I have had to discard things that don't work for us (hubby doesn't like sandwiches on homemade bread), and have become very routine about the things that do work for us. In a lot of ways, I have already achieved the simple quiet life that was my goal: I can afford to stay home for a while, and we really only spend money on things that matter to us.

But I want that thrill back.

It's not that I'm going to fall off the wagon and stop being frugal just because it's boring. I know what my efforts have accomplished, and in all honesty most frugal things I do are just easier than their counterparts. It's just that when I was filled with glee over each new frugal discovery it was easier to keep making more discoveries, to keep learning and connecting. I wanted to tell the world about what I was doing, to teach and to help other people; now it just seems so obvious to me that I don't bother.

But when I think about some of my younger friends who are just getting married, I realize that they don't know what I know, that for them these things are still hard and different - and perhaps a little bit exciting. So perhaps the best way to regain the frugal love is to teach it, to see other people's joy as their lives get simpler and better. Because I think that would be quite the thrill for me.

For more frugal inspiration, check out Frugal Friday at Life as Mom.

A Gazillion, or how not to do financial planning

Have you seen the commercial where the two men are carrying around their "numbers" - i.e., the amount of money they need to retire? One has a large, but somewhat reasonable number and the other has the words "A Gazillion." The one with the number asks the other "How do you plan for something like that?" and the response is "I just keep throwing money at it and hope something good happens."

Oh my gosh, I can't tell you how much that resonated with my husband and me.

For a long time, our solution to most of our financial goals, whether we were planning for emergencies, retirement, or the down payment on our house, was to just to throw money at them and see what happened. We had no stopping point, no end goal, and no plan for what to do when we finished - if we even knew we had finished. I had a lump sum of money in a savings account that was to furnish all of our goals (except retirement).

Recently we sat down with a calculator, some paper, and our balance sheets and tried to reconcile all of this. Here's what we came up with.

1. Based on our Good Faith Estimate from our lender, we got a number for how much we would need for a down payment and closing costs, and put that in a separate savings account not to be touched for anything.

2. We made a list of what we need to pay for in the next few months - some basic baby furniture, moving expenses, a lawn mower, etc. - and a price point associated with each of them. I made a subaccount in my savings account for expenses and moved enough money to cover all of these immediate needs. (If we didn't have enough saved to cover them immediately, we would have figured out how long we had until we needed them and allocated a monthly savings amount until we had the money saved to buy it.)

3. We looked at our spending for the past 6 months and figured out what our recurring expenses were - medical bills, car insurance, car maintenance - that came up less than once a month. When a huge payment came up, it was killing our budget for that individual month. By dividing this by how often they occurred, we calculated how much we needed to set aside each month. We made a separate subaccount for each of them and set up a monthly autodraft from our checking account so that we would always have the money available when things came up.

4. We looked at what we had left - both in our savings and in our monthly cash flow and made some decisions. We agreed to put enough in hubby's 401(k) to max out the match, and to put enough into our emergency fund to cover 3 months worth of our expenses. We worked our budget to be sure we could get to that goal fairly quickly, and set up monthly auto transfers to make it brainless. We have some student loan debt we could be paying on instead, but we decided for right now with all the changes and impending expenses that the security was more important to us than the numeric advantage we'd gain. However, now that we have a goal for our savings, we will know when we have achieved it and can then reroute that portion of the budget towards debt reduction.

I'm so much more happy now that we have a clear plan, and having everything on autopilot gives me so much freedom. Maybe we don't have a gazillion just yet, but it turns out that's not what we needed.

Uncertainty and money

It's been a while since I've moved into a stage of my life categorized so completely by uncertainty. I remember a time when I reveled in it, when quitting my job and moving across the country felt like an adventure. I know that I had some money anxiety then, but it seemed to be par for the course, and so I just accepted it.

I don't feel that way now. My husband is graduating and we're moving to a new state (our third!). In a lot of ways that is very good for our financial state and our cash flow, and really I am so over this grad student's wife thing. On the other hand, there's a lot of uncertainty associated with it.

We're not sure exactly when we're moving. Since I already quit my job, this might be a bit of a problem. We've never gotten by on just hubby's stipend before, and even though it will be higher as a post-doc, it might get tighter than it's been in a long time.

We're not sure exactly where to move to. The city where we will be living is a rather large one, with a number of different neighborhoods, and as much as we're trying to do apartment research online, it's hard to tell what the right place to be looking is until we can actually get up there (and again, we don't know exactly when that will happen).

I don't know exactly what I'm going to do. I've been a teacher for so long, and we'll be getting up there after the school year starts, so I don't know whether to plan to just substitute, look for another job, or just stay home and "keep house."

We dont' know how much money we'll net. Hubby's salary is a whole new thing for us, and will put us in a tax bracket we've never dreamed of, so it's hard to tell how much of it we'll actually see.

We don't know how much things will cost. It seems likely that the cost of living will be higher, so it's hard to make budgets.


I know this is a good thing in my life, but I just feel so completely unsure of anything right now. I don't know where to begin.

Carnival is up!

The Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Greener Pastures. I'll post a wrap up later, but right now just go check it out!

Carnival of Personal Finance 151 is up!

Check out this week's Carnival of Personal Finance at Alpha Consumer.

I haven't had a chance to read much, but I will post a summary of my favorite articles some time in the next few days.

Off the personal finance wagon: a confession

I have a confession to make: I've fallen off of the personal finance wagon.

When I look at my posts from last summer, I see a young woman who had financial goals and plans, who had a system for tracking expenses, who made extra debt payments. I see someone in control of her finances.

How is it that now, with more money to my name, I'm so much less in control?

Over the past couple of months

• I haven't made a single extra debt repayment. My stated goal when I got started was to pay down my debt, and somehow that has just gotten completely lost in the course of my life.



• I haven't made a budget. This is probably part of the reason I haven't seen the money that should have gone to debt reduction. All the money comes in, all the money goes out. Any money I "save" with grocery coupons or by cutting my electric bill just seems to disappear into the cash flow.



• I haven't tracked my expenses. Not only haven't I budgeted for my monthly expenses, I really couldn't even tell you what they are. Have I cut my electric bill? I have no metric for comparison.

I'm sure there are many other ways in which I've lost control of my monthly finances, but I'm not even organized enough to know what they are. And yet . . . and yet. . . in a saner, more financially literate frame of mind, I set up a few idiot-proof systems for myself, so that despite all this, I'm better off than I was a year ago. I started investing in my 403(b) to the match, I set up and autodraft to a high interest savings account (for my summer emergency fund) and another autodraft to a mutual fund. I switched my student loan repayment plan from extended to standard. My money is doing what it needs to do.

But I'm not. I feel like I'm completely out of control when it comes to my finances. It's not a lack of money so much as a lack of a system. I want to get back to where I was last year, when I could discourse intelligently on interest rates, but I just feel so overwhelmed and behind that I don't know where to begin.

Help please?

The End of My Frugal Rope

(Originally posted at my now defunct writing up blog on 6/24/06. Apparently these things come in cycles)

Lately I feel like I'm at the end of my frugal rope. (A frugal rope, as I envision it, would probably be made of a series of plastic grocery bags, twisted up and braided together. But I digress.) When I first started being frugal and recognizing places that I could cut back, save money, and live in a more simple and deliberate way, it was very gratifying. I could see the impact of my big changes, could quantify the money savings, could feel the difference as the space opened up in my life.

The longer I live this lifestyle, though, and the more like habit these actions become, the less visible the impact. There are no more big changes to make, no more egregious factors in my life, and that means that there are far fewer victories to be made. I read blogs and message boards where people write "I saved $20 this week by not buying lattes!" For me, this is not a savings. I never buy lattes. I don't get to count that.

I'm afraid that I'm at the point when most people get frustrated and give up. My expenses have leveled off and there is no more big excitement or glamour involved in reducing bills. The changes I have yet to make are much smaller, and are the kinds of things that in the past I have considered trivial, but they're the only changes I have left to make.

It's not so much that I need to cut my lifestyle more because we still don't make enough money to cover out bills; I want to cut deeper to find more money to put towards loans. Most of all, though, I want that excitement back of finding something to cut. Without that sense of victory and success, it's hard to continue to live this way forever.

In order to stay motivated, I'm trying to come up with little games for myself. Every day, I try to stretch one more day before having to run the dishwasher. I'm experimenting to see how I can reduce dryer time by hanging heavier items, running the washer's spin cycle an extra time, and keeping the machine free of lint. (I know I'd do even better by hanging all of my clothes, but I'm still trying to find a productive way to do that in this tiny apartment.) I'm trying to turn my water heater off during the day, to see if that reduces my energy bills at all.

Right now, any victory would be enough to keep me at it.

What your budget says about your values

I think it's very true that we put our money where our hearts are, and that what we choose to spend money on says a lot about us. As I made my August budget, I really tried to think about what my spending says about me, and whether my spending is in line with my values and priorities. So, without further ado, my budget items from greatest to least (I've omitted actual numbers).

1. Rent - I'm okay with this one. Shelter is one of the four essential necessities, and while our apartment certainly goes beyond a basic roof over our heads, I'm okay with it being the top line item in our budget. It would be possible for us to cut this a little by moving to a less nice place, but there are a variety of reasons (proximity, amenities, etc) that we chose this in the first place, and moving to a new place would bring us much less happiness. While I understand that rent is not an investment in any equity, it's the right decision for us now, so again, here my budget and values are okay.

2. Car loan - Ouch. Do I really value my car this much? No, not really, and I certainly don't value car car debt. I'm pretty sure it was a mistake to buy it, but I'm still not sure it's a good idea to sell it now. I'll have it paid off in about 10 months, and then I'll hopefully drive it for another 6-7 years or until the wheels fall off (and use the payment toward retirement). This is one that I think for now I'm just going to suck up and deal with, although it is a break between my budget and my values.

3. Groceries - Yeah, I'm okay with this. We really love food. I could probably cut this back a bit more, but in some ways I feel that good quality food is not the place to skimp.

4. Student loans - Well we definitely value education, and the increased income that will (hopefully) eventually come from it, but again we don't value debt which is why I'm glad we're not taking out any more. I would love to see these gone, and I'm going to throw my might behind getting out of student loan debt in the next year.

5. Gasoline - This is another place where my budget definitely does not fit with my values, but I'm not sure what else to do about it. I already drive an efficient car, keep it maintained and relatively empty, combine errands, and walk whenever viable, but the gas budget keeps creeping up. Frustrating.

6. Restaurants - I must admit, eating out really does make me very happy, but I don't like that this item is so high in my budget. I wonder if keeping more high quality tempting food in the house would make eating out less appealing.

7. Investing - I'm actually really proud of the money we've put aside for investing every month. I feel like it's going to do something very important for our future and our family's future.

8. Cell phones/cable/internet - These are all things that I regularly use and that I feel I get sufficient value from for what I pay for them.

What's missing:

Charitable giving - This is something that used to be very important to me, and I wonder whether my money obsession got the better of me let this get away from me. I definitely want to start reworking my budgets to allow for more of this.

So, that's what my budget says about my values. What does your budget say about yours?

Exercise and personal finance

When you are short on money and time, one of the first things that tends to go is taking care of yourself. You drop your gym membership, you take on an extra job, you spend all of your extra time searching and scrounging for money. You eat processed food out of a bag on your way from one job to another. You sleep less, relax less, and stress more.

This puts you in a very precarious position as far as your finances are concerned.
When you feel deprived, drained, and miserable, you are more likely to burn out or to make poor choices that cause you to mess up your personal finances and lose out on more money in the end. One solution to many of these problems is to find a way to incorporate exercise into your routine. Now, that doesn’t mean you need to join a gym, hire a personal trainer, or spend hours and hours of your day running. A simple ten minute routine consisting of a walk, some pushups or some stretching will accomplish many of these goals, and you will hardly miss that amount of time.

1. Exercise relieves stress.

You may prefer to “relax” by watching TV, stuffing your face, or surfing the web during the few free minutes you can find in your day, but the truth is in the long run these activities just make you more stressed. Exercise actively relieves stress, thus making you much less likely to burn out or engage in “retail therapy.” Bonus: you can’t call the home shopping network when you’re running on a treadmill.

2. Exercise gives you more energy.

At first, it may seem to you like exercise is just making you more tired, but in the long run, you will find that exercise gives you more energy, thus making you more able and willing to take on extra hours at work or do some freelancing at night. It also makes your sleep more restful, so you will feel good after fewer hours of sleep, thus saving you even more time.

3. Exercise boosts your self-confidence.

Confidence is extremely important in personal finance, particularly if you are considering starting your own business, but even if you are only managing your own money and household. You will not feel as deprived or helpless, thus you will be more able to make good choices about your money.

4. Exercise makes you eat less junk.

When you have committed to an exercise plan, you will be much less willing to put bad food into your body, so you will be less likely to eat at fast food places or to buy expensive junkfood. This not only makes you healthier, it saves you money as whole natural foods tend to cost you less money in the short and long term.

5. Exercise makes you healthier.

Between the short term cost of lost wages, and the long term cost of increased health care expenses, your health is your most important investment. Exercise will keep you healthier, thus saving and probably making you more money over the course of your life than just about anything else you can do.