We just had an offer accepted for a new home a couple of days ago.  As such, there’s now a flurry of excitement and financial activity going on in our household now, and there will continue to be excitement even after our current house is sold.

Part of this excitement involved taking the first steps to adjust to a new mortgage payment.  My wife put down some numbers for what our expenses are currently, added them up, and came to the conclusion that things were going to be really, really tight as far as making ends meet.

This surprised me more than a little bit.  The difference in the mortgages between the two houses wasn’t gigantic:  only a few hundred dollars per month.  Were we that close all this time?  Did we really spend $1,000 per month on food for our family of three?  Are our monthly credit card charges reasonable, extravagant, or at a bare minimum?

If we had been tracking our expenses more carefully over the past year, I wouldn’t be doubting the numbers like this. I’m guilty as charged:  I still budget by The Force and we’ve managed to (yet again) squeak by for a few years doing it this way.  But I think I had a realization tonight:  We can’t afford to do this kind of thing anymore.

It’s more than just realizing that there’s fat in the budget that can be cut.  ($1,000 for food was high, by the way.)  It’s realizing that having a concrete saving and spending plan, and monitoring that plan, is critical.  Spending and saving without tracking things is just wandering, and after a while, you just don’t know where you stand.  Like I just found out.

Being unsure of where you stand financially isn’t pleasant. Take some steps to track your spending and saving, as I’ve started to do (again) with Quicken.  I’m going to try my currently-owned version (Quicken 2007 Home and Business) for a while to see if I can get the hang of it.  So far it seems easier than the last few times I’ve tried it.  I don’t think that’s Quicken’s fault.  I’m letting it do more of the work it was designed to do, like automatically updating transactions in accounts instead of me rolling up my sleeves and entering everything by hand.  I’ll go through to check them, but it’s probably a good compromise to have Quicken do the bulk of the work.

(This post contains affiliate links.)

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Managing a checking account isn’t rocket science but it’s not basket weaving either.  (No offense meant to basket-weavers.  I tried to weave a basket in eighth grade art class and it ended up looking more like a Frisbee.)

But managing a checking account boils down to one key skill:

You have to know that the money is available before you make a payment or a withdrawal.

This can be illustrated in a number of ways:

• A deposit isn’t in your account until the bank says it is. Bank and credit union policies differ.  Some banks or credit unions will trust you until they can’t:  If you go to an ATM or a teller and deposit a $200 check, they may give you use of the money immediately.  Others may place a hold on the funds until the check clears.  The bottom line is that it’s up to you to know when you can use those funds, either by verifying your balance at the bank, or through a call-in service, or online.
• A withdrawal or a payment has left your account when the bank says it has. Checks clear a lot faster than they used to, and automated clearing house (ACH) withdrawals can happen very quickly.  It’s therefore wise to assume that there is no lag between when you make the payment and when it’s debited to your account.  For recurring debits like a mortgage payment, it’s best to earmark those as “debited” at least a few days in advance of the expected payment date.
• Relying on a linked savings account as a buffer will cost you. If you have a linked savings account, your bank will probably offer as a service the ability to dip in automatically to funds there if your checking account goes negative.  This saves bounced check fees and non-sufficient funds (NSF) fees, but banks charge for each transfer from savings.  This is the “slap on the wrist” charge.
• Relying on more extensive overdraft services will cost you more. This is essentially a loan from the bank that carries a per-transaction fee.  If your account goes negative, and you don’t have sufficient funds in a linked savings account to cover the charge and the fees, then if you’re opted in to this overdraft service, the bank will intervene, make the payment anyway, and charge you a larger fee for covering your six on that transaction.  This goes beyond slap on the wrist to spanking.
• There’s always the big guns:  non-sufficient funds fees and bounced-check fees. The savings-transfer fees and overdraft service fees mentioned above are less costly than NSF fees.  These are not only assessed by the bank, but by the merchant that you didn’t pay.  All because you didn’t know that the funds were unavailable when you wrote the check.
• Your “balance” may not be your actual balance. Some banks may include the amount of your overdraft service protection when you ask for your balance.  So, if you have $100 of protection through an overdraft service, and your actual funds are $500, then the balance might report as $600.  It’s still up to you to know that you really have only $500.
• Know what happens when you pay with a debit card at a gas pump. I don’t pay with debit at a gas pump, but I do know that stations put a hold on some amount above and beyond what you’ll actually pump, just to be sure that they’re paid.  Be sure you understand how this affects your balance, and for how long.
• Know the other rules of your account. Do you have a minimum balance?  A maximum number of transactions per month?  Teller fees?  Paper statement fees?  All of these and more can affect your balance.  Be sure you understand them.
• Do not expect the bank to hunt you down the second you go into the negative. It may take a few days for the notice to get to you.  This happened to me a few years ago.  My checking account got low, and the savings transfer kicked in on one transaction, along with a $5 fee.  By the time I got notice of the first fee (sent through the mail, not even at first class rates), I had already made three more transactions, at $5 apiece.  Of course, if I had kept more careful track of things, I wouldn’t have done it in the first place.  Nonetheless, it was $20 later before the bank brought it to my attention.

These are specifics, but if you always know your actual available funds before you make each and every payment, things will go fine.

Update: A special thank-you to Money Crasher for featuring this post as an Editor’s Pick in the Carnival of Personal Finance!

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I just mailed out my 2008 taxes this past week.  I really hate doing taxes.  It costs me money, it hangs over my head, it’s a pain in the butt.  And they’re finally out the door.

My mother-in-law today recounted a statement that the pastor at one of her previous churches made.  It was with regard to those things in life that we’ll do just about anything to avoid.  What he said was this:

If you have a plate of ugly frogs in front of you, eat the ugliest one first.

Somehow I knew instantly what she was talking about.  Frogs aren’t the best eatin’ anyway, but ugly frogs?  Oh man.  My taxes were the ugliest frog on my plate, and I let it sit there until it was really good and smelly.

But I still had to eat it.  It really would have been a lot better had I just gotten that ugly frog off of my plate in, oh, February.

Taxes may not be that big a deal for some people.  It could be any number of things:  cleaning out the gutters, sitting down to plan a budget or retirement, going to the doctor or dentist, doing inventory … any stuff that has to get done, but can be put off temporarily.  It’s rarely a good idea to let such tasks sit on your plate, because it takes its toll mentally.  It constantly reminds you that it’s there, and robs you of some of your attention, so why let it?

Just eat those ugly frogs, man!

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“Turn up the signal; wipe out the noise.”  -Peter Gabriel

Too many of my projects are laughing at me.  Here’s how I’m trying to shut them up.

The analogy is signal processing. With only a few important projects and sources of information (signal sources) it’s straightforward to handle them all.  But bring in dozens, or possibly hundreds, of other signal sources, and some filtering is needed to avoid going completely insane.

Some of the signal can be blocked with a filter, or it can be separated into components with another filter.  But filtering the signal changes it, and some of the information is lost.  Maybe some of the important information.  No filter that lets anything through is perfect.

So on to my e-mail signal processing.  I was taming my e-mail beast by setting up rules for shuttling the incoming messages into different folders: affiliate newsletters, bloggers, Carnival of Debt Reduction submissions, blog comments, other newsletters, MyPoints mailings for free gift cards, traffic exchange e-mails, notifications for my list of money forums, and on and on.  Things went where they we’re supposed to go, most of the time.

But a tamed beast is still a beast.

The beastly part of my e-mail stream was that now some important e-mails could be stuck in a place I didn’t expect.  For example, Lazy Man and Money was helping me with a friend’s site that had hidden ad code injected into it somewhere, and his e-mails got sent to SPAM because they had the word “pharmacy” in the subject line.

In the end, all of my filtering was making me numb to all of the projects I had going on.  I dropped some pretty important e-mails over the past few months, including e-mails from some potential advertisers and other bloggers.

Most of my e-mail stream was coming off as noise.

So how am I trying to tackle the problem?  I shut off almost all of my e-mail filtering rules, and I’m going to do my darnedest to keep them off. Just about every piece of mail now comes directly to my inbox. This forces me to deal with each message instead of pretending to deal with it by shipping it into storage.

I’m treating almost all of my e-mail as signal now. I’m already seeing that this is helping me to identify the noise.  At that point, I make a decision. Since filtering the e-mail isn’t really an option anymore, do I tolerate the noise, or do I destroy the source of the noise?

My membership to traffic exchanges has been a big source of noise.  These sites send tons of e-mail and force you to pay attention to them or else you’ll lose what you’ve earned.  (Safelists are even worse.)  I used them initially in 2004 to promote this site, but the site has long outgrown the need for these, and some of this site’s advertisers won’t let me use them to promote the site anyway.  At the same time, I was reluctant to get rid of them, as I had substantial downlines in a few of them, and had put quite a substantial bit of time into surfing on them to build up credits so others could view my sites.

Well, I finally cancelled membership in the first one tonight, and it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I had thought it would.  I had to confirm three times that I really, really, no joking wanted to delete my account and give up all of the free promotion and blah blah blah.  Now the other ones will be easy to cancel.  I know that I won’t miss those e-mails one bit.

What I’m hoping is that my pain threshold for e-mail noise will go down and I’ll get rid of more and more low-payoff projects just to stop the e-mails from being crowded out.  Then it will be a pleasure to grab those projects that are laughing at me by the throat and send them off screaming.

The noise reduction will be such a relief.  This will let me pay more attention to things that have importance.  Life is too short to waste it on unimportant stuff that pretends to be urgent.

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My wife is designing, and making, a quilt for a competition. A couple of days ago she did a wholesale change of the design. When I asked her if it what she had planned to do was just too difficult, she told me, “Pretty much everything I did, the quilt was laughing at me.”

She’s a great quilter and makes great quilt designs, and this about-face wasn’t because of lack of effort.  She’s cutting her losses, and the new design is working much better.  (She showed me some of the stitching she did, and I couldn’t find where the stitches were until she pointed them out.  Really slick!)

I find that some of my projects are laughing at me, but they’re saying, “You took me on, and now you can’t finish me.  Hahahaha!”  I hear them laughing at me each time I’m driving to work and one of them pops into my head at a time when I can’t really do anything about it.  Having too many goals is like having none and what ends up happening (I’m finding out) is that none of them really flourish.  The projects grow so closely to one another that they choke each other out.

Cutting the losers out of your schedule is hard enough, but backing off from winners to pursue something even bigger must be harder still.  Those projects are laughing with you rather than at you.  J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly is looking for a staff writer in order to pursue some publishing deals, and he admits that it “feels like [he's] crossed a threshold into a strange and scary world.”  He is trying to avoid being laughed at by his blog as he pursues these other deals.  He knows the time commitment involved and is willing to risk adding a different voice to his 65k-subscriber blog in order to leave time to pursue these other ventures.

I run across ideas every day but still find it difficult to keep up with the ones I already have.  Too many of my projects are laughing at me.

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My wife and my mother-in-law spent this week totally rearranging and repurposing our office.  Once it gets back in order I’ll post pictures.  The extra space we have in there now is way better than even the clever frugal corner desk brought.

The new office is more open and less claustrophobic.  Granted, we still have much of the contents still in our living room, but we’re going through it and thinning it out.  For the time being, the office is a breath of fresh air.

Stepping out of my office to my feed reader online, I saw that Jim over at Bargaineering had launched a membership component to his site, complete with its own currency.  This was following a launch of the forums a few months ago, and recent accolades from Liz Pulliam Weston as he was featured front and center on her list of the 100 most useful websites.  Some time back he had quit his day job to publish this website, and others, full-time.  In short, there are lots of great things happening over in the Jim Wang department.

Then something hit me.  Jim, and other successful people like him, don’t dabble. They find their knitting and work at it.  They have a few choice things that they absolutely love to do, and they do them well.  I doubt Jim, or anyone else successful for that matter, could accomplish much if they had a million irons in the fire.  They may try a lot of things, but they quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t, and chops off the stuff that doesn’t.

My cluttered office was but one manifestation of a very cluttered life.  It was strewn from end to end with unfinished taxes, unsold (no, unlisted!) magazines, unread financial statements, unstudied materials for an untaken auctioneering exam.  My e-mail inbox wasn’t much better.  E-mail from so many places, so many sites begun but not really maintained, so much noise. E-mails from dozens of traffic exchanges that I hardly ever surf at any more, but keep in the hopper, just in case I find something else to try to promote.

It’s all pretty overwhelming, and it’s often much easier to head over the Addicting Games or Tetris Friends and spend a couple of hours being totally unproductive.  But at least there’s no chaos there.  There’s something to focus on.  It’s calming while it lasts.

I realized that if I try to do everything, I will accomplish nothing. Just the act of not really letting go of anything drags down the important, meaningful things.  There’s an incessant chatter going on:  things popping into mind when nothing can be done about them, like thousands of Post-It® Notes flying around just out of reach.  And they don’t go away.  These are things I’ve signed myself up to do, at least mentally, and they’ll stay there, buzzing around me like a bunch of mosquitoes until I pay attention to them, one by one.

The way to get out of being overwhelmed like this is not to get more organized.  The way to get out is to admit that I’ve just plain taken on too much stuff and too many commitments, and that I need to get rid of the stuff that isn’t working.  Hauling everything out of the office so that it could be rearranged got me started on thinning out my stuff, but it did nothing to begin thinning out my commitments.  Now that the ball is rolling, though, there’s more chance that I’ll be able to get out of some commitments and sell off some mental baggage.

If seeing the office decluttered and open gave me such a sigh of relief, I can’t really imagine what kind of sigh of relief I’ll be having when my life is just as decluttered.  And with my brain relaxed and newly unburdened, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to accomplish some really worthwhile things.

Any of you gone through a giant decluttering?  How did it feel?  Did your productivity soar?  What else?

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Not doing so can cost you.  Allow me to explain how it cost me.

I have had a fair amount of dental work, and opted for supplemental dental insurance through my employer.  It’s not cheap insurance, but it does allow for coverage on “the expensive stuff” like crowns, multi-face fillings, root canals, etc.  My health insurance has coverage only for the most basic maintenance like no-frills checkups and some fillings, and doesn’t even touch the big expenses.

My teeth need a lot of work done on them because at one point I didn’t take very good care of them.  Some of my fillings had been replaced several times, and porcelain caps were needed for those.  These are a grand, and I had two done since the beginning of the year.

I had been going to a dentist close to where I live, and I knew she wasn’t a member of any dental HMO plans, and none were offered through my work until a couple of years ago.  She provided good service, so I continued going to her, knowing that it would be expensive because I really couldn’t get coverage anyway.

When my workplace started offering supplemental dental insurance, I was surprised to find out that she took the insurance that my work offered.

This was my mistake:  I didn’t ask any more questions beyond that.  I assumed that because she took the insurance that I’d be covered under what I thought would be pretty decent reimbursement for expensive services.  The dentist’s office didn’t lie to me; they did take the insurance.  They just weren’t in the preferred network.  It was only in the preferred network that I got the reimbursement for the expensive services.  So, I got almost nothing for this expensive work.  Oops!

I thought I had done due diligence; I asked the dentist before I signed up for the supplemental insurance.  But the goals of the dentist and her staff are clear:  get me in the door, work on my teeth, and charge fees.  Whether I get reimbursed for half of the work, or for none of it, doesn’t matter.  I can’t fault them for that.  That’s exactly what they should be doing.  They didn’t force me to get my teeth worked on there, and they’d be stupid to ask me too many questions about my coverage, because I just might go somewhere else.

On the insurance end of it, the insurance company doesn’t care where I get my teeth worked on, or if I get them worked on at all.  They take my premiums, and process claims according to the policy agreement I have with them.  They’re more than happy not to pay me back much money.  They’re not lying to me either: they have a full directory of their network online, and sure enough, my dentist wasn’t on it.  (If she were, I’d still need to verify that, because the dentist might have dropped out since the last update of the directory.)

Which gets to the title of the post:  You have to understand your health and dental insurance coverage yourself. The doctors and dentists are concerned with staying in business and providing quality service.  The insurance companies are concerned about staying in business.  These concerns are separate from the patients’ concerns about how much they pay.  Neither one ultimately cares that much about how much you pay, as long as they’re doing what they agreed to do.

Here’s what I learned through this little gaff: “We take that insurance” doesn’t mean “We are in the preferred provider network.” Unless you read the policy, and know what questions to ask of the dentist/doctor, you might assume that you’re getting reimbursed for certain services when you’re actually not.  (Also, be sure to verify with the dentist or doctor even if you see that they’re in the preferred network on the insurance website.)

I hope that hearing about my mistake saves you some money and disappointment.

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I only set two goals for myself for 2009, and they’re at the heart just consistency goals: writing down whether I do something each day or not.  I figure that if I can at least do that much, then I’ll be able to see how I’m doing on the goals, and I’ll be more likely to stick with them.  (That’s the theory anyway.)  The two goals are:

• Did I read (or listen to) my Bible that day? Yes or no, aiming for every day.  (I’ll explain the “listen to” addition below.)
• Did I exercise for at least 30 minutes that day? Yes or no, aiming for three times per week.

I purposely did not set any financial goals initially and instead purposed the Bible goal to help me gain wisdom in how to proceed that way.  So far this month we’ve had a lot of out-flow, but we’ve also had unexpected in-flow of funds, so I know that God is helping us through our current expenses. What’s more, I won a copy of H&R Block TaxCut Premium Federal tax preparation software from not one, but two personal finance bloggers this month!  (ChristanPF was able to give his copy to someone else.)

So far I’ve kept to my goals pretty well.  Tonight, after reading a post on Lifehacker I checked out a new (free) tool called Joe’s Goals that does exactly what I need.

It was a painless signup process, and I was able to put all of my hand-written data for the year thus far in the tool in about five minutes.  Now that things are set up, I go to the site once a day, click a couple of boxes (if I did both things that day) and I’m done!  It’s that easy.  What’s more, I’ve set my account to send me an e-mail if I don’t log in within two days of my last login, so I’m less likely to forget about it.  JoesGoals.com is very simple and very effective!

Oh, I was going to explain why I changed my first goal to “read or listen to the Bible each day.”  A few weeks ago I was in Costco and ran across the Zondervan NIV Audio Bible.  It’s a dramatized reading of the complete Old and New Testaments on sixty-four CDs.  I bought it sight unseen (sound unheard?) and was pleasantly surprised.  The background music isn’t annoying and the narration isn’t cheesy.  I’ve already gotten a lot out of it, and it’s been very effective at helping me to get the big picture.  Plus, it gives me a way to use my commute effectively.  I’ll go beyond listening, but for now I’m counting it as spending time in the Word.

Incidentally, the Lifehacker post also mentions using Mint.com to track financial goals, so I may need to revisit using that.  So, there you go.  It may be a bit early to ask but how are your goals going for this year? How do you keep track of your progress?

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My wife lost her wallet on Friday while visiting some friends in DC.  She had all of her credit cards, her ATM/debit cards, and her driver’s license in that wallet.  I found this out about 1:30 PM Friday, right before the weekend.

Here are the steps I went through:

• I tried to help her as much as I could over the phone. (I was at work.)  If she could have found the wallet, then the problem’s solved.
• I submitted a lost and found claim with the transportation authority in case someone turned it in.  I later followed up with a phone call but it would take around five business days for the item to reach the central office.
• I took off the rest of the day. Thankfully I could do this.
• I went to our primary credit union and withdrew some cash and asked how to cancel their debit/ATM cards.  At this point my wife was still looking for the wallet, so I thought I might give a little more time (maybe an hour) just in case.
• Once I got home, I wrote down who I needed to call up. This included our credit union (for an ATM/Debit card and a credit card), a bank for a business ATM/Debit card, Chase (for the credit card that replaced our Chase PerfectCard™ MasterCard®), a department store, and a credit union from my childhood hometown that issued the one credit card we didn’t lose (because I was the only one with one of those).
• I prioritized who I needed to call first.
  • First, I called my hometown credit union.  I hadn’t used that account in quite a while, and it would be our only source of credit until the new cards came in.  I made sure that the card was still active and that the automatic payment in full from the linked checking account was shut off because I hadn’t had any reason to keep money in that account for a while.  I verified that my mailing address was current so I could receive the bill.
  • Second, I reported my current credit union’s ATM/Debit card and credit card as lost.
  • Third, I reported our Chase card as lost.
  • Fourth, I reported her business ATM/Debit card as lost.
  • Satuday morning she reported her department store credit card as lost.
• Since we were both going to be in town that evening visiting other friends, I called up our friends in town and asked them to pick her up when she got back from DC on the train. Reporting credit cards as lost is one part.  Getting around legally without a driver’s license is another problem to address.
• I investigated how to get her license replaced. Thankfully we could do it Saturday morning.
• Now, with my wife on the way to town from DC on the train, I looked through our primary credit card statement (the Chase card) for recurring payments that were connected to that card. Since that card was canceled, all of the services that had that credit card linked for recurring billing had to be changed to an active credit card, or else a lot of late charges and service interruptions would begin.  (There are a couple of yearly charges that I just remembered as I was writing this!) Here’s what I “unhooked” from the canceled credit card:
  • PayPal accounts.  There were several subscriptions and a preauthorized billing arrangement that needed to be reset individually.
  • Amazon Prime, and a Subscribe and Save service.
  • My eBay seller fees.
  • Our cell phone plan.
  • Our long-distance
  • My web hosting accounts.
  • Our broadband.
  • A couple of membership websites.
• Even though the DMV website said that my wife did not need proof of legal status to get her license replaced, we took proof of identity, residency, birth, etc. the next day anyway.  Turns out the website was wrong, and we actually did need that proof.  The lesson here is that it doesn’t hurt to bring more backup paperwork than you think you need. The fact that the website was wrong wouldn’t have mattered, and my wife would have been without a license until at least Tuesday.

Now, we’re just waiting for cards to come in again.  I received a call from my hometown credit union’s credit card issuer as fraud prevention (since I hadn’t used the card in so long, all of the activity on it looked suspicious).

I think we’ve gotten through this one all right so far.  Here’s what I’d do the next time around as preparation:

• Make sure we have up-to-date copies of the front and back of every card in our wallets. I had one but it was over a year old.  My wife didn’t have one at all.  This makes calling up places to report lost cards much easier.
• I wouldn’t carry so many cards. It’s convenient to have everything in one place, but is it really necessary all the time?
• I’d investigate theft protection. Several of the companies I called up had something to sell me while I was trying to report things.  One of the things they offered was – surprise! – fraud protection.  I didn’t take it at the time but it may be worth looking into once I have the terms and conditions in front of me.
• I’d have a list of automatic payments coming out on our cards so I wouldn’t have to look them up from the statements.

Any other tips or suggestions?

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Maybe I’m one of a minority that has problems getting down to business when I hit the computer, work, or whatever, but when I sit at the computer I really have to be conscious about what I’m doing there. If I sit down without a plan, I gravitate toward “easy” activities, like surfing on traffic exchanges, checking my stats, or floating around eBay. Sometimes I get into things that really are no more productive than watching TV, like surfing Digg or poking around YouTube.

You know, easy stuff.

Some of these activities accomplish something, but they accomplish very little. Take the traffic exchanges, for example. People can, and do, make fairly good livings just joining programs, promoting them, surfing the traffic exchanges, referring people, and building their list.

Promoting the programs is necessary, but the programs have to be in place, and it’s best to make your own program and promote it. (That way you’re not building someone else’s business, you’re building your own business with its own income stream.) I have the means to do this with the autoresponder script I bought, but I need to write and test a few splash pages and a series of messages to load into the autoresponder. This isn’t quite as easy. This is real work.

The easy stuff is work, too, but it’s work that hardly requires any planning. I can go to my favorite traffic exchanges and start clicking on the matching letters in about 15 seconds. It’s easy.

Setting up the messages for the autoresponder takes thinking. It also takes planning.

The key difference is planning what to do during the whole time. The difference is whether or not you have a list of things ready to go or not when you sit down, and whether or not it’s enough to last you as long as you have time to dedicate to the work. It’s what makes an evening of computer work productive, marginally productive, unproductive, or even counterproductive.

I know from my own experience that once things are done, the mindless stuff fills the rest of my evening. Or, if I don’t really ever start on things that are productive, I’ll reach the end of my alertness, realize that I’m falling asleep, and try to do something productive. That works to some extent, but why only at the very end?

Whether it’s work, or play, or building up a business, or meditation, or study, I get out what I put into it. Putting these activities on auto-pilot will fill the time, and it won’t be stressful, but it won’t really get me where I want to go.

Are there activities in your schedule that a little planning could make much more profitable for you?