Prime Time Money

#4 Contribute to your Employer’s 401(k) and Get That Match!

#5 Put Your Savings in a High-Interest Savings Account

Photo: by heymynameispaul

Posted in 10 Things | 2 Comments »

10 Things That Bring Success in Personal Finance #10 Part 1: Take Ownership

Thursday, May 15th, 2008 |

I’m going to wrap up the “10 Things” series with a post (in two parts) that should hopefully bring it all together. Most of what I’ve shared already in this series has been one of three things: a specific tool, method, or guideline for having success in personal finance. The ideas I’ll share below and in part 2 (tomorrow) are really more about changes that need to happen within you, not something you need to go do.

I’m not a psychologist, nor am I well versed in the subject. However, please allow me to attempt to articulate the two changes that took place within me, in order for me to begin to have success in my personal finances. Nothing new here…it’s just what worked for me. The first was taking ownership.

Change #1: Taking Ownership

I’ve found that I can create change more easily in my life when I first take ownership for my situation. Somewhere along the way I realized it was me, and only me, who was going to get me headed in the right direction: out of debt, accumulating savings, and into a home of my own.

For you to truly take ownership of your own situation you need to look at your own bad debt, lack of savings and tell yourself that it’s YOU, and only you, who is responsible for moving you back towards a positive situation. Don’t look to others: parents, future spouse, the Government, or even your future self. Relying on one of these to bail you out may work for a while, but you’ll never learn to thrive and grow unless you’re pulling your own weight.

Here are some specifics to help you take ownership:

Stop Relying on Someone Else and Decide to Make a Change

In my college and early post-collegiate days I was relying too much on my “future self” to help me out of my current situation. I was going deeper into debt, telling myself I’ll be able to pay all of this back when I’m making a bigger salary. Foolish.

One day, probably while listening to some Dave Ramsey, I told myself enough is enough. For me, this was just another way of saying “grow up, PT”. It’s time you decided for yourself to make a change. Make today the day you grow up.

Develop Your Own Methods

My bill tracker tool, automated savings, this Blog are all personalized methods for getting me where I want to be. What are your methods? Whether it’s how you pay bills, spend less, or track your goals, come up with your own specific methods for creating success.

I’ve given you a few examples, but in the long-run, the methods that make the most sense to you and that are easiest to you (i.e. “ownership”) have the most chance of success. As long as you are working from a solid framework, your own methods of getting there are fine.

Play to Your Strengths

To own your situation, it helps to start with the areas you’re comfortable with. Work on those areas while you learn more about the others.

If you have a spouse, use a tag team approach. Mrs. PT and I know what our strengths are and we encourage each other in them. She’s great at living the frugal lifestyle (it comes natural to her), while I’m more naturally skilled with setting up and tracking our savings and retirement funds.

If you don’t have a partner yet, seek assistance from a trusted advisor on the areas in which you’re a bit deficient.

—

Are you taking ownership of your finances? Come back tomorrow as I share the second change that I made which has lead to success with my finances.

The Rest of the Series…

#4 Contribute to your Employer’s 401(k) and Get That Match!

#5 Put Your Savings in a High-Interest Savings Account

Photo: by Brian - Progressive Spin

Posted in 10 Things, Organize Your Finances | 1 Comment »

10 Things that Bring Success in Personal Finance: #9 Buy Your Home the Right Way

Monday, February 11th, 2008 |

Our Reasons for Wanting to Buy a Home

Hard to believe, but over the last 10 years I’ve rented at 10 different places. The cheapest rent being $150 at a really old house with two friends (post college); the most expensive being $1,295 at the townhouse my wife and I lived in for a year just after getting married. Most of those moves were justified for some reason. Mainly, I just couldn’t settle down into a career. Also, I wasn’t married nor did I have any other responsibilities tying me down.

Reason #1 for buying a house: I finally settled down. By settling down I mean I got married and found a career that I am content with. This career happens to have many job opportunities in the local market, so even if I grow tired of my company, I can always just hop to the next. These two things provided the stability to my life I needed to buy a home the right way.

Reason #2 was financially driven. Once my wife and I were married we wanted to start building equity in real estate by buying a home. In effect, creating savings from the money we were then paying out in rent. We also wanted our financial portfolio to be diversified. At the time, all we had was cash and retirement savings. Of course we could have just started investing in real estate stocks or mutual funds and been just as diversified…but that leads me to the third reason.

Reason #3 was simply that we wanted to have “our” home. We wanted a home we could call our own, not just another place.

What’s the point? There is a right and wrong time to buy a house. Success comes to those who wait.

How We Found Our Home

Once we decided we wanted to settle down and get our own house, we needed to find it. I’d be lying if I said we did a huge, exhaustive home search with the help of a top notch realtor. We actually determined we loved the neighborhood of townhouse we were currently renting in and decided to buy one of the townhouse being built in the next phase. The neighborhood is close to both of our jobs and the low-maintenance lifestyle if perfect for us right now. After deciding this, however, we did do a few things that gave me comfort we weren’t making a poor decision:

1. A Home We Could Really Afford

Our first move was to think carefully about how much home we could afford. There are plenty of online calculators and formulas out there that will give you a target home price you can reasonably afford based on your income and expenses. While we did use those, we didn’t strictly rely on them. Other factors we considered, which I think are important for deciding what house is affordable:

We wanted to be able to put 20% downto avoid private mortgage insurance and have a decent amount of equity in the home up front.
We wanted a home we could afford using a 30 year fixed rate mortgage.
We wanted to be able to afford the payment based on either of our incomes alone.
We wanted to leave enough money in our monthly budget to travel well and enjoy life outside of our home without the feelings of “working for our mortgage”.

2. Met with a Trusted Realtor

Since this was our first home, we decided we’d feel more comfortable throughout the offer and loan closing process if we had a professional with us. Something I’d recommend to someone who doesn’t already know a Realtor is to go out to Dave Ramsey’s Endorsed Local Providers page and find one. This is what we did and While we didn’t need them for our home search, they really came in handy come offer time and even made the offer for us (which we got!). We would have felt out of our league without them.

3. Did Our Own Research

Another thing we did was do our own research about the neighborhood. I set up a Google Alert to track any news or sales and rentals listings in our neighborhood. After about a month of searches, I had a spreadsheet filled with sale and rental prices of comparable properties in our neighborhood. I was then able to see that the offer we were making was in fact a great deal for us, and we weren’t paying too much. Let me know if you’d like to see this spreadsheet and I’ll forward it to you.

I also did some research on townhouses and their resale value and came to the conclusion that we were making the right choice based on location and association fees. Lastly, it didn’t hurt that we were currently living in one of the townhouses that we would be buying. We knew and felt comfortable with the builder’s product and the warranty service.

I ended up reading several books on the home buying process, but probably got the most use from the book Home Buying for Dummies (affiliate link).

How We Picked the Right Mortgage

This was pretty easy for us, as we feel strongly about the use of fixed rate 80% loans over other products. We’ve seen recently the dangers of going with other products. Our main concern was deciding between a 15 and 30 year loan term. We ended up going with a 30 year loan and hope to make extra payments to get rid of the debt quicker. Finally, we needed to decide on a lender. I detailed how we selected a lender in a December 2007 post. Please check that out.

Final Thoughts

Well, that’s really all I have for now on the topic. You learn a lot from buying your first home and most of it, for me, was an enjoyable experience. While it can be scary at times, you can ease your fears by knowing your stuff and staying within the limits I’ve mentioned above. When all is said and done, please make sure the time is right for you to buy, you buy the house you can afford, and you select an appropriate mortgage product.

Have any home buying tips? Leave them in the comments below.

The Rest of the Series…

#4 Contribute to your Employer’s 401(k) and Get That Match!

#5 Put Your Savings in a High-Interest Savings Account

Photos: by mcmorr and omarrun

Posted in 10 Things, Real Estate | 3 Comments »

10 Things that Bring Success in Personal Finance: #8 Live a Frugal Life

Monday, January 14th, 2008 |

I’m doing a series of post that will inform you of the 10 things that we’ve done that I believe has brought success with our personal finances. Most are simple things that anyone could quickly implement.

Live a Frugal Life

So far I’ve listed seven things. In my opinion, even if we did well with numbers 1-7, we’d still fall short if we didn’t live a frugal life. Why? Because we can always find a way to spend the money we earn or save. Unless we made a lifestyle change we are ultimately going to miss the mark. Can you say Michael Jackson? The guy owns the Beatles’ collection and still has financial trouble.

What is Living Frugal?

I define living frugal as simply making intentional choices with your spending, everyday. Notice I don’t say making cheap choices. Frugality has nothing to do with being cheap. See what cheap is down below. All you need to do to be frugal is to be intentional. What do I mean by intentional? I mean that a majority of your choices to spend should be planned and with your financial goals in mind. Remember back in #6 I said to set a net worth goal and how I said in #5 that you could set up a savings account to save for big items (like a house or a great vacation)? Well, it’s these goals that you should have in mind when you are spending. Are the choices you are making harming your chances of meeting those goals?

Frugality Doesn’t Come Natural

It didn’t for me, at least. You need to educate yourself on how to live frugal. Everyday we are bombarded with a thousand different messages of what we should do with our money. It’s up to us to learn to block and filter those messages so that we achieve the desired result either short-term or long.

How I Learned to be Frugal

For me, I think I learned to be frugal in phases over the last few years. It started with me learning what truly satisfies me (companionship, experiences, achievements) and what I value (good health, family, security). Once I equated my satisfaction and values with my spending being frugal became a huge desire. As time went on, I got better at making the choices needed to live that lifestyle.

Specific Ways that We are Frugal Now

Look for sales, discounts, coupons on items we intend to buy.
We don’t shop for entertainment purposes.
Cook at home often.
Find projects we can do ourselves vs. buy.
We don’t buy expensive, trendy clothes. We buy expensive classic looks.
Find ways to experience entertainment at a reduced cost. $1 second-run movie theaters.
Find 2 for 1 specials or split meals at large portion restaurants.

All the while, we try and evaluate purchases based on the need for high or low quality? Take a recent example: We just bought a new home and needed a dining table. This is our first home and table. We plan on keeping this particular dining table for as long as we can. We talk about having our grand-kids sit at this table. Is this the time to buy low quality? No. It’s best to spend the extra money to get a solid, classic piece of furniture that we’ll never have to replace. Now as for the center piece we will put on this table, we decided to buy lower quality at a discount store. Why? Because the center piece will go out of style and we will want to change it more often. Therefore, we don’t need to put our retirement at risk just to have an expensive center piece that we will want to replace in two years.

These are just a few of the ways you can live a frugal life. There are many more examples out there. I think it’s important that you discover the ways that work for you. Everyone has their own frugality meter, so to speak.

Cheap vs. Frugal

This is a highly debated topic, but I like to keep this pretty simple. I ask myself two questions:

Is it worth the extra time/money to make the less expensive choice? In other words, if getting the less expensive item will require me to drive all the way across town and spend more in gas and time value then it probably isn’t the frugal choice. It’s just being cheap.
Is the less expensive item such poor quality that it will not render any value and possibly reduce my happiness? If so, skip it. You’re just being cheap.

Benefits of a Frugal Life

Satisfaction of knowing you are achieving your goals
Getting the best value
Enjoying and honoring the things you own

So there you have it. That’s an in-depth look at frugality and how living the frugal lifestyle can help you have success. Hopefully you’ve gained something by reading about our experience with this topic.

#4 Contribute to your Employer’s 401(k) and Get That Match!

#5 Put Your Savings in a High-Interest Savings Account

Posted in 10 Things, Frugality | 7 Comments »

10 Things That Bring Success in Personal Finance - #7 Automatic Savings and Bill Payment

Saturday, January 5th, 2008 |

Automatic Savings

Let’s first look at automating your savings. What exactly do I mean by this? For me it’s meant setting up a recurring automatic withdrawal from my personal checking account to a savings account or, more recently and even better, automatically sending a portion of your paycheck direct deposit into a savings account. Here’s a snapshot of my current setup and how I’m doing that:

Bank Account Setup

Notice 50% of paycheck #1 going straight into our savings account. All I had to do to get this setup properly was to: 1) open an account with ING DIRECT (If you want to know more about opening an account with ING DIRECT, go here or here), and 2) tell my HR department at work to start sending a portion of my paycheck to this newly opened account. Most HR departments will have a standard form you can fill out to make this happen. However, if they don’t, or you just want an easier way to do it, ING DIRECT has a direct deposit form you can use. Very handy.

Why would you want to go through the trouble to do this? The system doesn’t require you to be disciplined. All it requires is a one-time setup and then you can forget about it. It’s just works on it’s on. Or, to be more accurate, your employer and the banks work on their own to help manage your money. For more on automating your savings and different techniques I recommend David Bach’s Automatic Millionaire.

Automatic Bill Payment

Now let’s look at automated bill payment. This is definitely a topic that I am still learning about as technology progresses, and the security of web based transactions improve. So, while I’m not an expert here, I’ll quickly share with you my methods. As you can see in the diagram above, I have two types of expenses: fixed and variable. By nature, the fixed expense payment are all that I can automate. While I call them fixed for purposes of the diagram, what they really are are recurring bills. This includes mortgage, insurance, utilities, and loan payments. Basically any type of payment that I am going to be paying every month. In a side note, while it would be nice to have no recurring payments, I’m not to that point yet, so I have to deal with the many that I do have.

So, I’ve got all these recurring payments. What do I do with them? Instead of sitting down every month to write each one of these payees a check, I automate it. I do this by providing each payee (that will allow it) my banking information so that they can withdraw the proper amount from my bank account each month. Most companies will allow this now. I still can’t get away with it for my water and energy bill, but all the others will allow it, and welcome it. This is usually setup fairly easily online or by calling their customer service line. That’s it. Easy right? Let’s look a some of the pros and cons of doing this:

Pros of Automating Your Bills

1. No more late fees. Turning the reins over to the bill company means never being responsible for the timing of the payment.

2. Less time wasted and hassle. Let’s face it, paying bills stinks. Anytime you can take a boring task away from your life, it’s a plus. Spend the saved time with your family and friends.

3. No more (or at least considerably less) checks, envelopes, and stamps.

Cons of Automating You Bills

1. Risk of someone getting your banking information. The assumption is that many different companies (and people within those companies) have access to your banking information if you use this method of auto bill payment. I technically don’t know if this is true. For many people this is the deal breaker. Using the method I described above, you will have given out your banking information to several payees. Each one of those payees is then going to have to keep your information secure. Do you trust them? Are you protected?

I’ve minimized this risk some by only keeping enough money in my checking account to make the monthly payment. Therefore, if my information leaks out, only a small amount of my cash will be at risk. Another thing you can do to minimize the risk is to only give your information to those payees with the VeriSign seal. Site that use VeriSign will have SSL, which “establishes an encrypted communication channel to help prevent the interception of critical information when transmitted over the Internet.”

2. Less flexible. When it’s time to change bank accounts, I’m going to have to tell each of those payees my new banking information. That might be enough motivation to keep me at a bank I’m not happy with for much longer than I should.

3. Overdraft fees. What if one of your bills has a huge incorrect charge on it, and you end up over-drafting on your account? Well, this risk can be minimized by checking your statements every month and keeping a line of credit or overdraft protection on your bank account.

4. Losing touch with your finances. Setting up auto payments can have a negative affect on the overall awareness of your finances. Similar to automating your savings, once your payments are out of sight, they can quickly become out of mind. Again, this risk can be minimized by reviewing your statements carefully every month.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it…That’s the lowdown on how I simpify my finances by automating them. Hopefully you will find that automating both your savings and bill payments bring success in your personal finances like they have ours.

The Rest of the Series…

#4 Contribute to your Employer’s 401(k) and Get That Match!

#5 Put Your Savings in a High-Interest Savings Account

Photo: by Don Solo

Posted in 10 Things, Save Money | 4 Comments »

10 Things That Bring Success in Personal Finance: #6 Track Your Net Worth and Set a Goal

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 |

I’m doing a series of post that will inform you of the 10 things that we’ve done that I believe has brought success with our personal finances. Most are simple things that anyone could quickly implement. Look for a few posts every week.

Track Your Net Worth and Set a Goal

Simply put, your personal net worth is equal to your assets (stuff you have) minus your liabilities (debts). For instance, your assets might be cash in checking and savings, investments, real estate, and cars. Your debts might be your mortgage, credit card balances, and student loans. All you have to do is add up the value or balances of each category and simply subtract your debts from your assets. Ideally, this will equal a positive number.

Why is it important to know your net worth and to track it?

Knowing your net worth will:

Give you confidence that you are on track to a comfortable retirement
Give you the knowledge that you are able to pay off your debts
Provide motivation if you are falling behind

What should your net worth be?

Well, first, it should be positive. We all want to own more than we owe, right? Beyond that, it’s up to you to decide how much you want your net worth to be. You can’t take it with you when you die, so… I recommend using net worth averages for your age range to help you determine what your net worth should be. Here’s a tool from CNN Money that will show you how you stack up against the average. If your around my age, it doesn’t take much in the positive to be ahead of the average.

How do you track it?

Like our regular monthly expenses, my wife and I track our net worth using a simple Excel spreadsheet. We’ve got our current net worth calculated, along with our expected net worth after we purchase our home, and one year later. You don’t have to use Excel. There are plenty of online based calculators out there that will help you get to your net worth. Here are some: Bankrate & Young Money. If you have Quiken or MS Money, they can help you track as well.

If your net worth isn’t a positive number, or isn’t as high as you’d like it to be, SET A GOAL. Put it on paper. Make a short term and a long term goal. Decide how long, based on your ability to save or pay off debt, that it should take you to reach your goals. Consider using Net Worth IQ as a tool to hold you accountable. Best of luck, and stay positive!

#4 Contribute to your Employer’s 401(k) and Get That Match!

#5 Put Your Savings in a High-Interest Savings Account