Reached November Goal!

I just reached my November goal! My "savings" is scattered between four accounts, but I set aside another $360, so that puts me at $1510, which is $10 more than the goal. It's also about $200 less than I hoped, but what the hell.

I've used my credit cards, but only for designated items. I put my gas on my Discover, and that gets me cash back. I also bought a few items on my Banana Republic card, but I was taking advantage of some deals and I sent the money to the card immediately, so I haven't carried any balance. In fact, I still have a $110 credit on one of my cards. I'm saving that as a reserve for Christmas presents.

I'm looking into purchasing stock. Everything's cheap right now; it seems like one of of those five-to-ten year opportunities to get into the market. I've been reading up on a few companies, and I think I'm going to start purchasing on Monday. I have a feeling lackluster sales on Friday will tank the market again. We'll see.

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Employee Stock Option Plan

I suppose I could spread these posts out, but why not post three times in one day?

My company's stock is in the toilet, as are most companies. I really want to buy some, because it's just incredibly low and the company itself is doing quite well; money coming in, balance sheets look good, gaining shares of the market, products coming online, medical device market that's semi-insulated. I've decided this is a really good time to start investing in the employee stock option. Like Warren Buffett says, "Be afraid when others are greedy, and greedy when they're afraid."

When they decide the price for our option, they take the lowest opening price on either January 2nd or July 1st of 2009, the open and close dates for the purchase period, and sell the stock to us at 10% below that price. Can't beat that with a stick. I thought it might be complicated, but I called up the fund manager, told them who I was and what percentage of my pay to put in the option plan, and that was it. It took under a minute.

That is all.

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The Problems of Automatic Withdrawal

Speaking of not being perfect, I ran into a string of overdrafts on my checking account, recently. My overdrafts go to my credit card, so I only get a one-time $10 fee if I go over, but it added up. The reason I was getting overdrafts? Automated withdrawals! Automatic withdrawals worked well for me when I was getting paid monthly, because I had all these withdrawals set up for the day after I got paid. Now, however, with bi-weekly paychecks my paycheck lands on different days every month, and I never fully adapted my systems and habits.

Several of these withdrawals were for tiny amounts--$5 or $10 I had going to charities or my alma mater. I like giving small amounts every month, because it adds up for the institutions and it doesn't feel like a burden to me. For now, I'm nixing this habit. I'm only going to give one-time donations to institutions. I might change back, later, but I'll have to set up some reserve fund to manage that, and I don't want to think about it right now. For now, I'm simplifying, and I asked all the institutions to stop the withdrawals.

The one that really vexed me was my auto insurance. It was a larger amount, obviously, and it kept tripping up my finances. I thought I had to pay via automatic deductions--that's how it was explained to me when I opened the account. This is only partly true. I must keep the automatic deductions option turned on, but if I pay ahead, they mark me as "paid in full" and don't deduct anything from my account. I did exactly that, which put the control back in my hands. I've put enough cash towards my insurance that I'm about 1.5 months ahead, and now I have half-month payments shipping to them every two weeks (when I get paid).

Automatic deductions are great for those who have problems remembering to pay their bills, but I like to keep my checking account balance low, so I'm not tempted to spend my "spare" cash. For me, it's far easier and safer to set up my own schedule.

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More Savings

I'm transferring my SmartyPig savings into my HSBC account. I also sucked it up and put another $100 into the HSBC--this leaves me only forty bucks or so to see me through next week, but if I go over, I just use my Discover card to pay for a few things. This is okay, because I transfer $150 to my Discover card every two weeks; I use it as a hedge fund, of sorts. Right now, I have a credit on that account (probably only a few bucks), and I try to keep a credit on it. This isn't the 'conventional' way to use a credit card, I know, but they don't seem to care. Why do I do it this way? By using my Discover, I'm technically going into debt (even though I have the automated payment shoring it up), so it keeps me from spending too much. Ah, psychology. We all, eventually, find a way to make it work for us.

So I get to kazam my savings goal up a little bit--looks like I'm at $1,147! I shouldn't have too much problem making my goal of $1,500 by the end of this month! Oh, and the toothbrush? I sold it on Ebay for around $35.

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My HSBC Savings and the Downsides to SmartyPig

I have to admit something. I hate my SmartyPig account. It's so incredibly one dimensional. As far as I can tell, you must enter a savings goal, then you must enter an end date to reach that goal; SmartyPig divides the amount of the goal by the amount of time, and withdraws the resulting dollar-amount from your account every month. You can't simply say "withdraw $25/month from account X". If you want to withdraw $25/month, you have to back-calculate using some arbitrary goal and end date. Having trouble understanding what I'm saying? That's because it's hard to explain, and a pain in the ass to set up. You can't option to not have money automatically withdrawn, and if you reach the end of the goal (I think), you can't leave the money in the account to accrue interest--they automatically send you a card with that ballance on it. I waited around, expecting them to quickly grow up and get a better interface, but I think I'm done. SmartyPig has the highest interest rate I can find, but even at 3.9%, I've decided to go elsewhere.

I opened an HSBC online account about a year ago, but it took me forever to get it up and running. They kept sending me my temporary password in the mail, but then they didn't send my registration ID in email, as they were supposed to. After spending twenty-minutes dinking around on the phone today (I was on hold for fifteen minutes this morning before I had to give up, but I called back tonight and things went much more quickly), I was finally able to get this account up and running. I transfered $420 into this account. It would have been $520, but they need to confirm another account I'm transferring from.

This has actually been a very frustrating day, bank-wise.

The HSBC account only has a 3.0% APY, but they have a 12-month CD at 4%. I've always been intimidated by the CDs because you usually have to have $1000 or more to put in them, but guess what? I now have over $1000 in savings! As soon as I can get the SmartyPig money into the HSBC account, that is :)

And my toothbrush? I've got a $28 bid on EBay, with a day to go, baby.

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How Much Is My Bonus?

We got our 3rd quarter update on our year-end bonus and I guess, not surprisingly, we hardly locked in anything this quarter. A measly 0.55%. We've locked in 4.65% for the year, so far. We have big chunk still coming, so it's feasible we'll break 10%, but that 3rd quarter was a blow. We were aiming to lock in 2.25% for the 3rd, and we missed almost all of it.

Eh.

Beggars and choosers, etc. Lots of people have it worse.

On the upside, a couple of people are in a fierce bidding war for my toothbrush on Ebay. The bidding is up to $5. Six days to go. The tension mounts.

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Challenge Update

I mentioned that Ramit Sethi over at I Will Teach You To Be Rich has a one-month $1,000 savings challenge. The gist: follow his advice and you'll save $1,000 in November. Maybe, but either way, I'm giving it a try. Sethi mentioned turning the heat down, and I haven't done that but I'm still working at sealing the windows up. I do one every day or so. It takes about a half-hour to do a window right, and, since it's going to be there for five months, I want it to look good. I've located closets that seem particularly badly insulated. One I was able to simply close. Another one doesn't have a door, and it's unfortunately in our bedroom. I'm looking into buying some cheap, heavy drapes at a thrift shop and putting those up.

Tip #3 was to sell something on EBay. I put my electric toothbrush up for sale, which I spent way too much money on and found I didn't like to use. We'll see if I get any hits on that. I have to say, however, that when I moved a few months ago, I put a lot of my old items for sale and I made a pretty good haul. I think I might make it an annual project to do this.

Still doing Tip #1, which is pack your lunch. I haven't done this every day, but it's enough that I know it's going to make a dent.

I'm ignoring Tip #4, which is to get friends involved in Sethi's challenge, because I just don't feel like it. Same with Tip #6, something about using gas price as a hedge fund by putting the money we're saving now into a separate account and using it to defray future costs. Again, I just don't feel like going through that effort.

I'm planning on doing Tip #5 and Tip #7. They are (respectively), trying to haggle your cell phone bill down, and not spending any money one day a week. Both seem like sound practices, and I'm a little miffed at how high my cell phone bill is every month.

In other news, Friday is payday, and I'll have a chunk of money that I can throw at my savings!!! Also, tomorrow I may get some news on the progress of my yearly bonus. My company locks in a certain bonus percentage each quarter, and then tacks on an additional percentage which is equal to the average of all four quarters. I've locked in a 4.08% bonus so far. Because we usually have an uptick in sales at the end of the year, the bonus is projected at around 12%. Tomorrow I'll find out how much we earned for the third quarter. The bonus pays out in February. Wohoo!

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Election Day Post

You should too.

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Accepting the Challenge...

I haven't been paying much attention to the blogosphere lately, but JD over at Get Rich Slowly mentioned that Ramit Sethi's blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich has offered a challange to save $1,000 in 30 days.

Wow! That's a lot of links for this little blog. While I'm on a roll, here's the actual announcement of Sethi's challenge:



Every day this month, Sethi's posting a tip on how to save $1000 this November. His first two tips were:

1.) Pack a lunch
2.) Turn the thermostat down 3 degrees.

Luckily, my GF and I spent Saturday cooking, both to eat healthier and to pair down on my rampant eating out. So, #1... done! #2? We've already got the thermostat pretty low, and I'm not going to turn it down lower, but with winter coming I went out and bought plastic sheeting for our windows, and then borrowed a hair dryer from a friend to install the sheeting.

Here's a cute commercial from the 80s on how install the sheeting!



Today's tip was to sell something, and I have just the thing! I own one of those Oral B Triumph toothbrushes, and I hate it. I'm putting it on eBay tomorrow.

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