So it looks like we’re in collapse and people are killing each other in the streets. Oh, wait, no, not really.

Sure, the markets are having a fit, which makes it painful to look at our retirement accounts. Except that we aren’t planning on touching them for many years, so eh. Feel a little bad for the baby boomers inching up on retirement, but really, not much. Yes, I know that schadenfreude isn’t exactly a positive emotion or anything, but many of them have defined their lives by excess so they shouldn’t be surprised when it comes around to bite ‘em. A little frugality isn’t perhaps a terrible thing.

photo credit: missdesigndiva

Meanwhile our politicians are tripping over themselves trying to do, well, I don’t really know. Looks like they are hellbent on trying to find a way to spend my son’s future income in an effort to stave off what will be an admittedly painful correction. Personally, being a free market kind of guy, I say go ahead and let it correct. But I am probably missing the big picture.

That said, at least in our household, things are certainly not flying off track. In fact, despite the supposed tightening of the credit market, we just received notice that one of our credit cards has substantially increased it’s limit. Thanks, but we really don’t need it. We won’t mention that to the government, because they may just decide they need that as well!

We did a decent job of killing off more debt this month. Broke well past the $1000 mark. And honestly are still living quite comfortably even with that kind of progress. We could probably introduce a little more pain and get the ball rolling a little faster. But that’s a budgeting issue, not a reporting one.

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently with my side business, and it’s beginning to really take off. Right now it is not adding any to our debt attack plan, as I am stockpiling cash right now in anticipation of further expansion. The holidays are rapidly approaching, and I have a feeling I’ll be spending a fair amount on advertising soon!

Oh, and oops, I will take a cue from Wall Street and restate some debt. I misread a medical bill statement and understated that debt by around $800. Where’s my bailout?

photo credit: StreetFly JZ

As expected, we suffered a little setback in debt reduction progress this month when a batch of medical bills arrived. And just as expected, there is no such thing as a cheap medical procedure, so of course we maxed out my wife’s portion of the deductible. Since the deductible on the plan I get through work is fairly high, well, likewise our final bill.

The first obvious lesson is that going without health insurance in this day and age is a sure route to financial ruin. I’m not thrilled with a fairly large bill, but it could have been far larger had we been without coverage!

And since health insurance was forefront in our minds, the wife and I decided to do a little comparison shopping to see what it would cost to get a decent policy on our own. One with perhaps a better deductible. Maybe look into a HSA to get a little tax advantage. That sort of thing.

We used the health coverage comparison engine at eHealthInsurance to look into a pretty broad range of policies. One things was obvious from the get go: we could — assuming we qualify for the plans, of course — get health insurance for a heck of a lot cheaper than what my employer is currently paying on us. Especially after an upcoming rate increase goes into effect.

I broached the subject of dropping us from the group coverage and instead getting a salary increase on par with the plan’s premium with my employer, and he certainly didn’t rule the idea out. So yesterday we submitted an application to see if we could qualify for one of the mid-range plans that meets our needs, halves our deductible(!), and qualifies as an HSA plan to boot.

Anyway, enough rambling for today. On to the raw numbers:

photo credit: ToniVC

Summer has finally made itself fully known, and walking outside is like walking into a sauna. Which is fine if I wanted a sauna, but not so fine if I just wanted to go for a walk. So, what better time to break out ye’ olde spreadsheet and see what kind of progress was made in killing off debt last month?

Summer always seem to be a little more expensive for us than other times of the year. After all, when it’s snowing and 7 degrees, we are perfectly content not wandering much and just staying warm inside here at home.

But it being a beautiful summer, we felt like wandering a bit. We made our annual pilgrimage to my extended family reunion, and decided to take a couple extra days to see my wife’s brother nearby while we were in the area. We did do a budget for the vacation, but it being one of those things we didn’t regularly budget for in the past (otherwise known as everything), we didn’t end up budgeting enough. A couple extra meals out, a few too many trips to the coffee shop, some random spending, and the bottom line showed us a couple hundred overspent.

I was a little disappointed, but wasn’t extraordinarily bothered by it. My wife? Borderline stroke. I had no idea how deeply the get-out-of-debt bug I brought home had bitten her! A few serious conversations about our goals and progress and such, and she relaxed a bit while also imbuing in me a little extra motivation to kick a few things into higher gear…

photo credit: Daveybot

Spring ends, summer begins, more debt goes to the great beyond. Isn’t it a wonderful thing?

Yet another month of incremental debt killing. While I could have boosted the damage done to the final tally a bit by using returns from my expanding online marketing side business, right now I’m comfortable using the funds to reinvest in what’s been working. Maybe next month I’ll throw the excess at the debt, but for now having the ability to use the play I have in that side business’s cash flow to experiment has proven useful.

Likewise, I’m sure we could have trimmed more, but going over our spending versus the budget it looks like we did a little comfort spending in June. In the end, it is just money, and we needed a little cheering up more than we needed to knock a couple hundred more off the total, so c’est la vie. Speaking of, we are still waiting to hear on medical bills associated with our loss. Since we have a pretty substantial deductible, unless medical procedures have gotten cheap all of a sudden, the ol’ total is almost certainly going to suffer a brief reversal soon.

Anyway, for those into specifics, here ya’ go:

photo credit: PhotoA.nl

Despite the ominous sounding headline I threw up there, the financial front of our little family ended the month making decent forward progress. Oh, sure, I would have loved to knock another few thousand a month off that total. And with our little stimulus payment (my apologies future generations!) coming in, I thought we might just have the chance to bite of a bigger chunk.

Some more good news: My little sis did manage to get herself hitched. To a guy I really like. And looked absolutely ecstatic the whole time. And while our gift spending was out of the ordinary monthly range, the wedding was no surprise and we had budgeted for that spending. So it made almost no dent finance-wise. And hey, it’s my little sister. I’m absolutely thrilled that she’s thrilled.

Looking good at knocking off that chunk so far! But alas, Murphy had other ideas. At least he had the good graces to wait to show up until we had a bit of extra coin around.

We’ve been working on growing our little family for several months without luck, until early last month when my wife shared a little good news with me one evening. Several visits to our wonderful doc later, and alas, it was not meant to be this time around. Whether at seven weeks or seven months, irregardless of how great anything else went, this type of loss makes for a rotten month.

Here’s to a better June!

Yet another reason to avoid giving out those gift cards that everyone seems to love:

photo credit: untitledprojects

Tens of millions of dollars in gift cards and certificates became worthless overnight in the wake of the Sharper Image’s financial plight — and customers holding those cards have little recourse.

Federal law allows a company to stop honoring store gift cards when it files Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and that’s exactly what’s happening at San Francisco-based Sharper Image. Sales clerks are telling customers they can no longer accept the plastic cards as payment, and the cards are no longer accepted when customers try to use them online.

Hope you didn’t wait too long to go out and grab your personal foot massager/fancy nose hair trimmer/overpriced adult games early!

We were all thinking of visiting the stores this weekend to do a bit of carefree Christmas shopping, but a microscopic bit of good ol’ Mother Nature decided to whack my son and myself with nasty head colds instead. (So if I ramble a bit — because I never do that, do I? — blame it on the Sudafed)

Going for an hour or two after work some weeknight just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you live far enough from what you city slickers would call civilization that a healthy chunk of that time would be spent just getting to a store (at least one that doesn’t have a tractor parts section ). So I’m a little disappointed, because even with the chaos that tags along with holiday weekend crowds it is still early enough in the whole holiday rush that they won’t be that crazy out there.

One thing that will be nice irregardless of when we make it out to do our part to boost the economy is that, for the second year in a row, we won’t be going further into debt spreading holiday cheer. Every cent of what we budgeted for Christmas gifts is sitting in a simple little ING Direct savings sub-account waiting patiently to be spent. (Yes, there are online banks that will give us marginally more interest, but at these totals, the simplicity of ING‘s site is worth foregoing that extra 43 cents or so we may have earned over the year.)

And once that chunk o’ change is gone, well, we’re done. And honestly, it should be more than enough, even if it’s a quarter of what it used to be. More stuff just means more clutter, and I’m tending much more to a few simple possessions over massive amounts of short-lived junk these days.

The time we get to spend with those we care about is worth more than any knick knack we get or give anyway…

Despite my previous rant on the wastefulness of TV, I just added more watching of it to my life. Plus, in defiance of my goal of getting rid of the ol’ sinker around the neck debt, I’m now paying a little extra to do so! But then, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to hold out for long…

Footy’s call was just too strong. I broke down and subscribed to Setanta on DirecTV so I could get my World Cup Rugby fix. I doubt fifteen bucks a month for the next two months is going to break us. But I’ll have to make a point in finding some areas to scrimp on my spending just to keep me honest.

Of course, the first few games I’ve caught have been ridiculously just a tad lopsided. The US vs. England match was interesting, in that we only lost by 18. I was expecting 50+. But we are nothing but minnows in this particular shark tank anyway. Which might have something to do with Rugby’s almost nonexistent following over here: we don’t dominate it.

Plus, in a country as litigious as ours, any game that has, for instance, rules covering blood substitutions is going to have a hard time here in the ol’ US!

Pads? Helmets? Time outs? American football is for wimps!

Back in March the ol’ home PC decided that it was time to give up the ghost. And, debt-or-no-debt, doing without wasn’t really an option. But I certainly didn’t want to empty a savings account or, worse yet, throw it on a credit card.

As I mentioned at least once before, I do a bit of computer tech work, so I was pretty comfortable deciding what was needed and what was not. Just in case you are in the same boat as I was, here’s a few money saving tips on buying that new PC:

• Never buy a top of the line computer. That is, unless you really enjoy paying double what the same system will set you back in six months.
• Most preconfigured systems come with marginally adequate amount of memory at best. There are ways to go cheap on a computer; this is not one of them. Memory is by far the cheapest bang for buck. Get at least one gigabyte of it.
• Unless you are a hardcore DVD or music pirate, a 300 gigabyte hard drive is overkill. Oh, and good luck backing that all up!
• If buying a Dell/Gateway/HP/Compaq/etc. pre-configured system, choose a “without antivirus” option if possible. You can get excellent antivirus protection with the free version of AVG. As a plus, you won’t have to suffer with the spectacular piece of junk that is Norton Antivirus.
• The big money saver? For most people, the bloat that is Microsoft Office just isn’t necessary. There are many, many alternatives that do the job of almost any MS app just as well, if not better, for the much more reasonable cost of zero.
  • For word processing and spreadsheets, OpenOffice is wonderful. As is Google Docs. Or for that matter, ThinkFree. Or WriteBoard. Or EditGrid. Or Zoho. Or… well, you get the point. Let’s just say, there’s a few options.
  • What about email? You’ll have to pry my Gmail account from my cold dead hands. (And if you feel like really integrating what Google offers, Google Apps is really pretty painless to set up.) Yahoo Mail. Or even Hotmail. On the other hand, if a desktop application is your thing, Thunderbird might be your thing.
  • Calendaring? Google Calendar. 30 Boxes. Remember The Milk. Kiko. Yahoo Calendar. Again, lots of options — and seemingly more every few days!
  • PowerPoint? Just say no. Ok, if you must: Empressr. Or Spresent. Or Zoho Show. But really, best yet:
    Just Say No! One more wasted hour sitting through another poorly thought out PowerPoint meeting (which is almost every one) that could have been taken care of more effectively with a simple handout and I may flip out…

Using those tidbits of knowledge, I easily knocked $200+ off an already ridiculously cheap system, and am happier with the end product to boot!

“When we have some money…” is getting to be one of those phrases that I’m really starting to hate. My wife has been uttering statements starting with that bit for the last few months, in reference to all sorts of things we are wanting.

Things like:

• going on a nice vacation: $500-$1,000+
• purchasing some additional exercise equipment: $100-$1,000+
• a gallon or two of paint for some naked trim we have in our home: $25-$50
• Or additional new underwear for our potty-training-in-progress toddler: $5

The first two would certainly be Good Thingsâ„¢, and setting aside a little extra every month would be an excellent way to afford them without any undue damage to the budget versus a big one time payout.

The last two just annoy me, however. Why? Because they’re already in our budget, Dear! That is precisely what that Clothing and that Household line item are all about. If we overspend the budget in certain areas, we either need to tighten up ship, or we need to adjust the budget.

But here’s the thing: we’re not overspending in those areas. Go ahead. Spend. Be a good consumer. We planned on it…