Personal Finance Blog | Money Management Blog | Financial Help

I’ll admit it. I’m a holiday junkie. The lights, the presents, the veritable cornucopia of feel-good glitter everywhere, stirs in me a powerful need to buy stuff. Couple that with a desire to ensure that my wife and my son have a magical Holiday season and you have a recipe for financial disaster. In fact, the only variable isn’t when the disaster will occur, but how much damage will be done.

You’d think, being a marketer, I’d be hip to all the tips and tricks of the trade, but the truth is, I get suckered into the advertisements and deals that inevitably spring forth this time of year like weeds in my backyard. I’m not prepared for the onslaught, and so I get suckered in, drifting from purchase to purchase in a vain attempt to make this Holiday season better than the last.

The truth is that filling the Holidays with gifts isn’t my problem—it’s the way I approach buying gifts that leads to my inevitable New Year’s budgetary heartburn. See, I’m like most people, I wait until a few weeks before the Holidays, buy what I can in cash and then put the rest on the credit card and say to myself, “well, I’ll just have to cut back the first two months of the year.” The plan never works and I end up stuck with credit card debt I didn’t really need.

My mother, herself a self-proclaimed holiday junkie, has a system for holiday shopping. She takes a certain amount out of each of her paychecks during the year, usually about $50, and then sticks it in her purse and doesn’t touch it for the entire year. While I don’t advocate growing your holiday shopping budget in something as insecure as a purse, Finicity Money Manager works along the same principle. Essentially, if you plan how to use your money BEFORE you spend it, when it comes time to shop, you aren’t filled with buyer’s remorse. Instead you can bask in the feel-good glitter of multiple holiday gifts without the worry of incurring more debt.

While it’s too late for me this year, next year promises to be better. After all, since I’m new to Finicity, I can now take advantage of Money Manager which means more planning and less stress. And, as we all know, that’s a good thing.

Happy Holidays!

Andrew Parker, Marketing

I guess we all like going out to eat more than we think because that was by far the most popular response (with 49% of the votes) by the more than 300 participants of the survey  in our personal finance community on Finicity.

The second most popular answer (with 19% of the votes) was contributing to savings, so it’s good to know we still value savings…but maybe not as much as eating out.

So why do we enjoy eating out so much - because it’s something we all do…either daily, weekly or monthly?

Obviously, the ease of having someone else prepare your food for you is pretty nice…and usually the food tastes better when you go out too. But maybe there’s something else when it comes to eating out during an economic downturn. It may be a way to escape from the day to day pressures and enjoy some type of luxury since most of the other luxuries diminish during hard times. Or maybe it’s our need to socialize (and not the food) and to be in a social environment with family, friends, co-workers, etc.

Whatever the reasons, we all like going out to eat. And some of the cherished times for my wife and me are those days when we’ve had a hectic week and we’re able to find a babysitter and get away for an enjoyable dinner together – full of laughter, great conversations, good food, delectable desserts, and free from kids whining and crying.

Bon appetit!

Corey Davis, Marketing

When I was younger, my older siblings used to always make fun of me because I hated to spend money. Now that I’m an adult, I have a number of different things that I have to spend money on, such as a mortgage, utilities, transportation, food, etc. One of the great things about using the Finicity Money Manager is that it gives me many opportunities to review my budget and look for ways to cut expenses.

Sometimes the ways to cut spending are pretty obvious, and sometimes you need to be a little creative. My family and friends probably would say that I’m being stupid, rather than being creative with some of the ways that I have found to cut some expenses.

One of the biggest savings that I have been able to maneuver is to refinance my mortgage with Finicity Home Loans. Due to the new lower interest rate that I was able to get, I was able to save a few hundred a month. Some other areas that I have found to save a little (this is where my family and friends think I’m a little weird) are on my electricity bill and gas bill. I was able to cut my gas bill by turning my water heater down, washing my clothes in cold water, and keeping my house cooler. Wearing a sweatshirt or wrapping up in a blanket are ways to counter having the house cooler. I do not have any kids, so it is a little easier to have my house cooler without affecting family members. However, be forewarned that getting out of bed in the morning is a little more difficult. During the summer, I would keep my house warmer so that my air conditioner wouldn’t run as much. These few things have helped me save a few extra dollars every month.

Kyle Lloyd, Accounting

A few weeks ago an old friend of mine was venting on his blog about the costs of an unexpected auto repair. Having been there before, I read his post with a great amount of empathy.  I am not exactly sure what broke, but it was apparently something that made a lot of noise and was several hundred dollars to fix.  His family was then faced with the dilemma that many of us have been in before – I don’t have the money to fix it. But I can’t get the money if I can’t get to work, and I can’t get to work without a car.  So, out comes the credit card!

He is a professor at a university a short distance from his home.  The university is too far away to walk, however, and they live in a somewhat rural area - so public transportation wasn’t really a viable option for him either.  He did the only thing he could think of at the time – he increased his debt load to cover the cost of the repair by putting it on a credit card.

The first problem with this plan is that he will not be able to pay off the credit card in full this month, and probably not next month either.  With interest charges, his several hundred dollar repair will end up costing significantly more!

The second problem in my opinion is that he views car repairs as an unexpected cost.   Now don’t get me wrong, I am not judging – I used to be the same way.   My car has definitely had more than its share of repairs, and without fail, they were always “unexpected.” And since I never had the cash on hand to cover the costs of the repairs, I would just put them on my credit card because, “Hey, I need a car!”   Unfortunately, those balances add up fast!  And the interest charges are brutal!

In reality, these expenses are not really unexpected – cars break down and need to be maintained.  It’s just another periodic expense that I needed to plan for.  Thankfully, I learned the principles of envelope money management and was able to implement these concepts using the Money Manager.   Sure, it took quite a while to build up a balance in my “car maintenance” envelope, because I didn’t have a lot of wiggle room in my spending plan.  However, even putting in $10 here and $20 there into that envelope helped when it came to things like windshield wiper blades, washer fluid, oil changes, etc.  And most importantly, it has prevented me from putting those purchases onto a credit card that I couldn’t pay off.

Jennifer Streiff, Business Development

I’ve got a great job. I get to try to break things and find faults in the work of others and when I find these things I get to tell them all about how their code doesn’t work like it should. It’s very fulfilling.

Along with the great job I get a not so nice commute. I average 70 miles a day. This helps to keep my ego in check. Kinda like the “With great power comes great responsibility” line from Spiderman except that in my case I think it would be “With a great job comes great pain in the wallet”. The gas price increases over the past year have really added up and taken a bigger chunk of my budget, and I hate spending money on gas when I could spend that same money to buy tools for my woodshop.

So not being willing to find a job closer to home and needing to reduce fuel expenditures, I started researching things I could try to increase my fuel efficiency. Obviously, by increasing my miles per gallon I decrease my fuel consumption which then decreases my fuel budget requirements. This is what I have found so far:

• Slow down - The first thing I found was lowering my traveling speed. I used to average 75mph on the freeway. I’ve lowered that to 63mph. Sure it takes a little bit longer to get to work, but only a couple minutes, and if I leave 10 minutes earlier I still get to the office about the same time.

• Be cool and smooth – Don’t punch the gas when the light turns green, accelerate smoothly and slowly. Also, try to coast to a stop at red lights.

• Stay pumped up - I’ve also started checking my tire pressure every Saturday. This isn’t as much a benefit as driving slower but when you drive 20,000 miles a year just to and from work, every little bit helps. On top of helping with mileage, this step also helped to validate to my wife the purchase of an air compressor I had been wanting.

• Get some fresh air – When driving around town roll your window down instead of using the AC. When you hit the freeway, roll that window up and partake of the air conditioned goodness. At slower around-town speeds, you’re better with the window down. On the freeway, with the extra drag created by the open window, you’re better off to add a bit of strain on the engine and get the AC going.

• Dietary supplements – I’ve also been experimenting with different fuel additives that are supposed to increase the vaporization of fuel in your cylinders to get a cleaner, more efficient burn. I won’t say what I’ve been using in case it ruins my engine, but I’ve been able to gain another 10-12% mpg this way - while only spending about $4.00 for every 150 gallons of fuel treated.

Following these tips, I’ve been able to go from an average of 29.5 mpg to 37.2. Spend a few minutes on Google. There are lots of tips out there that can really add up to more gas in your tank and more money in your wallet.

Jeremiah Rodriguez, Software Quality Assurance

When my wife and I were married, neither of us had ever created or used a budget or even balanced a checkbook, for that matter. We were both, as Dave Ramsey says, “Free Spirits.” When I joined Finicity, over three years ago, I was very impressed with and excited about our flagship product, the Money Manager (formerly Mvelopes). So I quickly became the “Nerd” in our marriage, when it came to finances, kind of by default. It is crazy to think about how far we have come in that amount of time. Everyone wants a quick fix, that magic pill that will make all of their problems disappear into the ether. But the truth is, no matter what your problems are, or whatever it is you want to change in your life, it’s NOT going to be resolved immediately or happen overnight. Change takes discipline and continuous effort. I like the way Ramsey puts it—change is a “process” not an “event.”

Don’t get me wrong, we still have a long way to go in building our wealth, but we have made a lot of changes along the way. One of the things I was hoping would change in this process was my wife asking me (more…)

Last week there was a wild fire on the mountainside not very far from my home. Thankfully we did not need to be evacuated, but it got me thinking about whether or not we would have been prepared to leave our home in a hurry if the fire had headed towards us. Is there really any way to prepare for such a thing? With such little notice, how do you decide what to grab? My first instinct would be to grab my grandmother’s, grandfather’s and mother’s paintings off the walls as we all hurried toward the car. Those are, after all, irreplaceable and completely priceless to me.

Then I started thinking about all that paperwork in my home office… legal and financial documents of all types. It would be impossible to find everything that is important in a hurry! I definitely need to do a better job of organizing those documents that really need to come with me if I need to leave in a hurry. Perhaps I should do what the Red Cross recommends and put the originals in a safety deposit box? On her Money and Happiness blog, Laura Rowley also recently included a list of the documents you should keep safely stored. It is also recommended that you keep copies of these valuable documents in one folder or envelope, relatively close to the front door. Then if there is an emergency when you are at home, you can grab the copies on your way out.

I am happy to say, however, that for the most part I rest easy knowing that our finances will be in order even if we have to evacuate our home. I don’t worry about grabbing copies of our bills, bank statements, etc. Since we handle all our finances online with the Finicity Money Manager (formerly Mvelopes), we have access to everything we need whether we are at home or on the go – I just have to remember to grab my mobile phone!

Most of our bills are handled with automatic payments - such a stress reliever! I honestly don’t know how I ever paid all my bills on time before automatic payments – life is just too busy to sit around paying bills! I like knowing that even if I am distracted with other things, such as evacuating my family or, frankly, even if we are just out of town – our bills will be paid on time!

I hope we are never in that situation of needing to evacuate, or losing our home, but if we are, it’s great to know that we won’t have to worry about our finances!

Does anyone else have any good tips for preparing your finances for an emergency?

Jennifer Streiff, Business Development

Take a moment and ask yourself, “How do I define financial success?”

We ran a survey on our site for a few weeks asking this same question and the overwhelming majority defined success as follows: not having to worry about money. This caught my attention…

Growing up, my assumption was if you have more money, you’re happier and you don’t have to worry about money as much. But I know people who are very wealthy who seem to be worrying about money all the time. And I know people who do not have a lot of money who seem to be constantly worrying about money.

I’ve learned that the amount of money someone has doesn’t determine the level to which he or she worries about money.  It’s really based on being in control of the money you currently have and then being able to reach short- and long-term financial goals. The hard part is just determining what those financial goals should be.

Here are the other answers that were available in the survey:

• Being out of debt
• Having 90 days of extra money in the bank
• Being able to retire early
• Having a million dollars in the bank

What’s your definition of success? Please share.

Cheers,

Corey Davis, Marketing

Recently I’ve been hearing a commercial on the radio from Chevron about “Better Mileage Tips.” Chevron advises,

“Simply decreasing your freeway speeds to 55 mph can increase your fuel economy by as much as 20 percent.”

I consider myself a driver who likes to keep up with “the flow” of traffic, and driving 55 mph on the freeway sounds insane! Come on–that’s almost suicide! I’ve passed cars that seem to be driving deathly slow (and they look like they’ll be driven off the road with the way everyone furiously passes them), but I would bet that even they aren’t driving THAT slowly. Maybe I’m a speed demon at heart, or just suffer from a lead foot, but when I first heard this ad I seriously thought, “Who are they kidding?” However, with the current gas prices, my more practical side wants to believe what Chevron has claimed.

I have decided to put their claim to the test! Can driving 55 mph on the freeway really save me money and better my gas mileage? We will soon find out!

I challenge everyone else out there to perform their own test and join my Finicity group, “Club 55 MPH.” I’ll post the details of my test there and plan to frequently give updates to the “Club 55 MPH” group forum.

If you want to, you can watch the video of the Chevron ad – it’s similar to the version I’ve been hearing on the radio. And here is a link to some of the other tips they’ve listed as well.

I’ll post my final results back here on the blog, so stay tuned!

Kristopher Higley, Designer

Since living within a budget is a good short-term and long-term investment, I’m always looking for tips to help me get a better return.

I have a good friend who has twin toddlers and a third one on the way. One day when I was visiting with him, he told me about how he and his wife do their grocery shopping. When they started using the Finicity Money Manager, they began to realize that they would have large swings in their grocery envelope. As they analyzed it, they realized they were making many stops at the grocery store to pick up items they ran out of. And each time they stopped, they always ended up buying more than just the things they needed.

Grocery Stores, can you please put the milk and eggs at the front of the store so we’re not tempted to buy other things?

As this happened more and more often, they began to exceed their grocery envelope. To fix this, they came up with a master list of items, both groceries and household items. At the beginning of each month, they started buying non-perishable items (enough for the whole month). It took a month or two for them to figure out the correct quantities, but once they got that figured out, they began to see results very fast. Now they’re saving both money and time.

Kyle Lloyd, Accounting