Student Loans

I completed my Bachelors degree without us having to take out any loans. For my Masters degree Alison and I took out $10k in loans. We've been paying for around 2 years and have around $8,000 left. We have been feeling very strongly that we need to get these loans paid off as quickly as possible. In order to focus on getting these paid off, we cancelled our home phone and cable in August.

It wasn't a big deal for us to cancel either the home phone or cable because we felt we were overpaying for both. The last month that we had our home phone, we used it for maybe 40 minutes (we would go 4-5 days without even using it). Our per minute rate was probably around $1/minute. We have virtually unlimited minutes on our cell phones, so it seemed like a no brainer. The cable was a little more difficult decision. We really watch very, very little TV. There is no sitcom or similar show that we watch, we don't watch the news and I've watched only 7 or 8 movies so far this year. We have dozens and dozens of children's shows recorded on our computer, as well as about 100 movies, many of which we have never watched, so Ada and Kate haven't had to suffer.

The one thing that Alison and I do watch, though, is sports. We are dying not being able to watch the Jazz during their amazing come-from-behind win streak. We've been tracking each game using gametracker, but it's obviously not the same. Same goes for watching the Utes (for me) and the Cougs (for Alison). Luckily, I get to watch half of the Utes games in person, but Alison isn't so lucky and is feeling the pain more than I am. Sidenote: We are able to watch many sporting events on ESPN3.com, but if the game isn't on an ESPN/ABC network or they decide not to stream it online (such as Monday Night Football) then we are out of luck.

What this has really done for us, is to motivate us to get our student loans paid off as soon as we can. As soon as they're paid off, we'll reinstate our cable and once again be able to waste away in front of the boob tube as is our pleasure.

STUDENT LOANS

Start: $10k

Current: $8,000

20%

START

END

April Flowers

I’m not usually one to do these marathon posts, but it’s been a busy month, I haven’t made a real post since April 1st, and I’ve got a lot to say.

1. Spend-free April. You may remember a couple of years ago Alison and I had a spend-free April. At that time we did our best to not spend any money on pretty much anything but fresh produce and bread. Alison was on WIC at the time so we were able to pretty much go a whole month without spending. We didn’t think we were really in a position to duplicate the experiment again, but we did set a goal to cut spending on all variable categories by 80% (basically, we will pay our full mortgage, utility bills, etc.) We wanted to trim our spending on groceries, clothing and other household items. I haven’t calculated how we did, but I don’t think we quite made it. It doesn’t help that we purchased a 65” TV this month…


2. Yes. We bought a new 65” Mitsubishi DLP TV. We didn’t expect to get one so soon or so big, but we’re not complaining. Not that we need to justify this purchase to anybody but ourselves, but here are our justifications for purchasing it: We had enough money saved up to pay for a 52” LCD TV. As I was looking at them at RC Willey one evening the salesperson made an offhand comment that if we weren’t going to hang the TV on a wall we could consider a DLP TV (which is around 15” deep). We did and we purchased. We had planned on buying one at the beginning of football season in order to let the prices drop lower, and then we wouldn’t have to pay for an HD DVR until then… But RC Willey was having a good sale (and they paid our sales tax), we had free delivery and setup until the beginning of June and a $150 (or so) gift card to RC Willey that we wanted to use. We have not been disappointed with our purchase. It’s been fun to watch the Masters and the NBA Playoffs on the big screen. We put the TV on the RC Willey 18 month no interest plan because we had just paid off our last big purchase (remember this one?) and what’s not to like about making money on our savings while paying the minimum due for 17 months? But, it turns out that my payment to RC Willey was posted after we purchased the TV and they applied it to both purchases – thus leaving our interest-free purchase from last year not paid off and the TV paid halfway off. Because I don’t want there to even be a chance that there will still be a balance on last year’s purchase, we’ll pay the full remainder off this month.

3. Work. This has been a really good month for me at work. I still love my job and I was able to bill more than 100 hours the last two weeks to my principle engineer as well as many thousands of dollars on another project of my own. It feels good to work my butt off, but I still can’t believe how much I don’t know. I love my job because there is truly a lifetime of learning ahead for me. My company had an open house to show off our new office space on Earth Day. Fitting because we are going for LEED Platinum (no building is yet certified LEED Platinum in Utah, but when all is said and done, ours will probably be the third). We also changed our logo. The new one is shown below:
4. The Jazz. They’ve been a hard team to peg down all season. They’ve got great players and they have a cast that should take them a lot further than they made it this year. They just seem to have so many players that are inconsistent and don’t play hard every game. I definitely think that changes need to be made to the team this summer, but I have no idea what those might be. Part of me feels that a summer free from Olympic obligations and other injury causing activities may allow them to have an injury-free year together as a team and then they’ll go ahead and win a championship. I can dream, right?

5. The Malibu. The Malibu’s registration was due in March and I took it in on the last day of the month and it failed. There were three problems that showed up. I took it to one shop and paid for the diagnostic and they were able to take care of one problem. They told me that the second problem was intermittent and that the third would have to be taken care of at a dealer. I didn’t want to pay dealer prices so I found another shop that could fix the third problem (which they did), but they also told me that the first shop had fixed the entirely wrong problem and that the first problem code was still active in my car’s memory system. I then took it back to the first shop and they tried to explain their way out of what they fixed but they got the check engine light to finally go off. That same day I left work early to take the car back to the inspection point to get a retest done. As I was driving there the check engine light came on. Of all the rotten luck. The next day I was going to return the car to the shop that failed at fixing the first problem when I noticed the check engine light was off. I drove directly to the inspection place and had my car all checked out (but I never turned it off, so the codes wouldn’t reset). The car finally passed and as I looked through my emissions report I saw that the same problem code was still active, but that it wasn’t one that even mattered to pass emissions. $600 later, arrgh.

6. I am reading Amy Dacyczyn’s The Complete Tightwad Gazette – Promoting Thrift as a Viable Alternative Lifestyle. While many of the tips are too over the top for me or don’t apply, there are many that do and I will try to share some of them here. As always, I’ve got loads of new book reviews on my book review blog. Check them out if you haven’t in a while.

7. I befriended SeaBass on facebook. You should too. I can die happy.

Personal Finance

My calling in our ward is the Ward Welfare Specialist focusing on personal finances. What the job basically entails is to visit with people who are in financial trouble and help them set up a budget. It has been an eye-opening experience seeing the difficulties that people in the ward are experiencing. I thought that I had a pretty good idea of what a Bishop's calling entails, but as I have served in this calling I realize that I still have a lot to learn.

Following is an email that I sent out to the ward welfare committee because they were asking for my recommendations. I'm going to try and post a little more about personal finance/frugality topics here on the blog as well.


There are so many good financial resources. A few of my favorites are:

Personal Finance

1. One for the Money Guide to Family Finance, by Elder Marvin J. Ashton. This is a pamphlet that you can probably get from your bishop or from Church Distribution. The address from which the pamphlet is adapted is a talk given at the welfare session of the April 1975 general conference. The original talk can be found here.

2. A second pamphlet (also available from the bishop or distribution) is All is Safely Gathered In: Family Finances. This pamphlet can be found online in its entirety here.

3. Possibly the best website on the internet for somebody starting out in personal finance is personalfinance.byu.edu. This website contains 5 beginning courses, 17 intermediate courses and 15 advanced courses that you can go through at your own pace as you create your own personal finance plan. Also available for download are more than 350 pages to use as a manual. The courses cover everything from budgeting to investing, life insurance to debt and loans.

Budgeting

4. There are many good budget programs available for use as well. One of my favorite free programs is pearbudget, which has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. This is a spreadsheet that allows you to easily track your expenses. In my opinion, this option is the easiest to use if you are familiar with spreadsheets (such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc). Download pearbudget here.

5. Another awesome program is Rainy Day Budget (incidentally created by my brother). The program is perfect for people who have never kept a budget before. The program takes you through the steps required to set up a personalized budget and allows you to track a budget more easily if you are unfamiliar with using a spreadsheet. It can be downloaded for free here.

6. My personal preference for budgeting is Quicken (or Microsoft Money). I really don't recommend jumping to one of these programs until you have consistently kept a budget for a while. Quicken ranges in price from $40 to $80. Every week before family home evening I download the weeks transactions from my bank accounts, credit cards, loans and investment/retirement accounts and categorize all purchases. Quicken automatically calculates where we stand as for our budget each month and calculates our net worth. Quicken data can also be imported into TurboTax making tax preparation a little easier. The learning curve for these programs is far steeper than for any of the others.

7. Another option that I have utilized in the past is a basic spreadsheet that can be printed out and used by hand or within the spreadsheet program itself. This option is basically a simple table for tracking your spending categories.

8. One final option for creating a budget is good old paper and pencil. Grab a calculator and find out whether or not you will have enough money to make it to the end of the month. The utlimate goal in keeping and creating a budget is tracking your expenses in order to spend less than you earn.

Frugality

9. Often times, in order to stick to a budget you've got to cut your spending down. This can be accomplished with various frugal tactics. One of my favorite websites for frugal ideas (as well as all things personal finance and improving yourself) is thesimpledollar.com. The site has been around for a couple of years so the archives are very extensive. Type in any question that you have and chances are that thesimpledollar has answered it.

10. Another great website for frugal ideas and personal finance articles is wisebread.com. All of these sites mentioned also link to many other websites that cover similar material. There is an enormous amount of information available for saving money.

11. A great book with frugal ideas is The Complete Tightwad Gazette. The book is 972 pages of frugal ideas taken from newsletters that were published in the early '90s. There is something for everybody in this gem.

There are so many resources available to help people get ahead in their finances. I am more than willing to help anybody out in creating their own budget or helping research answers to any other financial questions. Please be aware that I am not a financial adviser, but only somebody that is willing to help you find your away around financial issues.

What Economic Downturn?

We've made a bunch of purchases the last few weeks. Here are the big ones in order from cheapest to most expensive (ranging in price from $15 to $1800):

1. Bedside table. Ikea.
2. Barstools - Thank you Ikea.
3. A dresser for Ada. Once again an Ikea special.
4. Bookshelves/cubbyholes for the computer. Ikea.
5. Changing table for Kate. Ikea.
6. Dyson vacuum from Woot! (we already really, really like this vacuum). It's light enough that Alison can even vacuum as she recovers. Good thing too. 'Cause I'm always busy blogging.
7. Big girl bed for Ada. How could we live without Ikea? Now onto the big-ticket items.
8. New dining room table. This was delivered by RC Willey's just this morning.
9. 4 recliner sectional. RC Willey. Now we just need a big flat panel TV.
10. New Bosch high-efficiency washer and dryer. RC Willey. That reminds me, I need to send in my Rocky Mountain Power and Questar rebates...
11. The next two pictures are of our new bedroom set. RC Willey.

12. While this picture shows our bed, it should be a picture of the mattress and box springs. I never imagined that we would be sucked into paying almost $2000 for a mattress. But, Alison and I both love our new bed and have been sleeping great. So good that we don't even hear Kate crying.

From Braggart to Begger

It's already apparent that I've become a weekend blogger. While this semester isn't killing me with difficulty, I've had a bunch of homework and time-consuming hud that I've had to do for my classes.

You remember how I was boasting about how nice our tax return is going to be this year? Well, I was asking for it but we had to take dear little Lurp (our '95 teal Geo Prism) into the shop and get the clutch replaced. I was a little disappointed with this because it wasn't too long ago that we had our clutch replaced. The last time was over Labor Day weekend 3 1/2 years ago. Alison, Rachelle and I were driving to Spokane, Washington to visit my sister Alysia and her husband. We had been driving for almost 12 hours and had just gotten off the interstate at their exit when the clutch went out. While we were disappointed that we had to pay for the expensive repairs we were extremely grateful that we didn't get stuck somewhere in remote Montana - not that there's anything wrong with Montana, but...

This time the car had been losing power in the lower gears for a couple of weeks. It was getting bad enough that I was trying to find alternate routes of going up the hill towards our apartment (because I would be driving at a crawl). We finally took it in and were once again met with the bad news. $875 later 'ol Lurp is good as new. Nonetheless, that cuts 12" off what plasma TV we can afford with our tax returns. Darn.

Money and Taxes

I prepared our taxes over the weekend.  I had planned on purchasing TurboTax (that's what I've used the last few years), but our income was low enough that we could free-file with both the federal government and the state of Utah.  I ended up using an online version of H&R Block's Tax Cut that went very well. 

Our income in 2006 was $15,000 more than we made in 2007.  Sometimes we look back and wonder how we made it...  Last year our adjusted gross income was just a couple of hundred dollars higher than it could be to claim the earned income credit (which is usually $1600-$1800).  If I had not gone to work the last couple days of the year, then we would have made $1400 more than we did...

This wasn't a problem this year.  We easily qualified for the earned income credit as well as other education credits and the basic deduction.  The good news (ok, great news) is that between the state and federal tax refunds we will be getting more than $4,000 back!  This will make a nice dent in a down payment (or school loans...).  And maybe I will finally buy my Wii :). 

Next year will definitely be different.