Financial Picture Update

I took some time to update the figures to the right under My Financial Picture. I'm not reallly happy about it. My net worth dropped $3K in January. The biggest factor in this was the hit that my 401(k) has taken since the beginning of the year. I think I've lost about $5K. Not good. I hate the funds we have and hate the Paychex retirement tracking system even more. It's not easy to use at all. We move to a new plan this month and will be going through Ameriprise. Added to that is that the max employr contibution moves fom 1% to 4% of our salary. This is huge. It will add over $3K to my 401(k) this year. Thank God. I am really wanting to get to t he $100K point in retirement savings. The market in general has not done too well so my stock portfolio is down as well. But, I'm still buying and holding.

I am making no headway with the credit cards. My total balance went down by only $100. The finance charges are killing me. In order to help combat that. I am going to break up my monthly Discover card payment into weekly payments and throw anything left over to the cards at the end of the month. This way my daily balance can be whittled down . There is no use in me keeping $50 aside each week in my checking account. I'll send it right to Discover. Hopefully, that will help. I am shooting for a $200 regular payment. I will be putting any supplemental income right to Discover so when checks come in for survey groups, secret shopping, etsy sales, etc. I'll be putting them straight to the card. I'd like to see next month's balance be $5500. That would make me feel better about life.

As always, chant to the tax return gods. I need them to come through for me.

January recap

The first month of the year is done and I am pretty pleased with how it's gone. I have really trimmed spending significantly. This is what I am most proud of. The biggest help in this realm has been the serious reduction in eating out. It's really hard not to sometimes, especially as everyone heads out of the office to my favorite Chinese place. Must. Have. Willpower. It's been easily curbed by my resolution to go to the gym more. Twice a week I hit the gym during lunch and thisinly allows me a quick meal at my desk.

I printed out my bank statement to do some quick analysis. I broke out my expenses for the month into a few areas where I had made goals. This is how I did:

Meals Out: $82.76
I did have 5 girlfriends in town in the middle of the month and we actually limited ourselves to ne meal out, which I paid $30 for. The rest of it was three lunches out, a meal at a night meeting, and treating my daughter to pizza. I have more than cut this in half from December and would have been less save the great lunch out with the girls.

Groceries: $269.33
Again, this was a little higher than I planned as I had houseguests for a few days. Of course, they were MORE than generous with buying supplementals and I love them for it. I took November's numbers for groceries and tey totalled $461.19. Wow. Two things are at play here. First, I am watching the flyers and cutting coupons. Second, I am no longer buying liquor. Of course, I had a boyfriend in November so I kept the house better stocked. Not dating is saving me $200! That was a joke...

Gas: $227.48
This is pretty close to what I had budgeted! Off by $27.48 but I have discovered gasbuddy.com which tells me the cheapest gas in area. One day the Circle K was 2.84 a gallon and I was able to find a station two miles away for $2.71 a gallon. Good deal.

The bad stuff? I still have to pay my cable bill and I had about $15o in miscellaneous expenses. Just little things here and there. This is where I need to severely monitor and cut back. That is my biggest goal for February. I mustcurb as much spending as I can and put the money to the credit card. I can reward myself a little bit here and there. I really want new workout clothes. But, I need to see that balance go down more before I can!

So my goals for February are:

Groceries - $200
Gas - $200
Meals out - $40
Miscellaneous - $50

I am certain I can do this!

I love a head start

I have my first meeting with the CPA that is doing my taxes for me this year. I can't tell you how excited I am to not be doing them this year. I am certain I should be able to do them myself next year, but with the move and this being the first year I'm filing seperately, I afraid I'm going to forget a bunch of deductions and, worse yet, monumentally screw up my taxes.

I am waiting on a few more items to come in the mail but am really proud of myself for keeping my info pretty much in line. I have misplaced only one or two receipts but am pleased to find 90% of them. Also, the totally anal rententive tracking of my charity mileage is a good thing. One of my goals for this year was to find a better way to file and store information so this tax prep is helping me do that.

There are two reasons I'm starting so early. First, since I am using the majority of the tax return to pay down my credit card, I want that money as soon as possible. The longer I wait to do my taxes means the more money I will pay in interest. If I get my taxes done by mid-Februray, I should be able to have the return but my birthday early March. That's perfect.

The second reason is that I am certain I am over paying my federal taxes and do not want that money going to Uncle Sam so he can gain all that interest. I want to pay down those damn cards so I don't have to pay interest. I found a calculator online that helps figure what you should take in allowances. It said I should take Single 9. I take Single 4. I want an expert to help me figure out exactly where I should be. Again, the sooner I get this down, the sooner I can adjust my paycheck and the more money I will end up with in the long term. If I find I'm over paying and can make a $25 a week increase in my take home pay beginning in March, that will mean an extra $1,000 this year.

I'm loving finding new sources of increasing the amount of money coming in by doing nothing other than evaluating how money goes out. It's important to me to think about the long term. $25 seems like a little. But, over time, every little dime adds up...

Thanks for the $600!

Well, didn't we all get fabulous news today! I am excited about tax season as it is. I know I'll be getting a sizeable return this year that is really going to help me get the credit cards paid off. This $600 is going to be even better. Ever since reading the article on MSN, I have been daydreaming about what I will do with the $600.



My first thought was to put the whole damn thing to the Discover card. I love that that was my first thought. Of course, what I do with the $600 will be highly dependent on what I get for a tax return. I plan on putting at least half of the return to the credit cards. If the two store cards are not paid off by the time I get the return, I will put the money there first. But, there are a few things I would like to be able to do that deal with vacation or taking some time off. If I am able use half of the tax return for the credit card and save enough to be able to take a small vacation or two (I travel cheap too), then the whole $600 will go to the credit cards. If not, I will still put at least half of it to credit cards.



I am hoping to be able to put at least $1500 toward the credit card debt and save about $1000 for the year for vacations. I'll be posting real soon about the vacation planning and how I'm going to cheapen that out. That just means I need to start praying for a $1900 tax return. We'll see. I have the preliminary meeting with the tax guy on Tuesday. It's my dad's CPA so I'm hoping he cuts me a break in fees. Regardless, he is really good and my dad assures me anything that I pay in fees will come back to me in found money for the return. More on that later. For now, I have to go to the tax rebate happy dance with jazz hands and a fan kick finish.

Exciting news! Voodoo works!

All of the crossing of fingers and shaking of chicken bones and standing on one leg and facing Mecca and everything else that was done prior to my salary review has worked! Our company has not had a good year and I had to cut the budget back quite a bit. I was expecting a 2% raise and hoping for a 5%. I got a call last night after the salary review meeting and I am getting a 6.2% raise! This is phenomenal news and just what I needed.

The raise brings me up to $86,000 a year and, after using my ubiquitous Yahoo Payroll Calculator, should give me an extra $62 per weekly paycheck. That's $250 extra income a month! Oh sweet baby Jesus, I can't tell you how relieved I am right now.

This is going to allow to to meet all my bills and pay and extra $50 a month to my Discover card and and extra $25 to my Victoria Secret card while having a little bit more of a cushion. That means that when the VS card is paid off in April, I can switch that $75 over to the Discover payment and make a big $275 payment per month. That will make a huge dent in my goal to not have any credit card debt by the end of the year.

What really excites me is the thought of having an extra $325 a month next year to put toward savings and down payment on a car in three years. Is is frightening to think that I'm already thinking and wanting to plan for 2009?

House is empty and I'm behind

I had a houseload of friends the last few days, hence my absence. It is nice and quiet and I have today off. I am going to be doing a good amount of work today researching some new ideas for some extra money and doing some financial planning for the end of the month.

Luckily, my guests were all so happy that I was putting them up that they sprung for groceries for the visit so I don't think overspending happened at all. I kept very close tabs and tried to plan meals and such that weren't elaborate. I pulled my from existing liquor supply and that helped. I need to jump on to my bank site to see how well I did. All part of today's plan.

I am very behind in my goal to make $200 a month in extra income. I'm only at $115.63. However, a friend gave me a great idea last night. I used to make bead jewelry and had big plans to sell it online. Ebay was chock full of similar products and they take a huge cut. She told me about Etsy, which is a site where people can sell handmade items. It's really a great site and she spends a lot of time on it an is certain I could unload some of the stock I've had sitting around for ages there. It was a great hobby and I loved doing it. My new digital camera is up and running so I plan to take a bunch of photos and see of I can get some things up today. Jewelry making made me happy as I'm a creative person by nature. If I find that I can make some money off of it, I may go back to it. It's very relaxing and I need more of that.

Ch-ch-changes!

Did you notice something different when you clicked on over here? Like how I presume you are a return visitor? I'm playing with Adsense! How fun!

I love the amount of comments that are left on this blog for two reasons. They are a great vehicle for communication and that they offer an immense amount of feedback and suggestions. I hope that you find some good tips and ideas here but love that you're willing to share yours as well. One tip I got came from a guy who's blog address I don't even have (but thank you c.crowe!) or I would so link to him and call my my friend. On my previous post about my month-to-date supplemental income earnings it was suggested to put an Adsense banner at the top of the page, above the fold.

My first reaction was, ugh. I have seen some blogs where you need to scroll way down past the fold to get to the meat of the blog. I am not a fan of that. I can't imagine you would be either. That's why we're friends, right? You get me. But, I thought I'd see how it looks and how it works. I just ran over to Adsense and made up a new banner and was shocked at how not ugly it is. It's not awful!

So, here's the challenge. I'm giving it a good run until the end of the month. I'll let you know what changes in income I see on February 1st. I'd love some feedback from you though. What do you think of it? Do you mind it? Do you not even care? Have you had success with similarly placed ads? I'm new to this stuff. I have no idea what I'm doing but will try anything once! I'm learning as I go. I've done a good amount of reading about monetizing but I have to find a blog titled, "Breaking down monetizing Barney style."