America's Cheapest Family

Can you imagine being a family of 7 people and living on a post-taxes annual budget of $35,000 per year? Seems borderline impossible, but it seems there is a family who has done it out in Arizona as detailed in the linked post over at The Digerati Life by Silicon Valley Blogger, who does some really nice takeaway tips from looking at this amazing family.

The one that jump out at me most (since it is where I think I hit my own personal wall) is the notion of organizing yourself properly to attack a life of greater frugality. Oh, as if any words could ever be so true as this! I think of all the times where I spent more money than I needed due to just not planning ahead:

• Not packing a lunch and then blowing money on an overpriced meal at the company cafeteria (which just ticks me off all the more because the food is less-than-delicious)
• Wasting food (especially fresh vegetables) I bought because I got caught up in doing too much during the week and it goes bad
• Buying something I saw in the store the first time I see it when, chances are, it's much cheaper on-line

In fact, I think when it comes to eating, that is where I run into the biggest issue. I like the idea of cooking a lot at once so I have tons of food on hand whenever I am ready to eat... but for reasons that continue to elude me, I don't do a great job of putting it into practice.

My baby steps goal is to getting in a bunch of weekend cooking and store it all away for the week. It's just one step, but one that will avoid a lot of last minute stops at places that are overpriced and (lest I forget) 100 times less healthy than what I can whip up myself.

Simple Living: The Journey's First Steps

Over the past few days, I've gotten a few pieces of fairly unwelcome financial news. Yesterday, I found out I needed about $800 of work on my car to fix up the O2 sensor and catalytic converter so I could pass my emissions test. Then today, I got the really super news at the
dentist that I have a crack in one of my molars and will need a crown… which AFTER insurance will run me $1,200. Needless to say, my wallet is a touch on the sore side this evening as I look over these completely unexpected costs.

All of this is a good lead-in (at least there was some silver lining to all of this) to something I've been thinking a lot about of late and something I plan on posting about quite a bit: what it would take and what it would mean to live a much simpler life. It occurs me quite a bit whenever I incur some financial hit because a simple life means seeking to live below your means and giving you a great deal of personal freedom.

This is not exactly a topic I plan on trying to tackle all in a single post, but I wanted to at least get the concept flowing now for everyone to consider since I'm sure there are a lot of people out
there who long for a little less life complication. So where to begin with a topic so vast? I thought this was a nice little piece over at Get Rich Slowly on how to get more value on what you already have.

It's a pretty interesting concept: Before you pull the trigger to make a purchase, get into the habit of being mindful to ask 2 questions:

1. How often will you use the item; and
   
2. How much enjoyment will you get out of it?

I've started to get myself into this habit of late because it can be very easy for me to confuse need against want. Perfect example. My car was giving me more hassles than I care to think about with the need for maintenance… and of course this was all kicking in after I got that bugger paid off. Feeling fed up with my car (the incredibly sexy 2001 Nissan Altima GXE… Limited Edition… because, you know… they only made like eleventy billion of them), I swung by an Infiniti dealership on my drive out from picking my ride up from service. I took an Infiniti G35x out for a spin and… holy crap, that was nice. I was rather smitten.

Oh sweet siren... call me not to my doom upon the rocks!

But you know what? As I left the dealership, got home and let the euphoria of dropping the hammer on 306 incredibly sweet horses wash away… I realized it was just a car. That's it. A really nice car, but just a car. It wouldn't change who I was as a person nor would it suddenly make me the definition of refined cool (as the commercials would suggest). What it would do is add an additional $650 to $700 per month to my budget with car payments and higher insurance premiums. So for me, it wasn't worth it… at least not yet. My car will crap out eventually and is rapidly approaching 100K miles, but until that time, it gets the job done.

This is a small step, but an important one - to begin to cut myself off from thinking things bring about the happiness or satisfaction you imagine they might as you consider snapping them up. It doesn't have to be something as elaborate and expensive as a finely tuned luxury sports sedan.

So here's to first steps that will, hopefully, lead to more and more steps... and more blog postings.

Keeping Your Finances Mint-y Fresh

We all want to be better with our money (at least I do), but is it just me or is it not a pain to track all of it? Where are you spending those hard-earned dollars that seem to flow out as fast as they come in? Are you dropping cash at Whole Foods like a Halo 3 addict drops cash on Red Bulls and snack cakes? No? That's just me? Damn...

But it is an important topic during the most consumer-frenzy of times right now as people invade every retail outlet known to man for their Black Friday deals. It looks like things have gone to a new level this year with places opening up at 1 freaking AM. Ugh. So how to tame the spending beast and keep a few more sheckels in your pockets or at least know where those hard-earned coins are heading? For me, I am trying Mint.com, seen here in a delightful photo.

Mint.com is part of an ever-growing wave of personal finances Web sites designed to help you track your expenses, figure out where you are killing yourself and even offering a list of deals that could save you money based on services you are currently using. So, whether it's Mint, Wesabe, Mvelopes or a potential Web-based version of Quicken, there is certainly more resources than ever (with Mint and Wesabe being free) to help you in the quest to manage the almighty dollar.

At its core, Mint pulls in information from each of the financial institutions (banks, credit unions and credit card companies) you provide to it and then categorizes your cash flow for you. This obviously begins with a leap of faith in providing to Mint all of the necessary log-in information needed for Mint to automatically gather all of this information and there is a key crux of the matter: Are you comfortable with your financial information being pulled in real-time by a 3rd party? The folks at Mint do go into a fair amount of detail here about what they do to protect your critical information, from encryption in the data transfers, using the same tool as many large banks for gathering your information and even hacking their own site.

Once you are into Mint, the site allows you to get an overview of each of the accounts you have enabled Mint to pull data from. Here is a snapshot of my own account (with the more critical information blurred out from your nosey types), but at least giving you an idea of how Mint displays your transaction information.

Mint can also break down your spending into nifty pie and bar charts by category as well.

In addition, Mint seeks to provide you with offers to save you money by doing an analysis of your current credit card rates, spending habits, monthly bills, etc. Again, this gets down to a matter of whether you find this like a creepy financial Big Brother eyeballing your accounts or a personalized way to provide relevant offers. Of course, these offers don't hurt our buddies at Mint too much since I am sure there is a financial benefit for them if you end up signing up for the offers. There has to be some way to pay for a free site. I am more prone to think of these as being an improved means by which to view some potentially money-saving offers (although I am not sure how the offer below saves me much money right now since I am looking to pay down a balance and would rather enjoy a 7.9% APR vs. 13.74%):
So here's a quick summation of the whole Mint shooting match:

Good Times
- Pulls together information/financial transactions from a wide range of financial sources
- Mint categorizes items automatically and while it may be off on occasion, it is pretty simple to change the categories on a one-off or permanent basis.
- Interesting feature to compare potential savings or deals based on accounts you have or purchases you have made.

Ehh
- While it is great at pulling in past transactions, Mint does not have any features (as of yet) to put in future payments, credits, etc. In this sense, having a personal financial program like Quicken or Money really is a big benefit.
- No support for investment account information
- For the privacy-phobic, it may be scary to have a third party pulling all of your financial information into one place.

I think it is well worth a try since it's free and easy enough to stop the service if you are not finding benefit to it. In the end, it is like almost anything when it comes to money - if you are not being vigilant about it and making use of your personal finance tools, no amount of snazzy gadgetry is going to do you much good.