Back To Basics Archives - Page 3 of 4

I’ve Got a Job… Now What?

By Stephanie, updated May 30, 2007 3 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

Two friends separately contacted me yesterday with the same question: “I have a full time job now… what do I do?” (They both play the trombone too, it’s kinda eerie.) I understand where they’re coming from. With a sudden influx of money comes this daunting feeling that you should really take control of your finances. But… how?

I’m going to give you guys a warning, though: if you came looking for the sexy answer, you’re barking up the wrong blonde blogger. I’m not going to give you a one-liner like “invest in gold and you’ll be set for life!” Sorry, but I’m going to give you the real down and dirty (that sounds sexy too… but it’s not).

Step 1: The Fun Part
Estimate your income. This is easier to do after your first paycheck, because then you can see exactly what percentage they’ll be swiping up for taxes. But even if you haven’t received that first paycheck yet, estimate away. You can adjust it later.

Step 2: The Depressing Part
Estimate your expenses – a new jobs means they’ve likely changed. I recommend you download and use PearBudget – it’s a free, really easy to use program that runs in Excel. Or, at least use the Pear way of dividing up your expenses:

Regular expenses: monthly expenses that don’t change in amount. E.G. Rent, car insurance, cell phone bill, savings…
Irregular expenses: “things that come up a couple of times a year that you know you need to budget for. For example, you know you’ll spend about $1,800 on car maintenance over the year, but you won’t pay it on a regular schedule. So you budget $150 every month into “Car Maintenance,” and then, on some sad day, you’ll have to give the mechanic all that money.” Other examples: gifts, travel…
Variable expenses: monthly expenses that vary in amount. E.G. groceries, dining out, gas for the car…

Step 3: Try Not to Faint
Take your estimated income for one month, and your expenses for one month… and hope that the first one is larger than the second one. Actually, if you included savings in your expenses, they should be the exact same number. But, they probably aren’t. So… “what do I do…”

“…if my income is more than my expenses?”
In all seriousness, this is a question you would probably never ask me. But if you truly estimated all your expenses accurately, and you came up with this, then you do have a problem. I know at least one of you has some hefty credit card debt playing the monkey on your back. And you need to deal with that. For serious!

Don’t put anything more on those credit cards. Not a red cent. Go cut them up, now. I know, I’m a mean Stephanie, and I don’t want you have any fun. Deal with it. Don’t charge anything else until you’ve paid them both off. (Hey, at least I didn’t tell you to sell your trombone!)
Use that extra cash to really, really work on paying down that debt. I’m assuming it’s high interest, and it’s definitely dragging your credit score down at this point. Just remember, if you only make the minimum payments, it’ll probably take you upwards of 30 years to pay off those cards. I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want to meet up when you and I are 50+ and find out that you’re still paying off some charge from 2006.

And if you don’t have any nasty credit card debt? Pump up your savings, and feel mighty proud. Also, know that I hate you.

“… if my expenses are more than my income?”
Ouch… but this was always a likely scenario. You’re going to have to cut down an expense. And no, don’t go for the savings first – that’s like sticking a knife in your own jugular. I’m not going to tell you what expenses you should trim, because I know you’re smart, and you’re the one that has to live with the decision. Find some fat, and trim it.

Make sure you do put away some savings, though. Even if it’s just a dollar a week, get in the habit. It takes about 3 months to establish a weekly habit, so by then you’ll have over $12 (whoopee!), but more importantly, a good habit for life.

Step 4: Just Do It
Live your life, track your expenses, adjust PearBudget (or your tracking system of choice) as you go along. There really isn’t any secret formula – in fact, I’m rather sure there wasn’t anything here that you didn’t already know… somewhere in the back of your mind.

Oh, and about that savings: make sure you’re putting it somewhere that beats inflation, like a high yield savings account. You know how much I love ING Direct (aff), but so long as you’re saving, I’m happy.

Back to Basics #4: Credit

By Stephanie, updated April 9, 2007 1 Comment
This post may contain affiliate links

I have a pet peeve. Actually, I have more than one of them. My number one pet peeve? People who say “ATM Machine.” But running a close second is when people mistake “credit” and “debt” to mean the same thing.

I shouldn’t get so annoyed about it. Commercials, ads, banks… everyone throws the two words around all the time, and it’s easy to get confused. But if you have any interest in taking control of your own money, you ought to learn the difference.

Credit is the ability to borrow money. Debt is money owed. To give an example, if you knew that you could borrow $1000 from your parents at any time, that would be a line of credit. If you owed your parents $1000, that would be a debt.

Credit is important because it’s one of those “you need it to get it” things, especially if you’re trying to open up a larger line of credit, such as a mortgage.

There are some people that make a point of trying to live without credit. Since credit is the ability to acquire debt, people see it as a temptation. And to be fair, it is. However, I think it’s somewhat foolish to completely abstain from credit, because it’s become so ingrained in our modern lives.

The Dreaded Credit Score
Not only do you need credit to get credit, but you need to prove to creditors that you’re low risk. That you’ll pay them back any of the debt you incur on this line of credit. And unfortunately, you can’t just have your mom write you a note, vouching for you. Instead, creditors will pull up your credit score.

I don’t want to bore you too much, but your credit score is just a number, derived using “secret math,” that shows how responsible you are. A credit score can be pulled not only by creditors, but also by landlords when you’re applying for an apartment, and even by employers when you’re applying for a job. No joke – I just picked up an application for a job at the mall, and it came with a ” Fair Credit Reporting Act Disclosure.”

Since your credit score is so important to so many aspects of you life, you really ought to know what it is. This can get pretty confusing, because there are tons of different types of credit scores. The most common and most trusted, however, is your FICO score. Actually, there are even three different FICO scores, just to confuse you further. That’s because there are three different companies (Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax) that collect credit data on you and compute your FICO score from it. Lost yet?

Getting Your Score
If you want to grab one of you FICO scores, you can do it for free. MyFICO.com’s ScoreWatch* let’s you see your FICO score, and the credit report that is used to calculate it. It will also tell you what that score means to you, and offers a cool thing called Score Simulator, which will let you see how different actions (such as maxing out your credit cards, or paying off all your debts) would change your score.

ScoreWatch monitors your score and updates it daily. You can get the 30 day free trial, and cancel before the 30 days are up if you don’t want to continue monitoring your score. If you decide to continue on, you’ll be charged $90 for a year of monitoring. I would recommend this to anyone serious about improving your credit drastically over the course of the year. But if you’re simply curious about the score, you probably don’t need it past the 30 days.

Back To Basics is going to focus on credit scores and credit reports for a little while, so don’t be worried if this post left you with questions. For now, just check on your credit score, and be careful to protect it. That means no late payments, even on the electric bill!

*Affiliate link.

Back to Basics #3: Checking Accounts

By Stephanie, updated April 2, 2007 7 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

Savings accounts are cool and all, but sometimes, you actually want to be able to exchange your money for goods and services. Checking accounts make this easy to do, by allowing you to fill out a little form, appropriately named a “check,” handing over some of the money in your account to someone else.

No Interest?
Although, just like in a savings account, the bank is borrowing your money, they don’t pay you any interest on it. Your money sits there and doesn’t grow at all. This is almost like a “fee,” you’re forgoing the interest in favor of easy access to your money – at least, in most cases. Some banks have checking accounts where if you keep enough money in the account (usually north of $5,000), they’ll pay a very small amount of interest on it.

New technologies have profoundly changed the way we use checking accounts. Debit cards, which are basically the hybrid of a check and a credit card, allow you to easy spend money out of your checking account. They’re also a nice way for the bank to try and get more of your money.

Overdrafts
If you draw out more money from your checking account than you actually have in there, you’ve done something called “overdraft.” There’s a series of different ways the bank might handle this, but most of them involve charging you a fee of some kind.

One thing you can do is have your bank set it up so that if you overdraft, the bank can just take the extra money out of your savings account. But the best solution is simply to pay attention to how much money you have in the account, and not spend more than that. Seriously, it’s not that hard, especially now that you can check you balance from home, using the computer, as many times a day as you want.

Checking on the Interwebs
The other technology transforming checking accounts is online bill-pay and echecks. Using just the account information for your checking account, you can pay many businesses online, including most of your bills. It’s gotten to the point where many people don’t even use paper checks anymore.

Which is where the online banks are starting to swoop in. If you no longer need paper checks, then you can get an online checking account. ING recently rolled out their online checking account, “Electric Orange,” which can be used for online bill-pay and echecks, and comes with a debit card, but no paper checks. However, you can contact ING and they will issue a paper check (for example, to your landlord). Still, the account pays 3+% interest on money sitting there. For the time being, this account is only open to customers who have an ING Orange Savings account, but that’s easy to get, with no fees or minimums.

My philosophy when it comes to my checking account: don’t let money sit in there, earning no interest, if I don’t have to. I only keep enough in there for what I’m going to need in the next two weeks.

Back to Basics #2: Savings Accounts

By Stephanie, updated March 19, 2007 2 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

Most people have (or know they should have) a savings account. But do you know how the money in your savings account works, and earns interest?

How do banks work, anyways?
Banks work by buying your money from you and selling it to other people. I’m not even kidding. When you put your money into a savings account, your bank pays you interest for doing so, because now they have money to sell to other people, in the form of loans. I won’t lie, I wish I could buy money from people at an extremely low rate, and then sell it to other people at a much, much higher rate! I’d be rich! I’d be the Bank of Stephanie.

So obviously, it’s better to keep your dealings with the bank in the “savings” category, and not the “loans,” category – although that’s not always possible. But if you think about it, if you have a savings account and a loan at the same bank, you’re buying your own money back from the bank at a much higher rate. Ew.

So how much is the bank going to pay you for the privilege of selling your money? Usually, not much. My own savings account earns about 0.2% interest annually, which is about the average. Considering I barely use the account, there’s only about $15.00 that just sits in there, earning 0.2% interest. At the end of the year, that’s only about 3 cents a year that the bank pays me for my $15.00.

Even if I ramped up the amount I kept in the account to $10,000 (which would clearly mean I robbed the bank and then deposited that robbery money right into my savings account, which would be convenient!) that money would only earn $20 over the course of the year.

So why bother with the savings account at all?
For one thing, the money in a savings account is a little tougher to get at than the money in a checking account. Sure, you can get it out with your ATM card, but you can’t get at the money with a debit card or check. This encourages you to save, rather than spend – hence the name of the account.

And the other thing is, although you might not be earning much interest on your money, you are earning some, which means it’s better than stashing the money under your mattress.

But I want more!
Oh, it can be done! 0.2% interest is pretty dismal, especially when you realize that inflation is about 3% a year – meaning that your money in a savings account is actually losing value. Ick! So, can you beat out inflation with a savings account?

Oh, you totally can, thanks to the internets! Online savings accounts offer much, much higher rates. Why? Because they’re online, that means the banks don’t have to pay tellers or security guards or even janitors – they can just hire a few customer service people to man the phones. This frees up a bunch of their money to pay out to you, for using their savings accounts.

And of course, the banks go to great lengths to insure their databases are secure, so there isn’t a whole lot of worry attached with doing your banking online. You establish a “connection” between your new online savings account and a checking account that you already have. This allows you to electronically move money back and forth between the two accounts. You’re limited to 6 electronic transfers a month out of a savings account, but there’s no limit on transfers of money into one.

Ok, cool, hook me up.
Hold on, cowboy. Choose the right online savings account. This may not be the end-all-be-all decision of your lifetime, but it certainly warrants some thought. Here are the three accounts I would recommend:

Emigrant Direct
I opened my first online savings account with them, and I had a little trouble getting the account set up, but that was mostly my fault. They offer 5.05% annual interest on your money, which is so much better than that paltry 0.2% the brick-and-mortar banks want to buy your money for.

E*Trade
I opened my second account with E*Trade while they were having an “Open an Account with $1 and get a $25 bonus!” deal. This account also offers 5.05% interest, and I also had some dealing with their customer service (once again, the problem amounted to me being a dumb-dumb).

~~ING Direct~~ (Now called Capital One 360)
Capital One 360’s Orange Savings Account trails the pack in interest rates. However, those who have an account with them spend lots of time giving glowing recommendations to their customer service. I have a special place in my heart for good customer service, so I will certainly take the interest cut someday. Capital One 360 offers a $25 bonus if you sign up with a referral link and deposit at least $250.

Which of these accounts you chose is up to you. There are other accounts out there, some offering even higher interest rates. The important thing to do is figure out what matters to you most about a savings account, and pick the bank that best embodies that quality. If it happens to be local banking that matters to you most, then it might even be your brick-and-mortar local bank.

Back to Basics #1: Time

By Stephanie, updated March 14, 2007 3 Comments
This post may contain affiliate links

People are fond of saying “Time is Money!” Usually, people say this as some excuse not to be somewhere, or not to do something. Like, “Gee Stephanie, I’d love to stay here and help you organize your sock drawer according to a precise mathematical formula, but, uh, time is money!” *runs away*

But my friends that have an aversion to helping me organize my sock drawer actually are correct. Time is money in so money ways. We spend money on countless things that give us the impression that they’ll save us time. We use money to buy things to fill up the time.

But it’s through the glory of compound interest that we can really see the glowing relationship between time and money. For definition’s sake, there are two kinds of interest:

Simple Interest: If you earn 5% “simple interest” on $100, you’ll end up with $105, and it will never grow any further. Simple, eh?

Compound Interest is the interest that we all know and love (or in the case of debt interest, “know and loathe”). If you earn 5% “compound interest,” compounded (meaning “calculated and paid out”) every year, you’ll get $105 at the end of the first year. But it will just keep getting “calculated and paid out” every year. So at the end of year two, you’ll have $110.25. And after year 50, you’ll have $1146.74. Compound interest is obviously better than simple interest – unless we’re talking about debt interest, in which case you’ll owe $1146.74 after 50 years, in which case you’ll probably shake your first, look up at the sky, and curse compound interest.

But ignoring debt interest, we can be happy that most situations call for compound interest instead of simple interest. And time is compound interest’s key ingredient. Sure, having lots of money to save and invest is great, but having lots of time is actually better. If you have lots of time before you’re going to want that money again (say you’re 16 years old and thinking about your retirement fund), then you can put a relatively low amount of money away, and let time do most of the work for you (in this case, you put away just $8000 and end up with over $1,000,000).

On the flip side – and I’m not pointing this out to depress you – let’s talk about student loans. It’s easy to wrack up $8,000 in student loans (I pulled down that much my freshman year!), and one of the fun things about student loans is you can never escape them – not even through bankruptcy! So let’s say you have 10.7% interest on your student loans (which is outrageous for student loans, but it makes my example work, so just stick with me, ok?), and you duck out of paying them for 47 years, and finally, those $8,000 worth of student loans catch up with you. How much do you owe now?

Just like the 16-year-old that puts $8,000 away for retirement, you have over $1,000,000 – IN DEBT! Yeah, I bet you wish your hypothetical self had made your student loan payments now, don’t you?

So time can be your best friend, or your worst enemy. But you already knew that from all of your other dealings with Harsh Mistress Time, didn’t you? So what should you take away from this (aka “If You Didn’t Read Anything Up Till Now”)?

When it comes to savings and investments, put time on your side and start immediately, because time is worth more than money.
When it comes to high-interest debt, focus on paying it down quickly, rather than over time, because time will just make it worse.