Aspiring Blogger – Personal Finance Carnival #6 – May 17, 2013

by AB@AspiringBlogger.com

Personal Finance Carnival #6 – May 17, 2013 - Aspiring Blogger

Before we get started, I just want to say that this is the 75th published post on AspiringBlogger.com!!! It’s been almost 9 months in the making, but I’m pretty damn proud of that! Not long before the magical 100! Thanks to everyone who has helped encourage and support me throughout this journey – I appreciate it more than you know!
 

Welcome to the May 17, 2013 edition of Aspiring Blogger – Personal Finance Carnival! I’m pretty disappointed by the number of submissions for this post. I’ve typically had between 15-25 and had to edit that number down due to duplicates, poor content, etc. Today I started with 7 submissions and only 4 were good enough to share with you. Hopefully people aren’t sick of this – I know several people have emailed me or commented that they’re seeing a significant increase in traffic after being featured in one of my carnivals. It think before the next carnival, I’ll send out an email to anyone who has submitted something in the past seeing if they want to contribute again – maybe they’re just busy and need a little reminder.

All of the authors have put a lot of effort into writing their articles, so please  take a few minutes and click through to read each one that interests you. If you’re interested in participating in the next blog carnival, you can find out details here or submit your post here! Thanks for stopping by!

AB

Blog Friends

Mr.CBB presents Junk To Funk: Some Woman Down The Road Left Me With Hardwood posted at Canadian Budget Binder, saying, “It’s not everyday I come across a money maker in the streets for free but when I do see it I jump on it. Often a simple DIY project can yield you savings in your budget or profits to your bank account if you can sell it. Watch me turn junk into funk and save!”

Frugality

David Leonhardt presents Laundry costs and how to save money posted at The Happy Guy, saying, “Put clothes to the smell test. If they smell like sweat, put them in the laundry. If they don’t smell like sweat, they are still good to wear. If a person is in the habit of tossing their PJs in the wash each morning, they could save close to $100 per year just by wearing them 3 nights. $100 per person. A family of five could save $500 a year.”

Personal Finance

John Schmoll presents 5 Things I Wish I Knew Before I Graduated From College posted at Frugal Rules, saying, “It’s sadly been too long since I graduated from college. There are a number of things I wish I knew before I did, chiefly among them avoiding debt, investing early by taking advantage of a 401k and networking all with the intention of growing professionally as well as growing my wealth.”

Andrew presents How to Escape Second-Hand Car Scams – student-finance.com.au posted at student-finance.com.au, saying, “Buying a second hand car can be a real risky venture. Its happened to many people where they drive away and find out a month later there is a problem with the motor that will cost a couple thousand to fix, or the car could have been involved in an accident and wont pass registration. This article has some great tips that will help you from getting scammed and a good vehicle that works.”

Conclusion

That concludes this edition. I want to thank everyone who submitted a post – just because we didn’t have a lot of submissions doesn’t mean they weren’t good quality posts! I normally ask you to make sure to read at least a few posts – but this time, I think you can spare a few minutes and read all of them! Let me know in the comments what you thought of them. Do you see anything I could do differently to attract more submissions?

Submit your article to the next edition of Aspiring Blogger – Personal Finance Carnival using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future edition information can be found on my blog carnival index page.

 

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Net Worth Update – April 2013

by AB@AspiringBlogger.com

Aspiring Blogger April 2013 Net WorthApril was definitely a transitional month in the Aspiring Blogger household. We got rid of the monkey on our back by paying our massive (to us) tax bill, went on vacation, and had some extra expenses related to our impending home purchase. While our net worth increase was down substantially compared to previous months, we still managed to squeeze out a small increase. Mainly due to the new house purchase I expect our net worth increases to be smaller than normal (or even negative) for the next few months. Hopefully it will be a short-lived trend, but if you know me – I’ll be keeping an eye on it! Read on for all the details behind April’s net worth changes.

ASSETS:

Cash – +$0 – After my reconciliation last month, we have a pretty good grasp on how much cash we have on hand. I brought back some foreign currency from our overseas trip, but I’ve decided not to include that here, as it’s only about $50 worth, and it’ll be annoying to keep remembering! I know it’s not as exact as I like to be, but I’m ok with that in this case.

Cash Savings – -$4,290 – I hate to admit it, but unfortunately this number is accurate! If you read April’s Income and Expense Report, then you already know that the main culprit here is the $3,988 we sent to the IRS at the beginning of the month. The rest is mainly due to house expenses (the appliances we bought from the seller and other expenses we’ll cover later) which were pretty much expected.

Emergency Fund – +$13 – Nothing special again here – the interest just keeps rolling (slowly) in, and assuming we don’t have an emergency, it will continue.

Taxable Investments – +$0 – Once we are settled into the new house and our new budget is established, then I’ll start looking around for something to do here.

Roth IRA – +$1,065 – The stock market gains weren’t awesome during April, but we continue to pour money in at a rate of $916.67 a month. These accounts are a big part of our early retirement / financial independence plan, so we will continue to fund them no matter what’s going on with the economy.

401(k) – +$1,314 – Like our Roth IRA’s, some of this is investment gain, but most is new money we are putting in.

Auto Value – +$0 – Calculating the value of our two cars this month was a strange exercise for April. When I did my typical calculation it showed that the cars had actually INCREASED in value by $576! Looking back at March/April 2012, we had a similar increase – which leads me to believe that there’s a spike in used car values around the March/April timeframe. Even though the cars showed an increase in value, I decided to be conservative (and assume that cars don’t actually appreciate in value) and use March’s value. It’s funny that it was only last month that I wrote about the depreciation curve slowing down for our cars – even I couldn’t predict that their values would start going back up!

Home Value – +$2,500 – Astute readers will notice that I’ve added a new category this month. As we continue the process of buying a house, I will be including this category to capture the value of our home, along with a category under liabilities to capture the mortgage. The $2,500 listed here is our “earnest money” that we currently have deposited with the title company. It will be applied toward our down payment, so it will be included in our equity once we close on the house.

LIABILITIES:

Credit Card – -$1,041 – As we were on vacation a good chunk of the month, we didn’t have a good opportunity to spend like we normally do. I’m sure this number will increase during April as we continue to purchase “necessities” for the new house! :)

OVERALL:

Whew – that was a rough one! I’ve been keeping track of our net worth for almost four years now, and this was the “worst” month in over a year – and that month included the loss we took on selling our previous home! Having said that, it wasn’t unexpected and I still consider it a decent (if not great) month. As we move further into 2013 I expect these reports to fluctuate a lot more due to the change in housing, income, etc. Thanks for reading, stay tuned for the next update!

How did your net worth do in April? What do you think of how we dealt with the increase in auto value? How would you have handled it? Let me know in the comments!

AB

 

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Income and Expense Report – April 2013

by AB@AspiringBlogger.com

Income and Expenses April 2013 Aspiring Blogger

Damn – not the month I was hoping for. Of course, I was expecting most of this, and I actually thought we’d have a negative net income for the month – so this is good…in a way! We had that bad combination of a lot of expenses hitting (most that we were expecting, but a couple that came up) all at once and an income that is down from previous months. I’m VERY happy that we managed to keep the net income positive – keep reading for all the details!

INCOME:

Job 1 – +$0 – No change here, thanks to the massive amount (in my opinion) of taxes I’m having withheld from my paycheck twice a month. My company just completed our annual performance evaluation process, so if I did well during that (I won’t find out the result until the end of June) then I’ll be getting a raise effective July 1! Last year my raise was a little less than 6%, so I’m hoping for at least that much this year. Of course, I’ll let you know once I know something!

Job 2 – -$1,318 – During March we had the benefit of three pay periods, but April we were back to normal with two, so this brings Mrs AB’s income back to normal. If all goes to plan, then Mrs AB will be quitting at the end of July, so we only have three months left of her income – we definitely need to maximize it while we still have it coming in!

Interest – -$0 – We’re actually down $.27 this month due to the 30 day month (vs 31 in March) and balances that aren’t increasing as much as they should. You’ll see why later, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on. Of course, the majority of this interest income is made from the money we’ll be using as a down payment on our new house, which will be spent in a few weeks. It’ll be interesting to see how drastically that impacts this number.

Extra Income - -$131 – Mrs AB brought in more teaching money and more money from her athletic coaching gig during April. Both of these incomes streams are due to end during May – at least temporarily. I also received a small ($19) state tax refund from another state where I worked for a couple of days last year. As my company paid the taxes and I’m getting the refund, I consider this income…so just go with it! :)

EXPENSES:

Rent – (just the rent) +$0 – We’re nearing the end of the road for this category. Soon it will shift to the “mortgage” or “house payment stuff” category, or something similar. We’ve agreed with our landlord on a move out date, which gives us a couple of weeks of overlap with our new house, so we’ll have plenty of time to clean, move in, etc. I just setup our final rent payment in my online bill payer – and I can’t tell you what an awesome feeling that was. It’s definitely time for us to move!

Home - (Utilities – Electric, Gas, Water, Internet, Home Furnishings, Insurance) +$84 – I thought it was strange that I hadn’t seen a bill for our renter’s insurance (we moved into our rental in March 2012), so I emailed my agent and apparently it had been sent and we hadn’t received it. The bad news is that we had to pay it during April and it was higher than last year. Other than that, we just had normal bills in here.

Car – (Insurance, Maintenance) -$23 – We didn’t spend anything on the cars this month, so this category was $0 – great job to us!!!

Gas - (gas & tolls) -$201 – This is a strange one in my opinion. We were out of town for about 1/3 of the month, so of course we drove a lot less than normal. On top of that, I received $434 in expense reimbursement from previous months. When you add all that together, it works out to negative $65 in spending for the month…crazy!!! It won’t always look like this, but I’ll enjoy it whenever I can.

Groceries - (Anything we spend at Wal-Mart/Sam’s Club/Kroger/etc) -$242 – After really going crazy during March, we scaled back our spending in April. Combined with our trip, we were able to cut a big chunk out of our grocery expenses for the month. Unfortunately, a lot of this decrease shows back up in our vacation budget a little later.

Eating Out - (pretty self explanatory) -$87– In a similar story to our grocery and gas budget, our vacation had a big impact on this category as well. We ate out a lot while on vacation, but those expenses are captured as vacation expenses and not eating out expenses. As we pack up more of our house and prepare to move I expect eating out expenses to increase.

Personal – (Dry Cleaning, Haircuts, Clothing, Medical, Vet, Other Pet Expenses) +$13 – Just a new pair of jeans in here for Mrs AB in here.

Vacation – (any Vacation spending) -$123 – Ok, so this category looks wrong – and it is. I went on vacation expecting to use an ATM to pull out local currency to pay for things while were there. Instead, my dad had a lot of local currency and he acted as the ATM. All that’s accounted for in here are a couple of airport expenses and a few nights in a hotel that I put on my credit card. I think there’s somewhere close to $1k (maybe a little less) still to be added to this total, but that will appear in May’s income and expense report.

Misc – (Allowance, Gifts, Entertainment, Other) +$4,932 – Uhhh…yeah… not good. So let me try and explain. The main item in here is the $3,988 we sent to the IRS at the beginning of the month. On top of that, we bought some appliances (front loading washer, dryer, pedestals, and a refrigerator) from the sellers of our new house and paid $1,000 for all of them, which we think is an AWESOME deal! We are probably going to get a new fridge and use this one as an extra/drinks fridge, but this will give us more time to find a good deal on one. On top of that, a $200 check cleared to the seller of the previous house we were under contract on (he had been sitting on it for a while). This was our “option fee” and the seller was able to keep it as we exercised our option not to buy the house. I have no regrets, and the $667 or so we ended up spending on that house to not end up buying is probably a fraction of what we would have sunk into it. If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Money Pit” with Tom Hanks – you can get a pretty good idea of what our house would have been like!

OVERALL:

I feel good knowing that we are officially out of the crosshairs of the IRS. While this month was painful from a net income perspective, it definitely gave us a good bang for our buck. With the purchase of our new house scheduled for the end of May there will definitely be a lot more expenses coming up. Having said that, if we can survive the IRS, appliances, and other random expenses in a month – I feel pretty good about our outlook

I’m a little scared to look at our net worth for this month – we definitely didn’t add much cash to the pile during April, so we’ll see if it struggled like our net income. Stay tuned, I should have that for you in a few days!

Did your April spending work out as you expected? Are you on track for your 2013 income and expense goals? Let me know in the comments!

AB

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Time Management – Getting Things Done!

by AB@AspiringBlogger.com

I thought that things would settle down (both at work and home) after our vacation - but I  was WRONG! If anything, things seem to be busier now. I feel like I have no time to get ahead on anything – especially anything related to this site and my other online interests. Not much I can do except get through this busy time and really get some things moving once I can. I have lot of goals and ideas, I just need sufficient time (and motivation) to get them done.

I know I’m here complaining about being busy and not having any time, but if I’m honest – I need to do a better job of time management. I spend a lot of time goofing off online – reading blogs, news, playing games, etc – when I could (and should) be working on blog-related tasks. My main reasoning for this is that I use the games and surfing as an escape from long days at the office and all the other stressors in my life. In reality – I end up wasting a lot of time :( .

One of my big issues with our current house (the rental) is that my study isn’t in a separate room, it’s just in the middle of the house, so I don’t have a place to go and shut the door to get work done. In the new house, I will have a nice study with french doors that I can shut when I want to be alone with my thoughts. I can put up a whiteboard to plan out my tasks (a gift from Mrs AB a couple of years ago :) ) and make the room conducive to getting work done. Of course, just because I make it an awesome place to get work done, does that mean I’m actually going to work while I’m in there? Hell no!

I need to start setting smaller goals, milestones, and checkpoints so that I can always have something to be working towards. It’s great to have big, long-term goals – but I need some short-term ones as well if I want to stay focused and on task! I’m looking forward to getting settled into the new house (we should be moving in a month, so it’ll be a little longer than that) and putting some new systems in place to help me be a better version of myself. Thanks to all of you for sticking with me and reading what I put out – it’s always appreciated! If you have any tips or suggestions for time management techniques, I’d love to hear about them!

AB

Oh, and if you’ve got a minute – make sure to head over to Jon’s site (dadislearning.com) where he’s featuring blogs (including this one!) that have helped him save money and make it grow. Thanks so much for the shout out!!!

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Aspiring Blogger – Personal Finance Carnival #5 – May 3, 2013

by AB@AspiringBlogger.com

Aspiring Blogger – Personal Finance Carnival #5 – May 3, 2013

Welcome to the May 5, 2013 edition of Aspiring Blogger – Personal Finance Carnival! I’ve added a new category today for “Blog Friends” to highlight their articles. Today we’ve just got Mr. CBB, but I’m sure there will be more soon. If you want to be featured in this section, just hang out here – read the articles, make comments, and interact – like Mr. CBB! All of the authors have put a lot of effort into writing their articles, so please  take a few minutes and click through to read each one that interests you. If you’re interested in participating in the next blog carnival, you can find out details here or submit your post here! Thanks for stopping by!

AB

Blog Friends

Mr.CBB presents Life, Money and Retirement~Skype Doesn’t Reach Heaven posted at Canadian Budget Binder, saying, “Sometimes we need to ask ourselves why we work so hard for all the money we make and whether we are spending our time wisely. Pouring your life into one basket risks leaving behind potential memories that you might not be able to go back and get. Take time to evaluate your life, your priorities and your future.”

Budgeting

David Bar presents What To Tip Your Server posted at Barwhiz Blog, saying, “Tipping differs from country to country, base don history and culture. This guide will help you tip correctly as you wander from one country to the other.”

Financial Freedom

Jon and Krista Maroni presents Specific Ways to Start a Retirement Plan posted at Responsible and Generous Living in Early Adulthood, saying, “This post it to urge young people who avoid thinking about retirement to take really specific steps in starting their retirement plans and learning how to make a substantial sum of money so they’re free from income stress when they reach age 65.”

Financial Independence

gmeinna presents 6 Ways To Finance Your Startup | BobbyFinance posted at BobbyFinance.

Frugality

Rhiana presents Couponing 101: Where to get Coupons posted at A Frugal Life, saying, “Learn advance coupon techniques with Lesson 2 of A Frugal Life’s online couponing course.”

Justin presents Find Your Financial Path: Start the Journey Today – The Frugal Path posted at The Frugal Path, saying, “Sometimes the hardest step is the very first one that you must take. This can be especially true with personal finances.”

Location Independence

Jason Hull presents Do FBAR and FATCA Affect You If You Plan On Becoming an Expatriate? posted at Hull Financial Planning, saying, “If you plan on becoming a backpacking vagabond living in the steppes of Tajikistan, you’ll still need money to live on. Will the long arm of the IRS touch you? Here’s how to stay in their good graces if you want to be an expat.”

Making Money Online

Richard Adams presents Why You Should Avoid Paypal Like The Plague posted at Lifestyle Design Unleashed, saying, “Last month I lost my Paypal account. Find out what I did wrong and the lessons you can learn.”

John Schmoll presents Online Brokerages I Use: OptionsHouse Review posted at Frugal Rules, saying, “There are many online brokerages to use as you look to invest in the stock market. The good ones are there to meet your needs and help make sure you’re doing what you can to be investing for things like retirement.”

Frankline Sewe presents Make Your Blog Stand Tall posted at Make Money, saying, “The blogging tips will help you learn to write better and earn more money from your blogs”

Personal Finance

Bill Smith presents TurboTax Continues To Grow In Popularity posted at 2011 Taxes, saying, “Millions of people utilize TurboTax in order to file their income taxes annually. In fact, Intuit recently reported that sales for its products have increased since last year.”

Jennifer Saksa presents New Free Personal Finance Software posted at NCH Software Blog, saying, “MoneyLine is a brand new and free personal finance program to track all your money, bank accounts and spending in one place, to keep you organized and in control of your finances.”

David de Souza presents Should politicans have to publish their tax returns? posted at TaxFix Feed Update, saying, “Should politicians be forced to publish their tax returns? Or should they benefit from the same confidentiality and privacy as any other taxpayer?”

James Powell presents Tax Credits and Benefits Changes 2013 – How They Will Affect You : Tax Credits posted at Tax Credits, saying, “This post will look at how the changes in tax credits will affect you in 2013.”

Conclusion

That concludes this edition – I know, we had a LOT today! I want to thank everyone who submitted a post . Please take time to click through and read (at least a few) posts…PLEASE!!!

Submit your article to the next edition of Aspiring Blogger – Personal Finance Carnival using the carnival submission form. Past posts and future edition information can be found on my blog carnival index page.

 

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