Owner: My Family's Money URL:http://myfamilysmoney.com/blog/ Join Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:53:14 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: A personal finance blog that traces an anonymous family's journey through the miry clay of money Site statistics:Click here
Random Website Metrics and the Carnivals 2008-04-15 20:01:01 The Carnivals
Both the Carnival of Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality are up and running. The Carnival of Personal Finance #148 is up at Gather Little by Little. My post on outsourcing to your kids was included as an editors pick. In Glblguy's comments on my article he made a good point that when we outsource tasks to our children it is important that they have a voice in the proceedings. Otherwise it turns into a masked form of slavery, and nobody wants that!Kyle from Rather be Shopping was also kind enough to include my article about money poetry in the massive Festival of Frugality #121. Thanks!Website Metrics
Now on to my random website metrics. Today I was playing around with Google Analytics and fell quickly in love with their Map Overlay feature. It tells me how man Read more:Random
Credit Card Woes and Weird 2008-04-14 23:28:18 First the woes - I got hit with a $39 late fee yesterday because my due date was on a Sunday (why?) and when I made the payment on its due date it wouldn't except it until Monday, a day late. Talk about a bummer. I will try and call my credit card company and see if all the advice I've read about calling and asking them to waive a late fee for a loyal payer will work. Time will only tell. What makes it even a bigger bummer is that on Friday I knew that this type of thing was going to happen so I reminded myself on the bus to remember to do it once I got home. I think reading Oliver Twist on the ride home was not the proper step to take to ensure that I would remember. I think from now on I will pay the credit card as soon as I get the statement. Its may cost me a few pennies in int Read more:Weird
, Credit Card
Hump Day Humor: Cheap Admission 2008-04-16 09:01:00 Having money is great. Saving money to have more when you need it is always a good idea and it always pays off. But there is a conspiracy out there to separate me from my money. Whenever I want to use some service or to obtain some type of good, may it be in the form of some type of edible treat or skin warming fabric, people want to charge me money for it. I can't stand being charged for things that I need to survive, so when I stumbled upon a nice little scheme to get me 50% off the price of admission to various places of necessity I was shocked and awed by its subtle elegance. You see, with a little guile, a small amount of assembly skills, and an extremely flexible (or smallish) companion, you will never have to pay the full price for admission ever again.Here is how it works:You a Read more:Humor
, Cheap
, Admission
, Hump Day
Simplify Your Savings 2008-04-21 05:01:01 Photo by: helmet13There are a million and one ways to increase your savings. But for people like me, simplicity is essential to maintaining a long term involvement in managing money. If you make things complicated for yourself than you are never going to stick with it, because chances are you would much rather be doing something else. Using gimmicks and little tricks may provide some psychological benefit, but in the end I find that they add unnecessary clutter to savings goals and prove difficult to track - thus adding inefficiencies, frustration, and confusion into an otherwise simple equation:Earned Money - Spent Money = Saved MoneyThe goal is always to save more money. Some people choose to do this by earning more, others by saving more (some even do both, hurray for frugal capital Read more:Savings
I'm Pregnant! 2008-04-23 09:00:00 If all goes according to plan, by early November 2008 my wife and I will be the proud parents of a strapping young lad, like me. My wife thinks it is going to be a girl, but I know better - boy all the way baby!I am simply overjoyed with the thought of being a dad. There will be so much life to share with our little one, I simply can't wait until he is born and ready for interaction. I hear that most of the pregnancy and very early infancy is mostly mother-baby bonding time, but I'm still pretty excited to see my wife's belly grow and to hold a squirming, messy baby as it enters the world. I want to see his eyes and think that one day this child of mine will spread love in the world and shine brightly for all to see. I'll get to learn his thoughts and know his heart. I am sure there
Simplify Your Savings in 5 Simple Steps 2008-04-24 09:40:50 Could your savings use a lift? Is your wallet a little thin? Could you stand to pad your bank accounts? The equation for doing so is pretty simple. It looks something like this:Earned Money - Spent Money = Saved MoneyYou see, the mechanism for saving money is simple. All it takes is making more money than you spend and spending less money than you earn. Its simple, but not easy. Many of our savings resemble a poor, underfed pig rather than the fat, succulent creatures that put bacon on the table. In fact, 43% of Americans make a habit of spending more than they make (Source: How does your debt compare?) That is a lot of people! For these their saved money equation is all out of whack and resembles something like this:Spent Money = Earned Money + Saved Money (Borrowed Money)That is Read more:Savings
, Simple
Free $10, RFID, and the Invasion of Privacy 2008-04-28 12:55:31 A few days ago, I got a notice in the mail from Chase Card Services notifying me that from now until June 6, 2008 I will get $10 back if I make 3 purchases using their 'blink' transaction feature. A 'blink' transaction is one where all you do is hold your card up to a little pad and it automatically performs the transaction. It utilizes a RFID chip inside your credit card that emits a radio signal to the little pad that acts just like swiping your card, except you don't have to swipe it. It works just like a Speedpass does for gas stations, or a FasTrak , or the I.D. badges that communist party officials have to wear in China so that Big Brother can keep tabs on them. It's the same exact thing.I love free money (and so does my credit card compay) so I am planning on taking full advan Read more:Invasion
, Privacy
Calculating a Paycheck for a Raise 2008-05-01 09:01:01 Getting a raise is always welcome, especially when finances are tight and every little bit that comes in helps you pay your bills, put food on the table, and empowers you to provide for the basic needs of your family. But how much is that raise going to affect your income? There are two ways to find out:Wait until your paycheck comesDo the math (a.k.a. build a spreadsheet)I love building spreadsheets and can't stand the suspense of not knowing, so I would certainly choose the second option. Let the spreadsheet fun begin!Getting StartedCalculating how your raise will affect your paycheck depends largely on how you get paid and how often. If you are a salaried employee or an hourly employee who gets paid the same amount each pay period,* you have it extremely easy. One simple step will Read more:Paycheck
Where Has All the Content Gone? 2008-05-05 22:48:11 Things are a'happening here in the Lucre corner of the world wide web. I have been pretty lax in generating all that content you have come to rely upon to get you through your week because I have been working hard at getting a new version of my website up on my very own domain. I'm not that tech savy, so I have had to learn a lot in getting the new design up and running. When I haven't been working on learning some php or figuring out this new fangled thing called a plugin, I have been hanging out with my family, marching for babies, and learning about the absolute wonder of cob housing.I hope to get back to regular posting as soon as I can get things up and running. I have some ideas that I am really excited about and I can't wait to get them down to 0s and 1s. I'll post the new url Read more:Content
Where Has All the Content Gone? 2008-05-05 22:48:11 Things are a'happening here in the Lucre corner of the world wide web. I have been pretty lax in generating all that content you have come to rely upon to get you through your week because I have been working hard at getting a new version of my website up on my very own domain. I'm not that tech savy, so I have had to learn a lot in getting the new design up and running. When I haven't been working on learning some php or figuring out this new fangled thing called a plugin, I have been hanging out with my family, marching for babies, and learning about the absolute wonder of cob housing.I hope to get back to regular posting as soon as I can get things up and running. I have some ideas that I am really excited about and I can't wait to get them down to 0s and 1s. I'll post the new url Read more:Content
Calculating a Paycheck for a Raise 2008-05-01 09:01:01 Getting a raise is always welcome, especially when finances are tight and every little bit that comes in helps you pay your bills, put food on the table, and empowers you to provide for the basic needs of your family. But how much is that raise going to affect your income? There are two ways to find out:Wait until your paycheck comesDo the math (a.k.a. build a spreadsheet)I love building spreadsheets and can't stand the suspense of not knowing, so I would certainly choose the second option. Let the spreadsheet fun begin!Getting StartedCalculating how your raise will affect your paycheck depends largely on how you get paid and how often. If you are a salaried employee or an hourly employee who gets paid the same amount each pay period,* you have it extremely easy. One simple step will Read more:Paycheck
Free $10, RFID, and the Invasion of Privacy 2008-04-28 12:55:31 A few days ago, I got a notice in the mail from Chase Card Services notifying me that from now until June 6, 2008 I will get $10 back if I make 3 purchases using their 'blink' transaction feature. A 'blink' transaction is one where all you do is hold your card up to a little pad and it automatically performs the transaction. It utilizes a RFID chip inside your credit card that emits a radio signal to the little pad that acts just like swiping your card, except you don't have to swipe it. It works just like a Speedpass does for gas stations, or a FasTrak , or the I.D. badges that communist party officials have to wear in China so that Big Brother can keep tabs on them. It's the same exact thing.I love free money (and so does my credit card compay) so I am planning on taking full advan Read more:Invasion
, Privacy
Simplify Your Savings in 5 Simple Steps 2008-04-24 09:40:50 Could your savings use a lift? Is your wallet a little thin? Could you stand to pad your bank accounts? The equation for doing so is pretty simple. It looks something like this:Earned Money - Spent Money = Saved MoneyYou see, the mechanism for saving money is simple. All it takes is making more money than you spend and spending less money than you earn. Its simple, but not easy. Many of our savings resemble a poor, underfed pig rather than the fat, succulent creatures that put bacon on the table. In fact, 43% of Americans make a habit of spending more than they make (Source: How does your debt compare?) That is a lot of people! For these their saved money equation is all out of whack and resembles something like this:Spent Money = Earned Money + Saved Money (Borrowed Money)That is Read more:Savings
, Simple
I'm Pregnant! 2008-04-23 09:00:00 If all goes according to plan, by early November 2008 my wife and I will be the proud parents of a strapping young lad, like me. My wife thinks it is going to be a girl, but I know better - boy all the way baby!I am simply overjoyed with the thought of being a dad. There will be so much life to share with our little one, I simply can't wait until he is born and ready for interaction. I hear that most of the pregnancy and very early infancy is mostly mother-baby bonding time, but I'm still pretty excited to see my wife's belly grow and to hold a squirming, messy baby as it enters the world. I want to see his eyes and think that one day this child of mine will spread love in the world and shine brightly for all to see. I'll get to learn his thoughts and know his heart. I am sure there
Simplify Your Savings 2008-04-21 05:01:01 Photo by: helmet13There are a million and one ways to increase your savings. But for people like me, simplicity is essential to maintaining a long term involvement in managing money. If you make things complicated for yourself than you are never going to stick with it, because chances are you would much rather be doing something else. Using gimmicks and little tricks may provide some psychological benefit, but in the end I find that they add unnecessary clutter to savings goals and prove difficult to track - thus adding inefficiencies, frustration, and confusion into an otherwise simple equation:Earned Money - Spent Money = Saved MoneyThe goal is always to save more money. Some people choose to do this by earning more, others by saving more (some even do both, hurray for frugal capital Read more:Savings
Intellectual Commitments: Hard Determinist 2008-04-17 21:46:53 This is the first installment of my intellectual commitments series. It's a doozy ...I am a hard determinist. I believe that everything that has ever happened happened because it had to and that everything that will happen in the future must happen the way that it will. Being a hard determinist means that I reject the common construction of free will that says I can act or believe however I wish at any moment. I think that it can feel like we are free from all internal and external constraints and that we can act against our nature and disposition if we so choose, but I think that in reality that feeling is simply an illusion, a trick our mind, will, and heart play on us. I do hold to a very qualified and limited notion of freedom, but now is not the time for me to talk about that. Y Read more:Intellectual
, Commitments
Hump Day Humor: Cheap Admission 2008-04-16 09:01:00 Having money is great. Saving money to have more when you need it is always a good idea and it always pays off. But there is a conspiracy out there to separate me from my money. Whenever I want to use some service or to obtain some type of good, may it be in the form of some type of edible treat or skin warming fabric, people want to charge me money for it. I can't stand being charged for things that I need to survive, so when I stumbled upon a nice little scheme to get me 50% off the price of admission to various places of necessity I was shocked and awed by its subtle elegance. You see, with a little guile, a small amount of assembly skills, and an extremely flexible (or smallish) companion, you will never have to pay the full price for admission ever again.Here is how it works:You a Read more:Humor
, Cheap
, Admission
, Hump Day
Random Website Metrics and the Carnivals 2008-04-15 20:01:01 The Carnivals
Both the Carnival of Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality are up and running. The Carnival of Personal Finance #148 is up at Gather Little by Little. My post on outsourcing to your kids was included as an editors pick. In Glblguy's comments on my article he made a good point that when we outsource tasks to our children it is important that they have a voice in the proceedings. Otherwise it turns into a masked form of slavery, and nobody wants that!Kyle from Rather be Shopping was also kind enough to include my article about money poetry in the massive Festival of Frugality #121. Thanks!Website Metrics
Now on to my random website metrics. Today I was playing around with Google Analytics and fell quickly in love with their Map Overlay feature. It tells me how man Read more:Random
Credit Card Woes and Weird 2008-04-14 23:28:18 First the woes - I got hit with a $39 late fee yesterday because my due date was on a Sunday (why?) and when I made the payment on its due date it wouldn't except it until Monday, a day late. Talk about a bummer. I will try and call my credit card company and see if all the advice I've read about calling and asking them to waive a late fee for a loyal payer will work. Time will only tell. What makes it even a bigger bummer is that on Friday I knew that this type of thing was going to happen so I reminded myself on the bus to remember to do it once I got home. I think reading Oliver Twist on the ride home was not the proper step to take to ensure that I would remember. I think from now on I will pay the credit card as soon as I get the statement. Its may cost me a few pennies in int Read more:Weird
, Credit Card
Money Poetry - How I Lost Hundreds By Being a Scaredy Cat 2008-04-12 23:31:42 I like poetry. It's fun to read and even more fun to write. I enjoy the rhythm that well crafted words can have as they sit on a page - their hidden accents crying out to be given voice. Most of the poetry I have read in my life has not had much to do with money. It's mostly about love, or beauty, or love, or the violence inherent in the system, or love. Mostly it is just about love. My favorite poet is probably William Blake - he has this craziness about him that I find appealing and interesting. He didn't really write about money either, so that is what makes this little bit that I found the other day all that more interesting.Let wealth come in by comely thrift,And not by any sordid shift:'Tis hasteMakes waste;Extreames [sic] have still their fault;The softest Fire makes the sweetest Ma Read more:Money
, Poetry
, Hundreds
Outsource To Your Kids Already! 2008-04-10 09:51:15 Modern society has lost its ability to successfully employ its children. Don't worry, I am not about to advocate we abandon child labor laws or that we continue to exploit the world's poor through sweatshops and wage slavery. What I am about to do is argue that we can successfully employ our children to do things that promote the health of our family, teach our kids the way that markets work, and save us a dollar or two in the process.Outsource
When You're Too Lazy To Do It Yourself Many times the best time to outsource to the fruit of your loins is when you're simply too lazy to do whatever it is that needs to get done yourself. Let's use supplying lunch at work as our case study. Everybody needs to eat. Buying lunch at work can be expensive while packing a lunch can be time consuming.
Free Jamba Juice 2008-04-07 23:07:44 If you have a Jamba Juice
near where you live or work then be sure to head there on April 8th (tomorrow) before 10 AM for a free smoothie! I won't be able to take advantage of it because of my commute - but my wife will.
Carnivals - The super late link back 2008-04-05 10:06:39 The Carnival of Personal Finance is up over at Mortgage Quotes and the Festival of Frugality is up at My Dollar Plan. Better late than never I suppose.
Read more:Carnivals
Bike Commuting: Is it for me? 2008-04-04 15:59:39 I am currently in the serious consideration phase of becoming a bike commuter. The weather is starting to get really nice here in San Diego and I would love to spend a few hours each day enjoying the open skies and brown (but temporarily green) countryside. Here is a quick little list of some of the pros and cons of that I have thought of that are currently influencing my thought process.The ProsGood exercise - the extent of my current exercise regimen is 3 miles of walking per work day coupled with some light calisthenics thrown in to keep me alert as I sit at my desk. If I switched to biking my total mileage traveled under my own power would increase 633% per week and I would be spending 1400% more time exercising. That's a lot of nuts.Same approximate commute time - right now takin Read more:Commuting
March Budget: Friends Steal Your Money 2008-04-02 18:40:46 As per our blogger/blog reader agreement, here are the numbers for our monthly spending:This would have been another month of stellar budgeting skills had it not been for a thieving friend and a case of pay-a-bill-twice-for-no-reason syndrome that snuck (or is it sneaked - you decide) up on me without warning. Our thieving friend is getting married and my wife simply had to throw one of those before-you-get-married-you-should-have-one-of-these parties that ended up accounting for $75 worth of expenses that landed in our Misc budget line. Add to that my thoughtless double payment on my wife's cellular policy we would have done even better this month than last, running about $140 under budget - which isn't too shabby if you ask me. The only good news here is that we were still under budge Read more:Money
, March
, Friends
, Steal
Net Worth for March 2008 - I Am Legend Edition 2008-04-01 12:02:04 The doom and gloom that I predicted last month did not materialize in the month of March
, but it should have. Our net worth grew by 5% this month, or $1,126 according to my NetWorth
IQ profile. Of that $1,126, $1,040 came from our tax refunds that we received from the Golden State and Uncle Sam. If we had not received this refund our total growth would have been $86 or 0.38%. Instead of the graph that you see on the right hand side of your screen with the nice upward slope you would have seen something that would have looked like this:Like I predicted last month, this graph has a striking similarity to the negative parabola of doom seen here:Now our situation isn't really all that bad, it's just fun to draw a negative parabola of doom. But even if our financial future really does resem Read more:Legend
, Edition
, Net Worth
My Intellectual Commitments: A Series Is Born 2008-03-27 16:04:02 You can learn a lot about an individual if you can listen to more than what is being said. Blogs are a great example of this. They are chalked full of hidden hints and subtle signs of an individuals deeper thoughts and core beliefs. Most people don't really talk about these things in their blogs explicitly, especially in blogs about personal finance, but I think that the way that one thinks is really important and affects all areas of that person's life. Therefore, I am going to spill my beans and unveil some of my intellectual commitments over some unspecified period of time, and I am going to relate them all to personal finance. Many of them may not seem like they have any bearing on money and its management, but I am going to do as much mental yoga as I possibly can to give all my Read more:Intellectual
, Commitments
Hump Day Humor: Julie Andrews 2008-03-26 11:58:17 Today's laugh comes to us from the 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie. In the following clip we find our country bumpkin (JulieAndrews
) plopped into the big city of New York. Faced with the fact that she is in the dreaded state of not being like everybody else *gasp* this opening number depicts to what extremes we will go to fit in. If you only know Julie Andrews as the nun from The Sound of Musicyou may find this clip a little risque. The really funny part comes near the end.That clip is the Bee's Knees. Sometimes I think the things that modern men and women do to make themselves to look "normal" is similarly stupid. As an example, I'm absolutely sick of effeminate men. Retrosexual 'til the day I die - word up. Now if only the hair on my head was curly I could transplant it onto Read more:Humor
, Hump Day
Getting Our Heads Together 2008-03-24 10:55:06 I am the person who handles the finances in our family. I track our spending habits and make sure our accounts look like they are supposed to. I regularly head on over to the websites of our banking and credit institutions to check to see what purchases were recently made and enter them into our tracking spreadsheets (I used to do this using receipts but it ended up being more convenient to use the bank for this). These spreadsheets make prefect sense to me, but as I mentioned before they are still a work in progress and only look like a jumble of numbers to my wife. In fact, she considers them unreadable - and it is one of my new challenge-ified goals to make the information contained in these spreadsheets not only readable but also usable by my wife.At the end of this month I am plan Read more:Heads
Welcome Gather Little By Little Readers 2008-03-22 09:16:56 If you aren't a reader of Gather Little By Little I wrote a guest post for glblguy that he put up today. Feel free to head over to his blog and check out my article Why be frugal?If you are new to my blog, please consider subscribing to my feed and checking out some of my articles. I am currently in a series discussing why my family is committed to live debt free. I've also written about monkeys, ninjas, and what you can do with pennies. I enjoy tracking my spending and have some realistic but ambitious goals for 2008. Feel free to stay as long as you like. And remember - always be good, always stay clean, and always have fun.
Read more:Welcome
Recommend Site To A Friend
