Besides asking family friends for real estate advice, my father-in-law also manages rental properties himself. He is an extremely handy guy, and I hope to get him to teach me some useful home repair and remodeling skills later on. But today, he was replacing a tenant’s toilet and dropped it on his foot. The result was a side trip to the Emergency Room and a stylish cast. As a klutz myself, this is not good.
No, I didn’t forget! Over 100 people joined me in my Make A Goal Experiment and shared their goals. Since they are cached somewhere in a Google database by now, your goals are now a permanent piece of internet history.
Now to make it happen… I’m going to share a little tip my mom taught me. Whenever you are too lazy to study, exercise, or do a chore, tell yourself to just do it for five minutes. If you want to stop after that, fine. But you’ll be amazed. Once you do it for 5 minutes, most of the time you’ll keep doing it. I often do this with jogging. Sometimes I just come home after a circle around the block. But 90% of the time I go much longer.
Most of the goals involved a certain sum of money, be it for a house, debt repayment, or retirement. Applying my 5-minute trick, my suggestion is spend those 5 minutes and set up a small automatic transfer towards this goal today. Open an online savings account. Washington Mutual, Citibank, ING Direct, whatever – They are all earning around 5% interest right now, are FDIC-insured, and you only need $1 to open. Or depending on your goal, start an automatic transfer into your 401k or an automatic billpay to a credit card.
With most of these services you can set up automatic transfers weekly, biweekly, monthly, quarterly, whenever. No matter what your goal is or what your budget is, you can make some sort of commitment. If you can only do $10 a week, that’s still a start. After a while, that $10 will feel like nothing and you can increase it.
As for me, I am going to set up an automatic transfer of $125 to my savings account every week. This won’t make me reach my goal 100%, but it will get me moving and build some momentum.
Here’s a great find – learn a new language for free (well, your taxes may have paid for it) at FSI Language Courses:
These courses were developed by the United States government and are in the public domain. This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. It is an independent effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages.
Included are Arabic, Cambodian, Cantonese, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. If you have problems downloading like I did, try using Internet Explorer and Right Click > “Save File As…”. The audio should show up in mp3 format. Thanks to DumbLittleMan for the tip.
I’ve just spent the last hour watching various talks from previous TEDs, which from what I can gather is a symposium about exchanging ideas from innovative people from around the world. If you have an iPod, these would be great videos or podcasts (about 20 minutes long each) for a commute.
While not necessarily all money-related, many of them touch on economics and business. Here are a few that I found intriguing:
Rethinking Poverty: NovogratzJacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a non-profit that takes a business-like approach to improving the lives of the poor. |
Over Thanksgiving holidays we met up with a family friend who is a very successful real estate investor. She has millions of dollars of property both here in the U.S. and internationally. We started talking about investing and here are some of the points that I recall:
Get started as soon as possible. When she found out that we were without kids, making a decent income, and still renting, she looked at me like I had three eyes. I think most successful real estate investors are like that. When I explained that we’d be moving in 6 months, she still said that we need to start as soon as possible. Think long-term, but get on that property ladder!
Learn more about taxes. If you want to have rentals, you need to keep great records and take advantage of all the numerous tax breaks. She said she once took H&R Block’s income tax course and it was the best money she ever spent. That way, it forces you to examine all the byzantine forms step-by-step.
Read the rest of this entry…
I went over understanding your spending and also free budgeting tools. Once you start managing your money better, you should be spending less than you earn. Or maybe you have come across a lump sum of money somehow. Now what do you do with the money? Although everyone’s situation is different, I think that a good discussion can evolve from this.
Here’s a list of possibilities:
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A few publishers used to ask me for book proposals on my views on money management, but have stopped bothering since it is quite apparent that I just don’t have the time or discipline to do such a feat. Instead, a new ongoing project for this blog is to try to collate all the knowledge that I have gained so far (and am still gaining!) into a sort of free online finance book. The ongoing rough draft will be housed here (Update: I moved it to it’s own domain — and then moved it back 
). Tentatively, I am going to call it “My Money Guide”, but I don’t really like that name.
First all, thanks for everyone who participated in my Thanksgiving Giveaway. I think it was a huge success, and I was overwhelmed by the response. As for my weekend, my family was in town and despite all my anti-consumerism ramblings we did a fair bit of shopping. It was great to see them and I look forward to seeing the other half of my family over the Christmas holidays. I truly have much to be thankful for.
Enough of that, let’s get to giving out some prizes! First, I had to split up them up between guessers and bloggers. This was simply done by Excel’s random number generator add-in. Here are the results:
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As part of the Discover Mall Holiday promotion, they are offering $20 for each $200 spent. However, there was no mention of what would happen if you returned the items after you “spent” the money. Since credit card companies are usually masters of the fine print, I figured they had some sort of mechanism in place to prevent this. Nope.
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We are currently Costco Gold members, the standard level. We joined because you know you’re getting a fair price (if not necessarily the best) on great variety of products, the customer service is great, and you gotta love their food court. So after spending another few hundred dollars on food and gifts today, amongst all those banners pronouncing *2% Cash Back for Executive Members*, I started to ponder if I should upgrade my membership level too?
Executive membership costs $100, regular is $50. At 2% back, basic math says you’ll need to spend $2,500 a year to break even. I probably don’t spend that much. Then I remembered a rumor I kept hearing that if you don’t profit with the Executive Membership, Costco will give you back the difference. Say you only get $20 in rebates. Bring in your rewards check at the end of the year and they’ll give you $30. So there is no risk. This is part of their 100% Satisfaction Guarantee – “We will refund your membership fee in full at any time if you are dissatisfied.”
In addition to the membership cost savings, thanks to the commenters below, I am also reminded that there are tons of other discounts offered to Executive members only on things like insurance, small business services, cheaper check printing, real estate services, and more, that don’t end up on your rewards rebates but still save you money. So not only is there no risk, there is much potential upside.
Heck, you may spend more than you think at Costco. I started doing some math on the drive home. I never spend less than $100 per trip at Costco. Since I go at least once a month, that’s about $1,500 right there. In addition, we occasionally buy things for office parties and get reimbursed. That’s another $500-$1,000. If that doesn’t put us over, add in holiday gifts and other big-ticket items, and who knows, you might just spend over $2,500. Think about signing up for before you do all your shopping!
Update 2: I have actually never experienced the “hard sell” that others speak of below, but I can see how it might happen at specific stores. I’m guessing that each store is measured by how much Executive members they have shopping there, and a manager may decide to aggressively sign up new customers.
Update 3: Earn More with Costco Credit Card: You can get 3% cash back on Costco gas, 3% cashback on restaurants, and a $25 sign-up bonus with the TrueEarnings Card from Costco and American Express. It even doubles as your Costco membership card. More info over at my review.
Explanation: Read the rest of this entry…
Today (11/21) only, SunRocket is offering 2 years for $199. This “special” seems to come around every other month or so. I’ve been using SunRocket instead of a landline for over a year now now and I remain very satisfied for the price – check out my SunRocket Review for details. My faxing now works 95% of the time.
Added: You can also get two years for $199 from ViaTalk VoIP.
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