I was up at 4 am and we hit the road at 6 am.  Yawn!!  It is a 4 hour trip and we wanted to be there early.  I had gotten about 3 miles down the road when I realized that I didn’t have the cell phone.  I turned around and went back after it.  I wouldn’t want to take that long a trip without it.

Everything went well all day Friday.  The weather was great if hot.  The trip up was uneventful and by late fridaynight, had bought two beautiful horses and was back at the hotel.  It was very late and I was very tired.   I fell into bed and slept for a few hours.  At 7 am, I was up and headed back to the barn to check on the horses.  I fed and made sure that all was well and then headed back to the hotel.

That would have been when the trouble started.  The cell phone was missing.  I checked the whole hotel room over and it wasn’t there.  It wasn’t in the truck.  I checked the hotel lobby thinking that maybe I set it down when I went up to get coffee.  I tried calling it from the room and listening for it. The only place left to look was at the barn.

After breakfast, I headed to the barn to load the horses and find the phone.  The horses loaded fine but there was no phone.  Giving up on finding the phone, I climbed into the truck and started it up.  I put it in gear, gave it a little gas and didn’t move and I mean not even an inch.

The transmission was gone.  Boom.  It had acted up the week before but straightened out after adding fluid.  I had a mechanic drive it to check it out plus a couple of friends who are experienced with mechanical things.  They all thought it would be fine, that it was just low on fluid.  Apparently, everyone was wrong.

So here I am 4 hours from home with a trailer full of horses, a broken down truck and no cell phone.  Oh boy!  The barn was getting ready to close for the day so I quickly borrowed the phone to call home.   I got in touch with R’s son and his girlfriend and told them to find someone to come get me and the trailer.

And then I sat there all day, waiting and not knowing if someone was coming or not.   I did spend some time walking the parking lot looking for the phone.  I walked up and down the road in case I had set it on the truck and it had bounced off.  I rode the horses.  I waited and waited.  The security guard checked on me every hour or so but mostly, I waited.

After 6 hours, my friends made it to the barn.  I was mightily glad to see them and mightily grateful to them for giving up their weekend to come get me.  We headed home and arrived at about 11 o’clock minus one truck and one cell phone.

This week I have been dealing with suspending service to the cell and trying to get estimates on fixing the truck.  When it was all said and done, it looked like it was going to be a little over a thousand dollars to rebuild the transmission.  The cell phone is suspended until I can either find it or afford to buy another one.

The good news is that after deciding that there was no way that we could pay to have the transmission rebuilt, I got on the computer and found a rebuilt transmission for $250.   I had someone interested in one of the horses I bought so I had a quick sale and got the money to buy it.   It was another 90 mile drive to pick it up but we should save $750 to $1000 on it.

So once again, I have taken one step ahead and two steps back.

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I don’t have small children anymore but I know when I did, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do to see their eyes light up on Christmas morning.   I used credit cards and if it wasn’t enough, I wouldn’t pay some bills in December.  I would do anything to make sure that they were not disappointed.

This is a list of things that you can do to help reduce the stress and maybe keep your budget intact.

Manage children’s expectations.  Ask each of your children this question.  If you could only get one gift for Christmas what would it be?  This worked really well with my children.  If they named something too expensive, I guided their expectations by asking them for the next gift they would want because Santa might not be able to bring that one.  When they saw something else they wanted, we would ask them if they would rather have that than the gift they had named.  Almost always the answer was no.  This takes some practice but it works well to keep them focused on a special gift and not everything they see.

Inexpensive gifts for co-workers.  When I worked in an office, giving gifts to everyone who gave them to me would kill my budget.  I participate in the secret santa and gave any other co-workers something inexpensive.  One of my co-workers gave everyone a candy cane and a Christmas card.  It worked and it didn’t cost a dollar.

Keep small homemade gifts on hand.  I make cranberry chutney every year.  It is a favorite with my grown children and their families.  We serve it poured over cream cheese with crackers as an appetizer.  It’s not expensive to make and I keep some extra jars on hand to give to friends.

Have a Cookie exchange party. If you want to have a holiday get together and can’t afford to spend an arm and a leg.  Have a cookie exchange party.  Everyone brings two dozen cookies and copies of the recipe.  One dozen to eat and one dozen to share.  Everyone enjoys tasting the different cookies and gets to take some home along with a recipe.  You could do the same thing with appetizers.    This is an inexpensive way to entertain.

Set gift spending limits.  This is simply deciding in the family what the spending limit is on each gift.  It helps my grown children as much as it helps me.  Like a secret santa, we pick an amount that we can afford and whatever gifts we give have to cost less than that.  If you have a large family, this can truly save everyone money.  By the time I figure up my 4 children, their spouses and my grandchildren, it’s quite a crowd of people.  Spending $25 each on gifts would break my budget for the year, but I can manage $10.  Using some imagination and really thinking about what each person might like and you can come up with some inexpensive and imaginative gifts that they love.

The holidays should be a time of celebration, not a time of stress.  Do you have any additional ways that you manage holiday stress?

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We use the envelope system for both personal and business expenses and as cash comes in some is put in the bank and some is put in the envelopes. A priority is getting cash in the envelope for each bill. Checks are deposited in the bank and as a bill comes due, the money for that bill is put in the bank and the bill is paid. It’s a simplistic way to do things but it works for us. For over a year, the bills have been paid on time and we have money saved. Pretty neat, huh?

Her point is that for someone who is beginning to budget, a simple system may be the best.  Frankly, I think she is right.  When I initially started focusing on my finances and developing a budget, I also used the envelope system.  I didn’t use it for bills but I switched from using my debit or check card to using envelopes.  When I spent something out of the envelope, the receipt went in.

This simple method really helped me to determine where my money was going and helped me to focus on changing my spending habits.  I firmly believe however that how you budget or which spending plan that you use really doesn’t matter.  The key to budgeting is just to focus on your finances.

What do you accomplish when you start to focus on your money?  You become more aware of how much money you are spending.  You start to realize how much those little things like a soda and a snack on the way to work add up.  You realize that a large percentage of your money gets frittered away two or three dollars at a time whether it’s at a convenience store or in the gas tank from those little extra trips.

Once you know where your money is going, it becomes much easier to divert those dollars into savings or debt repayment.  If you stop at the 7-11 every morning on your way to work and spend $2.50, that adds up to $40 per month.  For me, that would be the minimum payment on my credit card plus a little extra.  If I add that to the payment I already send them, I could pay my credit card off in half the time or I could add it to my emergency fund.

It’s those little snowflakes of savings that come from simply focusing on your finances.  It’s not complicated.  You don’t need spreadsheets or programs or folders.  You simply need to focus in some way on where your money really goes.  Once you have begun, the rest gets easy.  The scary part?  For me the scary part is really knowing what I spend my money on, not planning where I want to spend it.

So if you are new to financial planning, keep it simple.  Keep your focus on your finances for a day, a week, or a month and the rest will come easily.  Be warned though, budgeting can become addictive.

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Managing your budget is not child’s play but making it a game might take the fear out of the word budget.  The following is a game that I developed that can be played for a day, a week or a month.  You earn points by making smart financial decisions.  You can play it alone or with your family members.

The object of the game is to earn points by making smart financial choices.  Points are based on the decisions themselves not the amount of money so this game can even be played with children on an allowance.  If playing alone, you will need to set a point goal such as 250  points.  If playing with family members, designate a period of time and the person with the most points wins the game.  Players can also lose points by making unsound financial decisions.

To play, keep track of what you earn and what you spend during the designated time period.

Strategy Points

10 points can be earned by:

• Writing down your planned expenses
• Making a list of debts
• Writing down your expected income
• Marking each expense as Necessity or Perk
• Marking each expense as Static, Reduce or Eliminate
• Writing down a way to increase income
• Writing down a way to decrease an expense
• Determine what your living expenses are for the designated time period. (Living expenses include housing(mortgage, rent, utilities), food, transportation and medical expense.)

Finance Points

25 points can be earned by:

• Putting 10% of all income into savings.
• Actual Decrease in an expense from planned.
• Actual Increase in income from planned.
• Reduction of each expense marked perk.

50 points can be earned by:

• Elimination of expense.
• Putting the same amount of money in savings as your living expenses for time period.
• Earning income from a new source.
• Making an extra payment on a debt.

Points are lost by:

25 Points

• Spending money on anything not listed on your planned expenses.
• Decrease in income.
• Spending more than 15% of your income on expenses marked Perk

50 Points

• Buying anything on credit.
• Taking money out of savings.

At the end of the time period, total up points earned and subtract points lost.  The player with the highest total points wins the game.

Have fun!  I’d love to hear comments, feedback and suggestions on playing the game or any additional ways to earn or lose points.

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Foster classes are taking up one of my evenings and it seems like I spend the next evening recovering from being out so late.  I guess I must be getting older as it doesn’t seem that long ago that I could stay up all night, go to work the next day and then do it all over again.  Yikes! Now if I stay up past my normal bedtime, I am ready for a nap when I get home from work.

Along with being busier at work and foster care classes, there are also more things to be done at home.  Grass needs to be cut, gardens need to be planted and all of the outside things that I put off during the winter need to be caught up.

I am finding that it is difficult to spend as much time writing and promoting this site.  I have had to take a hard look at my priorities and my writing schedule. One of my favorite things to do is to read articles on different sites.  It broadens my perspective and I have learned so much from other personal finance bloggers, however, I have found that I have much less time to do this recently.

In short, I am going to be spending less time surfing the web and try to focus more on reading the blogs in my reader.  I have a tentative schedule for the hours that I can spend researching and writing and I am going to be focusing on making those hours more productive.  I hope that it will be a positive change for Oh My Aching Debts.

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For each check card transaction or when you pay a bill online or by automatic deductions, Wachovia will transfer $1 into your savings account. Think about it for a minute or two, if you are a regular check card user or if you pay most of your bills online, this could add up to a considerable amount of money over a year. . It reminds me a lot of Paid Twice’s Snowflake plan for paying off debts only applying it to savings instead of paying bills.
To top this off, they are offering 5% Annual Percentage yield which is about the best I have heard of lately. They also offer a 5% bonus of up to $300.

If you use a check card for a lot of your purchases and pay your bills online, this might be a great way to save some extra money. For example, if you use your check card to buy lunch every day and for groceries weekly and you pay 10 bills online plus putting gas on it a couple times a week, your savings would look like this:

Lunch Daily: $20 per month into Savings
Weekly Groceries: $4 per month
Bills: $10 per month
Gas & misc charges: $20 per month

Total into Savings account: $54 per month or $648 per year and you haven’t even noticed it. Because Wachovia is paying a 5% bonus the first year, you could also take advantage of regular transfers into savings to bump that amount up another $100 per month which would give you $1848 at the end of the year and a $92.40 bonus plus the interest it was earning.

If you have trouble actually putting money into your savings account, this might be a great option for you to consider. Let’s hear it for Wachovia for offering rewards for saving money! You should read the entire plan and agreement before deciding but it makes me want to start banking with Wachovia.

Does your bank have a similar plan?

This post was included in the carnival of personal finance #143

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by code poet

It’s been 2 months since I posted my Goals for this year and I thought I should go back and do a short review. You can read my New Years Goals here.

Frankly, I am not too please with my progress for a couple of reasons. In my business, January and February are brutally slow. I have kept my head above water but only by pinching every penny and doing without quite a few things. March should start to see income from the business pick up and April should be better yet. I spent two years digging this hole that I am in and I guess it’s going to take awhile to climb out.

The other reason is that my use of the check card caused overdraft fees in my checking account and I am no longer using it. I actually called and had it cancelled. I can’t afford to plug up holes in my budget just to leave the drain open.

Goal # 1 is to have $1000 in an emergency fund by Christmas. I still hope to accomplish this but I have not made much progress in the last two months. On the other hand, I haven’t lost ground either. I have had about $300 a month in extra income from my notary business but that has been eaten up by the lack of income from the business.

Goal #2 is to have all my credit card accounts paid off by December 2008. I will actually accomplish this way in advance since I reached settlement on them this month and will pay them all off with my tax refund next week. That will leave me with one outstanding consumer loan for about 10,000 and I can snowflake that away. I will not be able to get it paid off before the end of the year but should be able to make a dent in it.

Goal # 3 is to double the revenue from the business. I really need to make this a priority. The response to my newsletter was good and I need to continue to do some kind of direct mail every month. I have not had the money to do ads in the newspaper but I am hoping to get them running again in March. For a bad month, February income was not too bad. It’s gaining but not quickly enough.

My major accomplishment is that I still have the house and the business and I am still getting through from day to day. And I can still afford one more batch of Triple Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes.

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As tight as my spending plan is, every penny that comes in has a job that it’s been designated to do.  Once upon a time, I used to keep enough in my bank account to cover a little unplanned spending. I don’t have that luxury anymore.

In my particular case, my leakage problem isn’t so much what I am spending on, it’s the method I use to spend. My debit card causes more havoc with my budget than any other single thing. I am going to call today and cancel it.

If I have cash in my pocket, I am very aware of what I am spending it on. I know how much I have and exactly how much I can spend and I stay within those limits. For some reason, if I am using the debit card, all of those limits and considerations go right out the window.

Now I know that the money comes out of my bank account and I know that I have to stay on my budget, but for some reason that little piece of plastic just doesn’t connect to the same nerve endings in my brain.

You can call it emotional spending, I suppose but it isn’t driven by emotion, it’s more careless spending. I have identified this problem before and tried to reduce the times that I use the card by carrying cash with me. That works for awhile but then cash gets low and I find myself using the card again.

I have tried only using the check card for emergencies but apparently in my mind, emergencies are any time that I don’t have cash. After all, how do you get to work or the bank if you don’t have cash to pay for gas?

Now I will admit that all of this could be remedied by better bookkeeping and writing it down, subtracting it out of my register, etc. That is a whole other issue and I have finally accepted that I am really bad at it. I have gotten better and now my issue seems to be that I have small automatic payments coming out of my account that ALWAYS come on the wrong day.

I will check my balance and my register and think that I have enough to put gas in the car and as soon as I do, an automatic payment will be lurking in the bank’s system somewhere that will cause an overdraft. I will get charged an overdraft fee and suddenly I am $3 overdrawn plus the $35 bank charge. It is VERY frustrating.

I asked the bank manager why they didn’t post these electronic withdrawals immediately. She told me it was to give the people time to go to the bank or something. They hold them against the account for up to 3 days without posting. Normally, this would not be a problem and might even be a benefit but right now, it creates havoc.

For now my solution is going to be to cancel the check card. I can’t afford the budget leakage that it seems to encourage me to do and I will just have to plan ahead for gas and any incidentals that I have to purchase. Do you tend to use your check card impulsively? How do you break that habit?

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Is that a blast from the past? I guess I’m dating myself but I have been humming that tune all day. I loved the song as a kid but wow, look at what inflation has done.

I have decided to take on a boarder and maybe eventually two. I have convinced myself that it is just plain silly to live in this 5 bedroom farm house by myself and I could use the extra income. I have struggled with this over the past few months but I ran into another blogger who has been renting out rooms for the last 10 years.

He rents furnished rooms on a temporary basis and he does pretty well at it. I have chatted with him about the pros and cons and looked into the legality of it all. I seriously wondered if there would be any need for it here because we are so far away from everything.

The advice that I have gotten so far is this:

• Have a written agreement.
• Make a list of things you will share
• and things you will not share
• Decide what is included in the rent
• Correspond by email first to make sure they are legitimate.
• No matter what your financial situation is, don’t take anyone with whom you aren’t 100% comfortable

Well, I took the plunge and signed up for 30 days at roommate.com. Right off the bat, I had to decide what I was going to charge. I put a reasonable amount. It’s almost half of my mortgage payment and will help out tremendously!

Then I had to decide what type of person I was comfortable living with such as male, female, straight, gay, etc. Well that one was pretty easy. I am pretty comfortable with all of the above and have found in my past roommate days that having a roommate of the opposite sex works out very well. You seem to be more considerate of each other.

They also ask what is included in the rent and that was pretty easy. Heat, TV, Broadband, Furnished room, etc. It isn’t the ritz but it does provide all the basics. I will probably have to put a/c upstairs this summer as it’s much hotter up there but I will cross that bridge later.

So I post my ad and start browsing through the people who are looking for a room. I’m amazed that there are actually people in this area who are looking, not a lot of people but still. The first one is someone who doesn’t seem to like animals. Well that’s out. The second one is a lady who is looking for a quiet place to live and lists cities near here and she is looking at slightly more than I was charging. I email her a short introduction.

The third one is a guy who lives in about 80 miles away and has just gotten a job close to my house. I’m amazed. I can’t even imagine where he could have gotten a job locally that would be worth driving 80 miles. So he likes dogs and cats and only wants the room during the week. And OMG, he will pay up to 4 times what I am asking. Holy Cow, Batman!

I go back and look at the profile again to make sure I didn’t miss anything but it all looks good. He has his picture on it and he doesn’t look like a thief or a rapist or a mass murderer. Hmmmm. Well, I email him and introduce myself and figure that would be that. And by the way, I didn’t change my price but I do find myself thinking of all the bills I could pay with $2000 a month.

He emailed me back today. He is interested and wants me to contact him next week while he is in town. So now I am alternating back and forth between being really excited as this will help me out tremendously financially and really nervous. I have a ton of things to do to get the house ready before I show it to anyone and eeeek… this is my busiest week in two months at work.

So instead of going to the competition in Fredericksburg tomorrow, I will be home cleaning and rearranging, dusting and mopping. The upstairs has been shut up since I moved in.

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I was very concerned that my location here was so rural that there would not be much need for loan signings. These are generally refinance loans that need to be signed and notarized. Apparently
though, for once, the economy is working for me rather than against me.

The lower interest rates are spurring a flurry of refinances and I have did one signing last week and have 2 more this week. It means some extra hours and lots of stress. I stress a lot over getting everything printed and getting there on time. The signings themselves are pretty easy but downloading, printing out loan packages at the last minute and then rushing 40 or 50 miles equals stress.

Financially though, it is a GREAT help. With 4 or 5 a month, I should almost be able to make a couple of those ends meet. Maybe I can work through this without bankruptcy. I can only hope and keep putting one foot in front of the other which is tough enough these days.

Picture Courtesy of limonada

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