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30-Day Money Cleanse – Week 3: Rev-Up Your Finances

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Rev Up Your Finances on a 30-Day Money Cleanse

I’m working my way through a 30-day money cleanse to polish up my finances a bit. Even though I read and write about money all the time, I can use a kick in the pants to really dig into my usual systems and make some changes. In Week 1, we went through some exercises to increase our awareness of our money. In Week 2, we devised a plan and started working on it. Now in Week 3, we’re going to take some actions to rev things up!

You can follow along and participate in the money cleanse from the original source, or you can join my game-ified version on Habitica!

Day 16 – Find Alternative Ways To Save

Don’t dine out for 1 week – that includes happy hours and those coffee runs. Compile a meal plan for the week including 3 meals a day, snacks and drinks. Build a grocery list and eat from what you have in your fridge and cupboards. I promise, you won’t go hungry and you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.

Well, “don’t dine out” is an easy one for a couple with a young baby! 😉 I’m actually having trouble remembering the last time I ate out somewhere. But in the spirit of the challenge, I need to look at my actual spending and see if there is some alternate way for me to save money.

Except… I’m completely stumped here. We’ve really cut expenses down to the bone because of the baby (or more because we don’t have time to spend any money with the baby!). For example, last week? 1 charge: groceries from Amazon Fresh. That’s it. And even looking at my order, there wasn’t really anything unnecessary – I ordered the basics and then moved on to other chores.

So no real wisdom on alternate ways to save here… other than “have a baby and get too busy to spend money!”

Day 17 – Re-examine “Memberships”

Using traditional cable? Consider options like Hulu and Netflix to cut costs. Cancel unnecessary subscriptions like Birchbox or Dollar Shave Club.

Hint: Go through your transactions on Personal Capital or Mint.com to find these reoccurring “memberships” to target for destruction!

I keep a handy-dandy list on my computer of all of my recurring charges, which credit card they’re on, and when they hit. So if I ever cancel a card, or get a new card number, or just want to see what I’m regularly getting charged for, I have my list!

There are only a small handful of discretionary memberships on the list:

The Netflix plan used to be higher – up until a few months ago, I was still paying for DVD service! Yeah, we weren’t really watching the DVDs. They were just sitting around while we streamed stuff, until we finally remembered we had a DVD. So I sent the last one back and cancelled that (for now).

If things got super tight, I could cancel the Patreon charge, suspend Netflix for a while, and cancel Amazon Fresh to get $35/month in savings. But, given the money-making/saving opportunities with Netflix and Amazon Fresh, that seems a bit like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Or, cutting off my grocery delivery and ability to write about Marvel franchises, anyway.

Day 18 – Savings Outside of 401k

If 20% of your take home pay is more than $18,000 annually, you should look at saving in a brokerage account.

While I don’t have access to contribute to a 401(k) right now anyway, I do have an IRA and an HSA (Health Savings Account), and maxing those out became my goal back in Week 1 of the cleanse. If I can max out the contributions to both (and my husband’s IRA) this year, then it’s brokerage account time!

Day 19 – Check In

You’re more than halfway through! Take a few minutes to reflect on how you’re feeling financially. Are you worried? Confident? Or feeling successful?

Come tell us how you’re doing in the Financial Discipline Guild!

So far, the challenge has mostly just reinforced what I already knew: right now, I need to be focused on earning more. There isn’t a lot of “fat” to trim in my budget these days.

I’ve been contemplating some additional “side hustle” streams of income. Either something completely passive (investing in dividend stock funds or peer-to-peer lending) or something semi-passive (setting up an Amazon FBA store or real estate investing). I don’t have time for anything that’s, well, time-consuming! Definitely wishing I’d had the foresight to set something up last year (when I had more time) so that it would already be up-and-running now. But I spent last year hustling for money the old-fashioned way! (Trading time for money.)

Day 20 – Find Your Advisor

If you have at least $100K in investable assets, seek a financial advisor to help you devise a plan so that you can maximize savings in retirement, optimize tax deductions and more.

I don’t have $100,000 in investable assets… yet. 😉 But like I mentioned last week, I currently have access to a fee-free Certified Financial Planner through an old 401(k) that I’m hanging onto. I still haven’t received the paperwork to roll that 401(k) to my IRA, so I can continue to delay the decision for a little while!

Day 21 – Explore Investment Strategies

Using a mix of low-cost ETFs or index funds is best for those just starting out. Vanguard, Betterment and Personal Capital all offer great strategies.

I’m definitely an index fund gal! My IRAs are with Vanguard, and I will probably stick with them going forward for ease of use, and because of the low, low fees. How low can you go, Vanguard? Just a few basis points, Stephonee! #InvestmentJokes

Day 22 – Choose Your Allocation

If you’re in your 20’s or 30’s and plan to work into your 60’s, your 401k and outside investments should be mostly (70-90%) stock index funds (about 2/3 US funds and 1/3 foreign). The remaining investment should be a blend of bond and alternative ETFs.

I’ve gone even more aggressive than this advice – I’ve gone all stocks, baby! I’m going to use this time to brush up on JL Collins’ (no relation) Stock Series.

That’s it for Week 3! Come back next week for the DRAMATIC CONCLUSION of the 30-Day Money Cleanse! If you’re doing the cleanse with me, I’d love to know how Week 3 went for you, in the comments below!

Photo credit: Baptiste C David

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30-Day Money Cleanse – Week 2: Devise a Plan and Take Advantage

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30 Day Money Cleanse - Devise a Plan

I’ve been going on this 30-Day Money Cleanse as a way to check up on my finances, and make sure I haven’t strayed too far off the path. Because even a personal finance blogger can get kinda lazy with her money, you know? It’s good to go through something like this periodically, to see your money from a fresh perspective.

Whether you’re doing the cleanse directly from Personal Capital’s blog posts, or through the game version I made on Habitica, I’d love to compare notes with you!

This week is all about taking what we learned in Week 1 and turning it into an actionable plan! Here’s how that went down for me:

Day 8 – See How You Stack Up

Evaluate if you are saving more than you’re spending. A good rule-of-thumb: you should have 50% of spending going to basic needs items, 30% to discretionary spending and 20% to savings.

Our goal for this year is to save 37% of our income. Just by attempting to do that, I’m hoping we’ll do way better than 20%! Now, included in that 37% are some short-term savings that other people might not count as “savings” (we have savings accounts for everything from Travel to Gifts to Video Games to Charity Donations…) because some of the money will get spent within 1 year. But without a strong dividing line on what should be considered “savings” and what shouldn’t, this 37% number just encompasses all of it.

Day 9 – Devise a Plan

Create your plan. It should focus on:

  1. Paying off high interest debt first,
  2. Setting up an emergency fund
  3. Save 20% of every paycheck

1 & 2 are done & done! I have no debts left above a 4.5% interest rate, and our cash on hand can cover more than 6 months of expenses, plus we have an HSA for medical emergencies plus Roth IRAs that we could tap tax-free in an emergency.

As for #3 (Save 20%), as I said in Day 8, the goal is actually to save 37%! The plan to achieve this stays the same: expenses come out of my husband’s pay, and everything I can manage to earn from home (while taking care of the baby) goes to savings.

Day 10 – Cut Down on Discretionary Spending

If dining out eats up a huge portion of your budget, set a weekly limit and stick to it.

Done! But, only because we had a baby. You’ll save a lot on eating out with an infant in the house! 😉

Discretionary spending just isn’t our “pain point” (earning money while taking care of an infant is!), so I’m pretty happy with how our discretionary spending (non-essential spending) is right now.

Day 11 – Think About Refinancing

Explore refinancing high-interest debt like mortgage or student loans. Anything over 4% should be looked at for a potential refinance. If you have ANY high interest credit card debt, this should be your top priority.

My student loans (4.5%) are my highest interest debt, and the only debt that’s not at 0% right now! I looked into refinancing them (more about that in a future post), but didn’t find anything promising in terms of lowering that interest rate right now. For the time being, I’ll just continue to have the payment auto-debited from my account for the 0.25% interest rate reduction!

Day 12 – 401(k) Check-In

If your employer offers it, make sure you are enrolled in the 401k. The max is $18,000 for 2017 for anyone under 50; and $24,000 for anyone 50+.

Unfortunately, no 401(k) is available to me or my husband at this time. However, I did use this time to request rollover paperwork for my 401(k) account from a former employer! I’m still on the fence about whether I want to do the rollover. Here’s why:

  • The fees on the funds are a little higher than Vanguard (aren’t they always?) but not very high (especially when compared to other 401(k) funds!).
  • They are proprietary funds that are only available to fund participants, so there’s no ticker symbol or way to track them in Mint or Personal Capital. This costs me time every month, checking the balance to put in my net worth calculation. (3-5 minutes per month)
  • Having the 401(k) account gives me access to a completely free financial planner who is paid on salary (not commission!) if I ever want it. (I used to work in that department with those planners, so I know they’re good!)

So are the slightly higher fees and the inconvenience of having to manually check the account monthly worth the free access to a financial planner? I’m not sure! (Let me know what you think in the comments!) But I requested the rollover paperwork anyway, so I can choose one way or another once the paperwork arrives.

Day 13 – Set Up an Emergency Savings Account

Multiply your mandatory monthly spending by 3 and by 6 (so, if you spend $2,000/month, your range is $6,000-12,000.) Put this much money into a savings account separate from your everyday checking. This is not meant for fun or vacations – it’s for true emergencies (like a sudden medical expense or job loss).

Hint: Capital One 360 is a fee-free savings account with no minimums – perfect for an emergency fund! And you can use the opening bonus and refer-a-friend bonuses to boost your savings.

Done! Like I said in Day 9, we have cash for 6+ months of expenses. That’s waaaaaaay too much cash! That money should be earning better than the interest rate we get in our savings accounts. So, we decided to leave just 3 months’ worth in cash, and move the rest into investment accounts. (In a true emergency we could always sell those investments… though that would be sad. So that’s a last resort!)

I’ll have more to say about our reasoning for reducing our cash holdings in a later post. 🙂

Day 14 – Discover Your Net Worth

Use an aggregator like Personal Capital to find your net worth. The software can do this for you. It will total up your assets (bank accounts, 401k, brokerage accounts, and home value) and subtract any debts (credit card balances, student loans, car loan, and mortgage).

Done! Been tracking my net worth monthly for the last 10 years. 😀 It’s a really useful number, especially to be able to see progress over time. And it’s the main driver behind my major goals (such as “Hit a net worth of $38,901 by June 2017” – the goal I decided on last week!).

Dav 15 – Rest

You’re half way there. Good job! You deserve a breather.

Phew! Alright, if you insist. 😉

Alright, we reached the halfway point! How is the cleanse going for YOU so far? Do you feel like you have a good solid plan for your finances now? Let me know in the comments below!

Photo credit: RawPixel.com

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30-Day Money Cleanse – Week 1: Awareness

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30-Day Money Cleanse - Awareness of Your Money

I’m doing a 30-day money cleanse, because even personal finance bloggers can benefit from revisiting their finances with fresh eyes once in a while! Whether you’re doing the cleanse straight from Personal Capital’s blog, or making it into a game with me on Habitica, I thought it would be fun to compare notes as we go!

Note: The text here differs slightly from what you find in the original 30-Day Money Cleanse on Personal Capital‘s blog. That’s because the text here is the edited version I used in my Habitica challenge. It includes some extra helpful hints I added to the cleanse when making it into a game!

I’ll show you mine…

Day 1 – Track Down Your Money

List all your financial institutions and your username/password to access them. And I mean all. Banks, credit cards, debt, investment accounts, 401k, IRAs, 529s, all of it. You’ll never have a chance at getting your financial life in order – much less improve it – if you don’t know where you are now.

I got to coast along and just check this one right off without lifting a finger. I already have the balances for all of my accounts (all of them) from calculating my net worth each month.

I also already made a document with all of the username/password info, kept in a secure place that only my husband knows about. We did this right before the baby was born, just in case anything happened to me during the delivery. It’s not a happy subject to talk to your partner about, of course. But if you are in a long-term relationship and your partner is even a little reliant on your income, you need to make sure they have access in case you become incapacitated!

Day 2 – Identify Your Financial Goals

Make your goals time-bound and concrete: “I want to pay down all credit card debt within 4 months” or “I want to retire at 50 with $2M saved.” We all have goals and whether you’re paying down debt or saving for a home it’s important to set a date and make a plan. Without clear guidelines forward, it’s far too easy to overspend on discretionary items as well as miss opportunities for wealth creation.

It’s been a while since I revisited my goals (because of the baby), so this is a really good exercise. Back at the end of December, I put forth some things that I’d like to see happen in 2017:

  • Get net worth back above $34,293 as quickly as possible. – ACCOMPLISHED!
  • Hit $38,901 soon after that. That’s the inverse of my “career low” from September 2009.
  • Max out both of our IRAs and HSA for 2017. We have until April of 2018 to do it!

Having already accomplished that first one, I’m pretty happy to turn “B” and “C” into actual goals:

  • Hit a net worth of $38,901 by June 2017.
  • Max out both IRAs and our HSA for 2017 (by April 15th, 2018). – That’s $11,000 + $6,750 = $17,750 ($1365/month)

These are some hefty stretch goals, considering I’m just now getting back to work after my maternity leave, and trying to work exclusively from home! But since the HSA is a top priority, and the money that goes into the HSA and the IRAs are pre-tax, it may just be do-able.

Day 3 – Use an Aggregator

There’s no need to make things harder for yourself than they need to be. Use Personal Capital or Mint.com to see at a glance your spending by category to identify where you spend the most.

I took this opportunity to sign up for Personal Capital… finally! (I know, I know – what kind of personal finance blogger am I that it took me this long?!?) I’ve been using Mint since 2007, but I kinda missed the boat when Personal Capital first came along. It took less than 10 minutes to sign up and get it set up, thanks to having all of my account info handy (see Day 1 above!). Good thing, too, since the baby woke up from a nap just as I was adding my final account!

Day 4 – Know How Much You Make

When it comes to your money, knowing rough estimates isn’t doing you any favors. Not putting that money to work in investments or your retirement accounts means you’re leaving opportunities to grow your wealth on the table. Check your pay stub and see how much you actually take home after taxes, health insurance, etc.

This one is a little tough, because I’m just now starting to work from home again following my maternity “leave,” and I am partially a W2 employee, partially a freelancer, and my income is always variable month-to-month. However, I have spreadsheets where I keep careful track of my earnings each month. And through doing my taxes, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the number for what I earned last year. I’m getting pretty intimate with what I earn right now!

Day 5 – Know How Much You Spend

Automatically bucket expenses into categories (e.g. insurance, debt payments, rent/mortgage, groceries, or discretionary spending like clothing or dining out). It pays to know how much of your money goes where. You might find that dining out is costing you hundreds more dollars a month than you intended.

Hint: Remember, you signed up for an aggregator like Personal Capital or Mint.com back on Day 3 to make this easy!

I spent some time looking through my transactions and reports on Personal Capital and Mint. And it’s a good thing I did! I noticed right away that my dental insurance had double-charged me for the month of February. I called them up and got the second charge refunded – that’s a cool $29.74 back in my pocket!

It’s really good to be looking at my spending right now – we had no idea how much it would change after having the baby. The good news is that it looks like it has gone down (no time to eat out or go do stuff!), even as we’re spending small amounts on things for a whole new person.

Day 6 – Prioritize Your Spending

Rank all of your discretionary items from most to least important – if you’d rather dine out than shop for clothes, your ranking should reflect this.

So “discretionary items” are any non-essentials (meaning I don’t have to include diapers and groceries in there!). I looked at my transactions going back to when the baby was born, and determined what non-essentials we spent money on. Then, I ranked them:

  1. Business spending
  2. Movies & Netflix
  3. Video games
  4. Gifts & charity
  5. Fast food & snacks
  6. Clothes
  7. Office supplies
  8. Books, toys, etc. for baby
  9. Books for the grownups

Honestly it was really hard to do this ranking, and every time I look at it, I want to change it some more. Do I really want to spend on office supplies more than on books for the baby? Except… grandparents can be relied on to buy baby things (whether we want them to or not!), but if we want some new pens, we have to buy those ourselves. Basically, prioritizing is hard.

Day 7 – Calculate Savings

Now that you know how much you bring home after taxes and insurance every month, put that extra capital to work! Subtract your monthly spending from your monthly income. Add that total to any retirement plan contributions (e.g. a 401k) so you see how much you can save. Allocating leftover sums of money over time can turn into traveling during retirement or owning a second home.

Oh, this so doesn’t work for my situation. Instead, we live off of one income (my husband’s) and save the other (mine). So our savings rate is supposed to be “whatever I can earn in a month.” Which is wildly unpredictable right now, since it’s based on “how much the baby sleeps this month” and “how much work is available.” Still, I guess the important thing is that I know that. My savings is just whatever I can manage to earn!

How about you – how’s the money cleanse going for you? Did you find any surprises in your earnings or spending? Are you excited about the goals you’ve set?

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Play the “30-Day Money Cleanse” Game With Me!

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Make a game out of a 30-day money cleanse
In this money game, you won’t end up flipping a table out of frustration.

Everyone can benefit from revisiting their finances from time-to-time, even those of us who think we’ve got a handle on them already. But I can be a lazy procrastinator sometimes. So whenever possible, I try to find a way to make a “Should Do” into an “Oh Man, Let’s Do This!” by making it fun.

Personal Capital, a financial software and investment company, has on their blog a wonderful little 30-day money cleanse, written by one of their senior VPs, Michelle Brownstein. And it’s a good money exercise! I know that even I (someone who already thinks about her money way too much) would do well to go on this “cleanse.” Even my finances need a tune up, from time to time.

They even emailed me this nice printable calendar, which I know I should print out and work through:

30-Day Money Cleanse from Personal Capital
30-day money cleanse calendar – grab the printable: [PDF]
But, here I am – weeks after someone first sent this to me, and I haven’t done it. I haven’t even done Day 1. Before today, I didn’t even look at anything past the intro in the blog post. I just keep putting it off! It’s been open in a tab in my browser forever.

What if this weren’t just a money cleanse… but a game? What if I had an avatar, and completing the different tasks in the money cleanse earned me XP to level up, and gold to buy silly outfits and equipment? What if I could have little pets and mounts for my avatar? Could I turn this money cleanse into a video game, so that I would complete the tasks just to level up?

Habitica Avatar Stephonee PoorerThanYou.com
Why yes, my avatar is wearing a wizard hat and sunglasses, riding a white wolf, and has a peppermint fox friend. What of it?

Enter Habitica – a gamified to-do list app (for browser, Android, and iOS) that turns my good habits, daily tasks, and to-dos into XP and gold earning opportunities! (And turns my bad habits and missed daily tasks into enemies that hurt my avatar’s health bar.) I’ve been using Habitica since early 2014, and I can definitely say that it has made my life better. Proof: I now floss, every. single. day. And I barely missed a single day of taking my prenatal vitamins during my entire pregnancy and beyond. Because if I didn’t do these things, my avatar would lose health points!

So if Habitica can get me to floss and take my vitamins every day, can it get me to actually go through with the money cleanse I’ve been putting off?

Of course it can!

And it can do the same for you.

That’s why I turned the 30-Day Money Cleanse into a “challenge” on Habitica. Challenges are “community events in which players compete and earn prizes by completing a group of related tasks” according to the Habitica wiki. That’s perfect for this money cleanse! So I put up the prize myself (10 “gems” – a currency in Habitica that you can only get by putting up real money, or winning challenges!) for someone who completes the challenge along with me.

I took all 30 days of the money cleanse and put them into the challenge, along with some helpful hints of my own about how to use Habitica to get the most out of the 30-day cleanse!

Habitica Challenge - The 30-Day Money Cleanse
How the challenge looks inside the browser version of Habitica – easy, right?

Completing each day in the cleanse will earn your character gold, and one lucky winner will also get the 10-gem prize I’ve put up for the challenge. Get in on the cleanse now to be eligible to win the 10-gem prize!

Current Habitica users can simply click the button below to join the challenge and get started! If you are new to Habitica, you will need to sign up for an account (it’s free!), and you’ll probably want to complete the short tutorial. Then, click the button below to join the challenge!

Play Now & Win!

Of course, you can do the 30-Day Money Cleanse without joining the Habitica challenge. (Play it straight “vanilla,” if you will.) Whether you use Habitica to motivate yourself or just do the cleanse straight up, I’d love to hear how it goes for you! I’ll be posting a summary of my progress as I complete it myself, so come on back and let me know how it’s going for you.

Photo credits: Jason Devaun, Habitica

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