Thursday, April 02, 2009

Dollar dollar bill, y'all.

Earlier in the week, my friend Alma twittered, "I need to learn how to save money. And also how to make enough money to actually save it. =/." I offered to send some links her way, then figured I might as well blog it in case they would benefit someone else.

First a disclaimer: I am, by no means, an expert on personal finance. I have 800+ credit, but that's because I make all my payments. In fact, I have a ton of debt, a lot of it credit card debt, that I am still chipping away at. I have made many bad financial decisions (I bought a house in 2005, so you can guess how that's gone), just some of them not as spectacularly bad as others. But I have done a lot better the last few years, and like Jules Winfield, I'm trying. Real. Hard. To be the shepherd.

Enough chatter for now, here are the links:

  • Consumer Reports Money & Shopping Blog: Hard to go wrong with Consumer Reports.
  • Consumerist: not really an advice site, but it will let you know which companies treat their customers like crap, so you can avoid them. Entertaining.
  • Get Rich Slowly: J.D. runs a pretty nice site about frugality. I think blogs like this are best since they offer practical, first-hand advice.
  • I Will Teach you to Be Rich: I like this site quite a bit. Ramit targets young people, he's a bit brash but very passionate, and focuses less on frugality (he's not as extreme as some of the other bloggers) and more on redefining what it means to live "rich". He just wrote a book of the same name and I think I will check it out.
  • NPR Planet Money: Birthed by our current financialpocalypse, NPR breaks down the financial system. Recommend the podcast, which I listen to daily, and usually just skim the blog. Won't help you balance your checkbook but knowledge is power, and peeking behind the curtain of capitalism and understanding how we got here can only help.
  • Smart Spending by MSN Money: It's alright, not my favorite. kind of high-level for my tastes.
  • Smart Money Consumer Action and Spending: these are alright. There's some overlap but you can pick and choose what to read. Yay, Google Reader! Yay, 'j' button!
  • The Simple Dollar: Trent uses a lot of personal testimony in his content, and practical advice like that is always , useful. Sometimes this blog takes frugality to a level I wouldn't, but different perspectives are always a plus.
  • Wise Bread: this blog is not bad. I like that there are a lot of different contributors, but a lot of posts about good deals make me want to spend money, not cut back.

(You may notice there are all personal finance links, and there's not a lot about investment. There's a reason for that: I have debt. It doesn't make sense to sink the money I have into stocks or mutual funds when I have debt accumulating interest. That said, I like The Motley Fool for investing advice, and still own piddly amounts of MVL and PEP stock.)

My advice is simple:
  • Pay yourself first - sock away your 401(k) contribution or savings right out of your check, before your impulsive ass can spend it. And always, always, put at least as much in your 401(k) as to get the match from your employer. That is free money.
  • Stop buying shit - umm, yeah. I have a wall full of books and DVDs that's very impressive when people come over. But did I really need to spend $10 on a DVD I watch once a year, because it was a "deal"? The worst thing you can do is buy something specifically because it's a "deal". Pick something you want - a house, a car, an engagement ring, a trip to Japan - and when that video game is in your hand, think about how badly you want it compared to what you are striving for. That said...
  • Don't be a cheap-ass - you still have to live. Denying yourself everything is just going to make you miserable. Every once in a while, you have to treat yourself - you just don't want to do it all the time, or in huge quantities. Use your judgment.
  • Compromise - I have two speeds for shopping for clothes. I either buy pretty nice clothes, name brand stuff, off the clearance rack, at Costco, or at outlets. Or I just buy functional clothes from Target or Costco. I like nice stuff, but I don't like paying for it. I like Diet Coke, but if Diet Pepsi is on sale, guess what I'm drinking. Starbucks or Peet's coffee beans are pricey, but not compared to the two bucks and twenty minutes of your life you blow because you're too lazy to make your own.
  • Never, ever buy anything from Target that's not on sale. Everything goes on sale at Target eventually.

Hope that was helpful. Now it's time to go to sleep so I can carpool with my wife to work. You see how that works?

日本に行きます!

I am totally psyched to announce that we're going back to Japan. After careful deliberation and lots of soul searching (at least for me, for my wife it was no contest), I decided $550 including all taxes was too cheap to pass up.

I estimate that we're going to pay $1100 for the plane and about $1500 for a cheap hotel or apartment for three weeks. At one point when gas was at its most expensive, I thought tickets might cost that much. I think we can eat pretty cheap, maybe splurging only a couple times on meals. I am most worried about how much we will spend on clothes (Rhonda) and tech and anime crap (me).

This may seem foolhardy in a recession. Rhonda already has her pink slip, and after dodging layoffs just a couple months ago, the IBM acquisition rumors don't exactly spell job security. Trust me, that is why I took almost the full 44 hours the seats were on hold to pull the trigger.

But this is a pretty important and symbolic trip for us, for reasons I don't want to explain. It has taken on added meaning over the last two years. When you have pretty dire financial and health situations over which you have no control, and you keep having to put off your dreams, it's incredibly disheartening. I know we are not the only people in this boat. But this opportunity presented itself at a time when we were in position to take advantage, and sometimes you need to make your own luck.

Also, scoff if you will, I feel this was divine intervention. I wasn't shopping for Tokyo tickets. I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact we might never go to Japan again or, at least, not in 2009. But a system of coincidences put itself into alignment Tuesday night. I had the "1000+" article count in Google Reader, yet I decided to read from a feed that is probably not in my 25 favorites. I decided to click on a link in that article to a website I'd never heard of, on a whim. That page happened to have a story on United fares specifically from SFO (and only SFO) to Narita for $400. The fare was only available on a handful of dates but some of those dates worked for our schedule. The sale only lasts until tomorrow, and the flights have basically all sold out. We were extremely fortunate, at a time when it seems like it's been a while since we've had some good fortune.

And you can see how I felt like we had to do this.

I didn't mean to write so long about this. Initially, it was just going to be a brief "woohoo!" kind of update. But it's nice to be excited about something again. We've had some news that made us feel relieved lately, and/or grateful, but not excited. Pumped. Alive.