My SHINY Nickels

Live Smart. Save Money. Retire Early.

READER MAIL: Hoppin’ Mad in Minnesota

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Occasionally one of my articles gets picked up by a major media outlet. My daily page views will spike to 15,000, I get some awesome new readers and everyone is happy. No, actually, let me take that back. One guy wasn’t happy. At all.

Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, picked up my post “Your Starbucks Habit Is Not Why You’re Broke”.   I received this email a few days after it posted.  Maybe it’s just me, but I think I hit a n-e-r-v-e.

“Dear Mrs. Nickels / AKA Laura,

Put this in your pipe and smoke it.  $5.09 at Starbucks PER my wifes 4 PER DAY/& 7 DAYS PER WEEK for the past FU@#ING 9 YEARS.  That’s $66,882.60 ($20.36 per day/ $142.52 per week/ $570.08 per month/$6,840 per year) over the past 9 years!!

So don’t be so biased in your article here. Our cars are paid for….. BY ME, I don’t drink alcohol, and I don’t indulge in Bull$h!t either. We have NEVER had a vacation, we don’t go out to eat.  We have 4 children and a home to pay for.

On top of it all, guess what…….. I am the only income in this family. Take you article and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

Brad S. –  Minnesota

Oh, where do I begin with this guy? No, seriously. Not sure where to start with this one. (I’ve decided to overlook the spelling and math errors for now.)

I don’t know about you, but my BS meter started flappin off the charts about 15 words in. Maybe his wife goes to Starbucks twice a day (crazy, but somewhat believable), maybe even three times a day (now we’re stretching the bounds of reality), but…4 TIMES A DAY, EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE YEAR?!?

Sorry, dude. That’s just plain silly.

Maybe he subscribes to the belief that if he exaggerates enough, I’ll just cave and believe him.
But let’s get back to the tall tale by Captain Exaggeration…

“We have never had a vacation, and we don’t go out to eat.”

Again, are you kidding me? Are you trying to convince me that if I took a look at your banking statement for the past 9 years, I wouldn’t see a single meal out? No burger joints, chinese food, sandwich shops…anything? Even my uber-frugal friends still manage to eat out at least a handful of times a year.

There’s my dang BS meter going off again.

I think his goal with all of the inflammatory words was to get me worked up. And it’s true that after I read his email, I cried. Tears from gut-busting laughter.

I get it; he’s frustrated at his wife’s Starbucks habit.  But Brad, if you’re going to yell at me, at least stick to the facts.  I’ll pretend that I believe you for the sake of argument. $500 a month at Starbucks is pretty hard-core, but I still don’t believe it’s why you’re broke.

You poor soul, you missed the whole point. Should anyone be spending $500 a month on Starbucks if they’re in debt or have no savings?  Of course not.  But I don’t think Starbucks is the real problem.  It’s a symptom, but not the problem.

So here is my response to Captain Exaggeration:

Dear Brad aka Captain E,

First, thanks for the kind offer to stuff my pipe, but I don’t smoke.

A $500/month Starbucks habit is pretty crazy. But frankly, it’s not my place to judge where somebody spends their money, if that’s what makes them happy. My only caveat is that all other financial priorities must come first.

  • Downsize your house. We have four kids, and downsized from 2,600 square feet to 980 square feet with one bathroom. Don’t regret it for a moment. Toughen up.
  • Drive reasonable vehicles. Your cars are paid for? Great! Are any of them worth more than $10,000? Sell it and buy something else. Put the cash difference towards debt or savings.
  • Eat out less. Oh wait, you’ve obviously got that one down already. You already told me that you never eat out. * pause for effect *

The truth is, your wife is probably going to Starbucks to escape, not because she truly enjoys the experience. If money wasn’t such a stressful issue, she wouldn’t spend as frivolously to begin with. So reverse engineer that bad boy. Stop spending so much on housing and transportation, and start taking care of your financial priorities (paying off debt, emergency fund, saving for retirement).

Once you’re doing better financially, her need to escape to Starbucks will probably dwindle down to a more reasonable frequency. (Mr. Nickels suggests some marriage counseling as well. You and your wife need to get on the same page when it comes to spending and money.)

But even if I’m wrong, and the Starbucks habit lingers, at least your financial house will be in order.

P.S.  I’ll try sticking my post where the sun don’t shine, but here in sunny California that’s a tall order.

Sincerely,
Laura aka Mrs. Nickels

You Don’t Want To Know What Your LAZINESS Is Costing You

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Two months ago, our washing machine stopped working in the middle of a wash cycle.  It’s 15 years old, so we figured it may actually be time to look for a new one.  But if you know us at all, we weren’t going down without a fight.

After some googling, we found it was a simple 2-minute fix.  Literally.

How many people would have called a technician, or worse…bought a brand new washing machine?  (Strangely enough, just a few weeks later, some friends of ours had the exact same problem.  They were just a hair away from buying a replacement, as they didn’t really believe it could be as simple as we described.  They went home, and sure enough…that was exactly the problem. Saved them from spending an unnecessary $700. You’re welcome, friends-to-remain-unnamed.)

Fast forward to this afternoon.

We returned home from an anniversary weekend in Lake Tahoe, and upon walking in, noticed a slight chill in the house.  Which was great news.  Our super awesome Nest thermostat had sensed we were away so the temperature inside the house had dropped to 60 degrees.

And while 60 is not unbearable, I prefer not to wear a ski parka inside. And as I already said, because the Nest is super awesome, it detected that we were home and automatically turned on the heat to reach our preferred 69 degrees.

The efforts to unpack continued, and about 10 minutes later, I noticed something.  Or the lack of something, rather.  The heat still wasn’t on. I stood in front of the family room vent.  No cozy gusts of warmed air.  I went to our bedroom and stood in front of that vent.  No air flow there either.

So I went back to the thermostat in the hallway.

It did turn it on, didn’t it?  It says the heat is on, but there’s no air coming from the vents. Fabulous.

[Randy walks up to me as I stand at the thermostat]

Randy: Didn’t the heat come on when we came home?

Me:  Yes. Well, it’s trying to come on.  I can hear the furnace buzzing, so I’m pretty sure that at least the power is on, but no air is coming out.

Randy: Great.

Me: Yup.

We were home no more than 20 minutes, and we were already putting our DIY caps on.

I checked a few more things to help rule stuff out.  Does the fan/blower work on the manual setting? Yes.  Are the batteries in the thermostat good? Yes. Did we trip a breaker?  No.

So we knew it wasn’t the fan/blower, or dead batteries or a tripped breaker.

Randy got out the ladder, and I got out my laptop and started googling…

I googled “furnace turns on but no air blows”…

I found a few sites right away that gave a list of things to check before calling the HVAC guy.  After turning off the power at the breaker (of course), Randy climbed on to the roof and removed a few service panels on the unit.

Note: Don’t pay attention to the uncut grass. We’ve been gone, okay? I know you just looked. Dang it.

We went through those initial easy fixes, none of them did the trick.

So I googled the actual brand of our furnace, American Standard, which led to some forums on how to troubleshoot problems with that furnace brand. Turns out there’s a blinking red light on the circuit board of our furnace that helps diagnose the problem.

Me: [yelling up to Randy on the roof] Is there a blinking red light anywhere???

Randy: Yes. It’s blinking 3 times.

So I googled that, and it turns out that means it’s the “pressure switch”.  I described the pressure switch, and after a few moments, he found it.

Me: [still yelling] It says to disconnect the rubber tube that leads from that switch, and blow through it to make sure there is no debris or bugs or water.

Randy blows through the tube, and reconnects it.

See that big orange tube?

I turned the breaker back on.

I ran back in the house and switched the thermostat on to get the heat to kick in.  And we waited…then a few l-o-n-g seconds later…WHOOOOOSH!

Gloriously warm gusts of air were pushing their way through the vents…

IT WORKED!

Our house is now a balmy 69 degrees, just how we like it.

Why do I tell you this silly story?

  1. Fixing it ourselves meant we didn’t have to wait for a service technician to come out.
  2. The fix cost us $0.00.
  3. Not all service technicians are honest.  A “good” one will make the easy fix and charge you just the $50 service call fee.  But a “bad” one will make a small problem seem enormous and charge you for labor and parts you don’t even need, easily meaning a bill of $500 or more. And you can’t always tell the “good” from the “bad”.

So don’t be lazy.

The point is to at least TRY. When something breaks, gosh darn it, just Google it.  Or Bing it.  Or whatever-search-engine-you-use it.  Even just running through the “Top 10 Things to Check Before Calling the Service Tech” may help save you some cash.

 

Because the truth is that money should be invested, earning you more money, and not lining the pockets of Big Al’s Furnace Fixers.

Like I’ve said in nearly every other DIY post, we’ve saved so much money by not throwing money at every creak, clink and rattle.  Even if it means asking a handy friend to come over and look at it with you for a promise of pizza and beer, that works too.

Your laziness is costing you money.  Literally.

I’ve gotta ask, partly because I’m nosy, and partly because well, never mind. I’m just nosy.  Have you fixed anything yourself? How much did you save?

 

 

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Now for one last thing , just so I can sleep a little better tonight…

Disclaimer / Legal Mumbo-Jumbo:

DIY projects, such as those mentioned above, are performed at your own risk.

As with any do-it-yourself/DIY project, unfamiliarity with the tools and process can be dangerous. All DIY-related posts should be construed as theoretical advice and aesthetic inspiration. Improper use of tools could result in damage to your property or serious bodily injuries. MYSHINYNICKELS.com is not liable for any damage or injury resulting from the DIY projects listed or referenced.

Your Starbucks Habit is NOT Why You’re Broke

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I’ve just about had it.  If I see one more article/blog post/tweet telling me that I need to give up my foo-foo coffee habit in the name of finance, I’m gonna…well, I don’t actually know what I’d do. But enough already!

There’s always somebody whining about Starbucks.  It’s wasteful.  It’s indulgent.  It’s unnecessary spending.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  But it’s about time the budget nazis get back behind the scope of their blame cannon and pick a better target.  (Wow, it felt good to get that out.)

Starbucks (or Peets or Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf or…) is hardly the reason why our piggy banks are empty.

If you’re broke, should you be indulging in foo-foo coffee? Probably not.  But is that the reason you’re broke?  Probably not.

We’re neck-deep in oversized houses and overpriced cars, and we’re worried about what coffee we’re drinking?  Why are we so afraid to tell each other the hard truth?  We’re spending too much in every area of our life.  Plain and simple.

It’s like we’re walking among the wreckage of a tornado, and starting the clean-up by dusting what’s left of the mantel.

The truth?  I enjoy a well-crafted cup of foo-foo coffee all the time.  Sometimes I’m on my own, with just my laptop and a latte.  Or sometimes I meet up with a friend and have a long-overdue catch up over espresso.  I love it all.  The aroma, the soft adult contemporary background music, everything.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The key is to find what really makes you HAPPY, what gives you the most PLEASURE, and spend more loosely in those areas.  Then cut back on the big stuff that doesn’t make you blissfully content.  You’ll find you have money you didn’t think existed. Does the extra square footage you “had to have” make you smile each morning?  Six months in, does the new car bring you true joy?

Once you start prioritizing your finances according to what’s really important to you, you’ll have money to buy your latte and drink it too.

I Was Just in a Car Accident. And I Feel Fantastic.

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Yes you read that right.  Yesterday at about 5:19pm Pacific Standard Time, I plowed into the back of the car in front of me.  I claim only about 75% fault on this one.  (For the record, who accelerates into an intersection, and then suddenly comes to a smoking-tire, screeching halt???  Sorry, but that just had to be said.)

The other driver was in a steel cage otherwise known as a Jeep Commander, and I was in the Mercedes.  In case you’ve forgotten from my earlier post, my sweet little car looked like this the day I bought it.  Sigh.

June 2009 — The day we bought the Mercedes. I’m not sure what I was attempting to do with my leg here, but I guess that’s what I thought people did when they posed with their new car. Instead, I look like I’m missing a leg and that my torso is super-glued to the door frame. Fail.

The steel bumper of the Jeep ended up with a few tiny scratches, while my front grill crumpled in like a piece of tin foil.  It doesn’t look too bad, but something under my hood started smoking and I distinctly heard a “hiss” sound.  Hmmm.

So after getting out of our cars and doing the whole awkward “so-hey-our-cars-kinda-touched-each-other” back and forth, we pulled over and did an information switcheroo.  Thankfully, no one in either car was injured; my airbags didn’t even deploy.  And, the other driver was actually pretty nice and normal, so that’s a +1.

We parted ways, and the first thing I did was call my husband to tell him the news.

Then I called the insurance company.

The sweet lady over at Esurance laughed at my 75% self-proclaimed at-fault assessment.  I don’t know, maybe I thought between my sparkling personality and my insistence that the driver in front of me was a moron for accelerating and braking would help my cause.  Apparently not.

So, big surprise, I’m officially at fault, blah, blah, blah.  That’s not the reason I’m telling you all of this.

What struck me about this whole darn thing was that my first thought (after determining there were no injuries, of course) was that I had no financial worries.  $1,000 deductible?  No problem.  Replace my car?  We can pay cash for a new one.   Getting in an accident is already stressful enough.  Knowing you have an emergency fund removes that extra unnecessary layer of anxiety.

The only part of this that is a wee bit sucky, is that this is my very first accident.  Ever.  Tomorrow is my 36th birthday, which would have meant 20 years of driving accident-free.  20 YEARS!  Oh well.  Guess I’ll start that clock over again.

My point is that money in the bank is more than just…well, money in the bank.  It gives you the gift of calm.  It gives you the gift of sleeping well at night.  So within minutes of the accident, I already had a pep in my step, and a grin on my face.  Considering what had just happened, I felt fantastic.

So do your future self a favor, and make sure you have an emergency fund.  And, drive safe my friends.

The Graham Cracker Effect

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graham-crackersIf you’re anything like me, the more you have your grubby hands all over your money, the more likely that money will find it’s way to Amazon.com or BestBuy or Target.  So the goal should be to stop “touching” it so darn much, and activate a sort of financial cruise control, if you will.

When we started really putting our savings into overdrive (yes, I’m trying to use as many car metaphors as I can in this post), we started out with a whole lot of manual transferring and moving (there I go again).  Payday would come and I would see that big juicy number in our account.  But in the back of my mind, I knew that number was about to get much smaller.  I still had to transfer to all of our different investment accounts.

No matter how motivated you are to put money away, there’s still something psychologically unnerving about entering a large dollar amount and then pressing “TRANSFER”.  In the early debt-free days, as we learned how to start saving our money, I fully admit it wasn’t always easy pressing that “TRANSFER” button.

“Yowzers, that’s a chunk of money.  I could have totally purchased two flights to Hawaii with that money.  Or a new convertible top for my car.  Or built a new patio cover for the back porch.”  Or I could…Or I could…Hrmph.

That’s when I finally realized that I needed to get everything AUTOMATED.  A hands-free, no-touch, never-saw-it-in-the-first-place kind of setup.  So that’s what we did.  And yes, it was a little bit scary.  We decided to start by directing a portion of our paychecks towards maxing out our 401k ($17,500 x 2) and Roth IRA ($5,500 x 2) contributions, and see how that felt.  But with just that first step, we knew it meant we were putting away $46,000 a year that we previously weren’t saving, so we felt pretty bad@$$ with just that alone.  We got everything set up, filled out various HR forms online and pressed “SUBMIT”.

Then…I started worrying.

“Are we going too far, too fast?”

“Are we going to feel broke all the time?”

But that first pay period passed, and as unbelievable as it sounds, we really didn’t miss it.  Yes, our final net pay was much lower. Of course. But like with many other things, you work with what you’ve got, you spend what you have.  In fact, I like to call it the graham cracker effect*.

 

* Mr.Nickels l-o-v-e-s him some graham crackers.  I used to buy a box of graham crackers on random occasion, and he would eat them at a rather normal pace.  The box would be gone in about a week and a half.  Then we started shopping at Costco. I found the exact same graham crackers in a 4-box package, for slightly less money than I was spending on the singles I was buying at our local grocery store.  So I plopped them in my cart.  Now, standard logic would tell you that if 1 box lasted approximately 1.5 weeks, then 4 boxes should last roughly 6 weeks.  But that’s not what happened.

grahamlarge

This is two weeks worth of graham crackers at our house…ok, I’m exaggerating. A little.

 

Apparently, the consumption rate of graham crackers increases in direct proportion to their current availability in the pantry.  In other words, the more we have, the more he eats.  We ran out of ALL 4 boxes of graham crackers in just 3 weeks.

 

My point is that many of us have a tendency to spend what we have, whether it’s a big amount or a small amount.  If you give yourself $500 to spend for the month, you’ll find a way to spend it.  If you give yourself $1,000 to spend, you’d find a way to spend that in a month as well.  So it’s time to push yourself.  If you currently don’t contribute to a 401k/403b/457/TSP/IRA, start.  Begin with a percentage you think you can handle, or if you get a company match on your 401k (my company matches the first 6%, for example), that should be your minimum.  Then sit back and see if you miss it.  I can almost guarantee you won’t.

Breaking the Million-Dollar Car Habit

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The BMW Z4. 2 years ago, we came dangerously close to buying this.

I used to have a car payment. Several different ones over the course of my life, in fact. Now that I think about it, I had a monthly car payment of some sort for 13 years non-stop, beginning when I was 20.  I went from a Honda…to a Mazda…then a Toyota…then another Honda…then a Ford…then another Mazda…and finally a Mercedes.

And until we paid off the Mercedes a few years ago, I had never driven a car that was debt-free.  EVER.  It had never occurred to me to just keep the same car.

mercedes

June 2009 — The day we bought the Mercedes. I’m not sure what I was attempting to do with my leg here, but I guess that’s what I thought people did when they posed with their new car. Instead, I look like I’m missing a leg and that my torso is super-glued to the door frame. Fail.

Cars have their appeal, I get that.  They once appealed to me enough to hand over hundreds of dollars a month for the simple task of moving my behind from Point “A” to Point “B”.  But to what end? We all know what happens. It’s the law of diminishing returns. The first few months in a new (or new-to-you) car feel exhilarating.  The pungent aroma of fresh pleather/leather/plastic/vinyl fills our nostrils, causing the pleasure sensors in our brains to light up like the 4th of July.  (That smell is so desirable, you can actually buy one of those little dangly air fresheners in the scent “New Car Smell”. Wow.)

newcarscent

You didn’t think I was joking, did you?

Anyway, as the months and years pass…you trade it in…accepting less than it’s market value just to “get ‘er done”…buy another hunk of steel and rubber to move yourself around…the months and years pass…are you sensing a pattern here?  Ok, good.  I thought it was just me.

I used to be that person.  I was stuck in the cycle until I figured out that if I want to reach my financial goals, I need my money working FOR me, not AGAINST me.  So I did a rough calculation.  How much money did I throw away on car payments during those 13 years?  (Do I really want to know? No.   But for the sake of illustration? Yes.)

13 Years  x  $400 average monthly payment = $62,400

Oh, how that number pains me.  Really, it does.

But if you take into consideration the opportunity cost of throwing that money away, the numbers get worse.  So let’s continue the self-deprecating fun with numbers, shall we?

If I had saved that same $400 a month for the first 2 years (25 months), I would have had $10,000 to buy a well-made, fuel-efficient, no-one-would-laugh-at-me car, with CASH.  That car would be driven (and maintained!) for at least 10…15…maybe even 20 years.  (Stay with me, we’re not done yet.)

So I now have my $10,000 car, paid for with cash, but I continue to save that same $400 I would normally be paying in car payments, for the remaining 11 years. Do you know how much I would have at the end of the same 13 years?  If I had invested that additional money, with an average 9% return, I would have a PAID-FOR car AND…

$89,672.62

Seriously!  The math doesn’t lie.  But this is so depressingly fun, let’s take it one step further.

Sadly, since many people consider a car payment as “part of life” and have one (or more) for much of their working lives, let’s say that I continued to save that $400 each month, as if I had a car payment, for a full 35 years. Do you realize how much I would have?…at the age of 57?

$1,176,736.85

AHHHHHHHH!!!   Let’s go bang our heads against a wall, because that, my friends, is what we miss out on when we decide to jump in to the buy/trade-in/buy/trade-in/buy cycle.

Can you imagine your life without a car payment? What would that mean to your finances?

Do the math.  If you were investing your car payment(s) instead of sending it to the CEO of Ford Motors every month, what would you have in 5…10…20…35 years?  Seriously, do it.  Find a simple savings calculator online, like this one at Bankrate.com, and put in your monthly car payment(s) as the monthly deposit.  Set the Annual Interest at 9%, and play with the number of years.  WARNING: The results may depress and/or inspire you.

So get off the merry-go-round already.  Sell your car, pay off your car, whatever you have to do to get rid of those ridiculously dumb car payments.

Or….don’t.

But be sure to take a good l-o-o-o-o-o-o-n-g whiff of that new car scent every few years…you’ll need it to drown out the smell of your million dollars going up in flames.

How to Feed 5 People for $5…and It’s Delicious!

By:

Dear chain-sandwich-shop-named-after-a-mass-transit-system,

I sit here laughing pitifully at your poser of a deal.  $5 foot long? Ha! I fed our family of 5 for just 5 bucks…and that’s WITH leftovers that everyone fights over later.  Top that.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Nickels

 

Last night I fed my entire family for $5.  Less than that technically, if you consider we had leftovers.  And it didn’t taste like cr@p.  In fact, it was deliciousness on a plate. What is this wonderfood?

PIZZA.

Oh that glorious concoction of crispy yet soft dough, slathered in slightly spicy sauce, with an ungodly amount of cheese and fresh toppings.  Aye aye aye.

It’s definitely a staple here at the Nickels house. It’s cheap, it’s fast and it’s finger lickin’ delicious.  And yes, the recipe is at the bottom of this post.  I wouldn’t leave you hanging, would I?

 

CHEAP

I buy my bread flour,  yeast, olive oil, mozzarella and sauce in bulk at Costco.  This saves us a ton of dough money. (Wow, that was a bad pun. Sorry.)  The toppings I usually purchase at my local grocery store.  I’ve approximated my cost per pizza in parentheses.

Bread flour $9.00 for a 25-lb bag  ($0.36)

Yeast $4.64 for a 2-lb bag  ($0.02)

Olive Oil $15.00 for a 2-liter bottle  ($0.50)

Shredded Mozzarella Cheese $15.00 for a 5-lb bag  ($2.00)

Prego Sauce $8.48 for 134 ounces ($0.25)

Sliced olives  $0.99 for 4 ounce can ($0.50)

Mini Pepperoni  $2.99 for 5 ounce package ($1.50)

My GRAND TOTAL per pizza?     $5.13

Do you understand how cool that is?  If you can get even half of your weekly dinners made for $5 or less, your grocery bill will start looking more like your phone bill and less like your mortgage payment.

 

FAST

First, if you haven’t invested in a bread machine, you should.  There’s no reason you need to pay full price either.  There are plenty on Craigslist, eBay or even on Amazon (used) for a fraction of the price of a new one.  I love mine.  Can you tell?

This is my magically-makes-pizza-dough-in-45-minutes machine

It takes me about 10 minutes to pull the ingredients together, toss them in the bread machine, and press “Start”.  Seriously.  The machine takes it from there…mixing, kneading and rising for another 45 minutes.  This is easy stuff, folks.

Once the dough is done, it’s another 5 minutes of pressing out the dough in the pan, spreading sauce, sprinkling cheese and toppings.  Stick it in the oven for about 14 minutes and that sucker is DONE.

The pepperoni and olive creation is ready to enter the oven…I’m already salivating.

 

FINGER-LICKIN’ DELICIOUS

It’s so stinkin’ good.  Seriously.  The dough is soft on the inside, crispy on the outside.  In fact, after it came out of the oven, it was sliced up and gobbled so quickly I forgot to take a final ‘finished’ photo.  So this post-dinner snapshot will have to do.

This doesn’t do it justice. But here’s a glimpse of what we enjoy here at the Nickels house on a regular basis.

 

If you’ve already started cooking more at home, then here’s a virtual high-five *SMACK*.  But if you want to get hard-core, buy in bulk and make your own pizza dough, and for $5 you can feed a small army.

 

 

 

~~~   The Nickels’ Basic Pizza Recipe   ~~~

Ingredients:

4 Cups Flour (preferably bread flour, it has a better gluten ratio)

1 tsp salt

1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus a little extra to brush on the crust

1 tsp active dry yeast

1-1/2 cups warm water

1 cup of your favorite pasta/pizza sauce (we use Prego)

3 – 4 cups shredded mozzarella

Toppings of your Choice

Directions:

In a small bowl, pour the 1-1/2 cups of warm water (warm, NOT hot or it will kill the yeast instead of activating it) and add the yeast.  Don’t stir, just let the yeast sit on the surface of the water; it will slowly dissolve.  Set it aside.  In a medium mixing bowl, stir the flour and salt together.  Drizzle the olive oil into the flour mixture, stirring as you pour.   Now we put the ingredients into the bread machine.  (If you don’t have a bread machine, you can google ‘pizza dough recipe’ and follow the directions for mixing/kneading/rising by hand.)

IMPORTANT!  Pour the yeast/water mixture into the bread machine FIRST, THEN add the flour mixture on top.  No need to stir, the machine will take care of everything.  Set the bread machine to the dough setting, and press “START”.  It should take about 45 minutes.  At this point, if you need to prep any of your toppings, this would be the time to do that.  If not,  then go enjoy your 45 minutes!

Once the dough is complete, set your oven to 475 degrees.

Remove the dough from the bread machine and plop (yes, that’s a verb if you ask me) it out on to a heavily floured surface, stretching it a bit to fit into the pan you’re using.  Turn the dough over to get both sides floured, and then place the stretched dough into your pan.  I use a large cookie sheet with raised sides.

Once the dough is stretched out to the edges of the pan, I take a fork and poke the pizza dough just on the inside area where I don’t want the dough to rise.  So in other words, avoid the outer edges, because you want a nice soft doughy crust.  Don’t you?  Then brush olive oil on the outer crust.

Take the cup of sauce (or more if you like things “saucy”) and spread it evenly over the inner area of the crust.  Sprinkle salt lightly over the entire thing, and then add the mozzarella cheese.  Lastly, add whatever toppings you like.  (If it were just me, I’d have something along the lines of goat cheese-caramelized onions-bacon-mozzarella, but this was a family-friendly pizza, so I went with mini pepperonis and olives.  We also like switching out the pasta sauce for BBQ sauce, and topping it with barbecued chopped chicken and thinly sliced red onions. Mmmmm. Maybe next time.)

The time will vary from one oven to the next, but our pizza cooks in about 14 minutes at 475 degrees.  Don’t be afraid to let the crust get golden brown and the cheese to get that nice caramel color, it makes it so flavorful!

 ~~~

 

I Hate “SUBMIT Button” Remorse

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My fingertip hovered over the “SUBMIT” button for much longer than what would be considered normal. I fretted. I worried. I walked away and came back. I knew that once I hit the button, there was no going back. No changing our minds.

We’ve decided to give up our unlimited data plans on AT&T.

I know you just shuddered too, right? (Not.)   It may sound crazy and overly dramatic, but my husband and I have been back and forth over and over, trying to decide what to do.  I guess the finality of it just bothers me. You can’t even get unlimited data plans on AT&T anymore. Only those that had them originally were ‘grandfathered in’ and allowed to keep them. We are heavy data users, but the undeniable truth is that we were paying WAY TOO MUCH STINKIN’ MONEY each month on our cell phone bill. For four iPhones, we were paying $226 per month. Aye, aye, aye. (I know.  That’s outrageous. We may be budget-minded, but we’re Apple people, okay? So shoot us.)

I kept getting these annoying little messages from AT&T to join their new “Mobile Share Value Plan”.   There must be something in it for them.  So every time I read one, my stubborn alter-ego emerged……

“I WON’T BUY INTO YOUR EVIL PLAN AT&T!!! I WILL DIE BEFORE I LET GO OF MY UNLIMITED DATA PLAN!  I AM NOT YOUR PUPPET, AND I WILL NOT BE MANIPULATED!!!”

antipuppet

I beamed with pride (at myself).  I will NOT be a drone.   I will NOT give in to slick advertising.   I will stand valiantly atop the unlimited data plan hillside, with my “I WILL NOT SURRENDER!” flag staked firmly in the soil.

Before I go any further, let me declare that I’ve officially revealed a part of my personality I’m not proud of.  That is, if I detect that I’m being manipulated somehow, I will do everything I can to NOT do whatever “they” want me to do.  And by this point, AT&T was causing my manipulation-radar to go bananas.  But after a few weeks of these annoying messages,  I decided to step back and analyze it rationally; the way you should always approach financial decisions.   I needed to think about this expense with my head, and not my manipulation-radar.

AT&T estimated that with the new “slick” plan, our bill would be about $130 + taxes/fees, including my 23% corporate discount.   And if you remember from a few paragraphs back, we’re currently paying $226 a month.  The key to the new mobile share plan, is that instead of unlimited data, our 4 devices would share 10GB per month.  The next obvious question is…is 10GB enough?  Would we go over?  Would we be in a constant state of possible-data-overage-induced stress?  I had no sense of current usage, so I went on the AT&T website and reviewed our data usage for the last 12 months.  On average, we used a little less than 5GB monthly.  So even if we doubled our data usage, we still wouldn’t reach our maximum.  (And I do realize that there is something in it for AT&T; data usage will only increase over the years, so the fewer number of customers on unlimited data plans, the better it is for them.)

At this point, I knew what we needed to do.  It only makes sense for us to give up our unlimited data plans.  So we did.  We put up our imaginary white flag of surrender, and clicked “SUBMIT”.

Am I still a little uncomfortable with the idea that I can no longer be a wasteful glutton at the AT&T data buffet?  Yes.  Am I a little worried that my bill will not be as AT&T “estimated”?  Yes.  Am I afraid I’ll have a case of “SUBMIT button” remorse?  Absolutely.

Only time will tell…I’ll be sure to give you an update when I get my first ‘normal’ bill…

5 of the Biggest Budget “Leaks”…Do You Have One?

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As you probably know, we try to get our own plumbing done around here.  Just the other day, our shower drain was stopping up.  We pulled out our drain snake attachment (it attaches to a standard drill, very handy) and roto-rootered the heck out of that thing.   About three and a half hairballs later, it was once more draining like it should.  Ahhhh…that’s better.  Showering while standing in 3 inches of grey water ain’t nobody’s idea of a picnic.

And while this post isn’t actually about plumbing, it IS about fixing leaks…in your finances.  It’s easy to identify the big items that put a major drain on our bank account…homes, cars, dining out…but it’s the small and quiet leaks in our spending that, when combined, add up.  Whether it’s fees we could be avoiding, unused subscriptions or little pockets of extra money we’re not tapping into, they are all small-scale wastes.  What are these slow leaks, you ask?  Here’s just a few…

 

1.  Unused Memberships / Subscriptions

Look through your last few months of bank statements.  Are you subscribing to anything that you no longer use?  Be honest with yourself, and cancel them, people!  If you get sincere joy from them, then by all means, carry on.  But just be honest.  (Do you actually read those issues of Popular Science, or have they stacked up over time to the point that they have become an extension of your coffee table?)

  • Gym memberships
  • Netflix, Xbox Live or other streaming media membership
  • Magazine / Newspaper Subscriptions
  • Weight-loss memberships (Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc)
  • Food-delivery subscriptions (Nutrisystem, food co-ops, etc)
  • Birchbox, Glossybox, other monthly subscription services…

2.  Floating Debt

Are you continuing to pay the minimum payment on a credit card every month, while letting a chunk of money sit in your savings account?  You figure that you need an emergency fund, right?  Sure.  But if you have anything more than $5,000 sitting in a low-interest savings account, while you sit on credit card debt, you need to wake up.  The money you have sitting in a low-interest savings account is likely earning less than 1%, while your debt is probably costing you anywhere from 10-30% in interest on your balance every month.  Quit floating your high-interest credit card debt; take your extra savings that’s making you next to nothing, and put it towards your debt. Ta-freakin-da.

3. Not Taking Advantage of the Company Match for your Retirement Plan

If you have an employer-sponsored retirement plan at work, but are not putting in enough to get the full match, you are THROWING MONEY AWAY.   Many companies, if not most, offer a partial match for contributions you make to your retirement plan at work.  At my company, for example, they match 50 cents for every dollar, up to 6%.   So over the course of a year, if I made $100,000, and contributed at least 6%, which is $6,000, the company will contribute an additional $3,000 into my account. If I’m contributing anything less than 6% of my salary to my retirement plan, then I’m giving up free money. Plain and simple.

4.  Overpaying on Insurance

If you have an excellent driving record, and you own your vehicle free and clear, consider increasing your insurance deductible to $1,000 and dropping collision and comprehensive coverage.  Your monthly premiums should drop substantially.  Also, check with your insurance company if they offer discounts for bundling; often if you combine your auto and homeowners insurance with one company, you can save.

5.  Wasted Utilities

Leaving the A/C or heat running while no one is home is a complete waste…of energy and money.  We have a “smart” thermostat, The Nest, which detects if we’re home, and has decreased our monthly utilities by 40%.  Even if you don’t have a “smart” thermostat, chances are you have at least a programmable thermostat, so take a few minutes to program it!  Aye, aye, aye.

 

At our house, we try to do an annual “leak check” every year about this time.   I thought for sure I wouldn’t find anything, but low and behold, I checked our transactions from the past month, and ACK!…I found a couple of things.

  • Last year we subscribed to an online tutoring service, IXL.com, for $10/month.  This was at a time when my daughter was having trouble focusing on math, so I found a tutoring site that was fun and interactive for her, and it truly did help.  (Yes, even a mother like me who has taken 4th-year calculus on differential equations and number theory is no help to a child who is determined to listen to anyone but me. Sigh.)  But once she improved her math grade, I forgot about it, and continued to pay the $10 monthly fee for several months after. Ugh.
  • Two years ago we bought an Apple iPad, and subscribed to the data plan through AT&T for $15/month.  I had cancelled the data plan a long time ago, but then reinstated it a few months ago while we were traveling. But we’ve been back for 2 months, and yup…still paying $15/month.
  • We were subscribing to a video game rental service, GameFly.com, for my son.  It was $17/month.  Eventually we reached a point where there were no games that he wanted to play (or could play due to mature ratings), so he slowly worked through the games in his queue, until there were NO games in his queue.  We continued paying $17/month for months until I did this check.  Yikes.

Just canceling those three above saves us $42 a month…over $500 a year.

So…I’m as guilty as the next guy (or girl).  Even when I think I’ve tightened things up everywhere I can, there are still places where I find a slow leak here and there.  So take a hard look at your own expenses…do YOU have a leak?

Plug it.

So You Want to Retire Early? It’s All About the Numbers

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numbersA comment from a reader on my last post, Would You Rather Have Money…or Look Like You Do?, asked for some ‘nuts and bolts’ information on our ‘retire early’ strategy.  I was planning on writing this in the near future anyway, but moved it to the front of the pack. So “Paul V”, this one’s for you. My motto “Live Smart. Save Money. Retire Early.” pretty much sums up our strategy. We’ll go through them one-by-one.

1.   Live Smart.

This means cutting back on at least the ‘big ones’…housing, car expenses, food…and, when possible (it often is), increase income.  We made most of these changes as soon as we decided to turn our financial life around.

Efforts we made to LIVE SMART:

  • Downsized our home.  (This may mean renting out your current home and renting something smaller and less expensive, or selling your freakishly-large McMansion with the equally-large property taxes.  Don’t be afraid to make a big change, especially if it means big monthly savings.)  Even a $500 monthly savings = $6,000 a year.  We saved thousands per month when we downsized.
  • No car payments.  If your current vehicle is worth more than $10,000…sell it and buy something less expensive and practical.  There are plenty of used cars that are economical and would pass the coolness test.  Once you sell, invest the cash difference, if any.
  • Cook more, eat out less (when you do eat out, go somewhere that gives you high pleasure-per-dollar.  If you’re going to pay someone else to cook and bring you food, it should be WORTH IT.)
  • Buy groceries in bulk – we shop almost exclusively at Costco.
  • Make sure you’re getting paid what you’re worth.  If not, seek out a higher-paying job.  (My husband found a new job making 30% more, even in a depressed job market. It’s worth the effort.)
  • Increased our auto insurance deductibles to $1,000, and because our vehicles are paid off, dropped comprehensive coverage completely.  These two changes cut our monthly premiums by 50%.  We comparison shop every year, and the best value the last 3 years in a row has been esurance.com.
  • Lowered our heating/cooling bill by 30-40% after installing The “Nest” Smart Thermostat. Paid for itself in 3-4 months.
  • Learned some DIY tricks.  Treat every repair/maintenance issue as an opportunity to do it yourself.  This won’t always be possible, but it’s always worth looking into.  Start with small projects, and work your way up to bigger things.
  • Once we made the changes above, the monthly cash we freed up skyrocketed.  We eliminated our debt, and then started Step 2…Save Money.

2.    Save Money.

  • Before you can know your own savings strategy, you need to play around with the numbers and see what different savings models do to your timeline. Go to Networthify.com and use their early-retirement calculator.  I suggest using 9% as your rate of return, and 4% as a safe annual withdrawal rate.   We plugged in our numbers, with a 60% savings rate, and it gives us an estimate of about 7.5 years until retirement.
  • For those with a net annual income of $100k or more, you should be aiming for a 50% savings rate…if you want to get hard-core, and really shorten your timeline, aim even higher.
  • Our first savings efforts went towards our employer-sponsored retirement plans (401k).  Next we each opened a Roth IRA at Charles Schwab.  Then the rest of our savings is invested in a regular taxable brokerage account, also at Schwab.  I like Schwab; their website is intuitive and simple to use, and opening a new account is as easy as it comes.  They process deposits and purchases quickly as well.
  • Invest in low-cost index funds
    • The mutual funds you invest in should never have expense ratios of more than 1.0%.  (Take a look at the ‘fact sheet’ for each mutual fund, and search for ‘expense ratio’ or ‘net expense ratio’.  This is how much the fund manager will charge you to manage your investments.)  That’s why index funds are so great.  Their expense ratios are usually 0.25% or less, which means they take a much smaller cut of your money to manage it.
      • Example:  If you have $250,000 invested in “Mutual Fund A” with a 2.0% expense ratio, they will take $5,000 out of your fund in fees each year.  If you have that same $250,000 invested in an index fund, “Mutual Fund B” with a 0.25% expense ratio, they will only take $650 each year.  Invest in index funds and keep more of your money.
    • The majority of our money is invested in four (4) index funds.  50% is in an index of the S&P 500, 20% in a medium-cap index, 20% in a small-cap index, and the last 10% is invested in an international index.  We’ll eventually move some of our balance to a bond fund (less risk) as we get closer to our retirement date.

3.    Retire Early.

  • If you used the handy calculator I suggested in Step 2, you should have a good idea of what your savings strategy will be and the timeline until retirement.
  • When your investments reach the point that a 4% annual withdrawal rate will cover your desired expenses, you are financially independent.
  • When you retire, you’ll continue to live smart, spending money on things that mean the most…for us this will be travel and eating good food.  In every other category, we’re going to live as economically as possible.
  • Check out one of the best posts I’ve seen on the math behind early retirement, by a blogger known as Mr. Money Mustache.  Both he and his wife retired at 30 years old.  He does a much better job explaining the early retirement strategy than I ever could.

 

Once you understand the power behind extreme savings rates and compound interest, the goals you can reach will blow your mind. Someone starting with a $0 balance, who begins saving 50% of their 100k net income can retire in 13.7 years with nearly $1.4 million dollars.

After my husband and I started living smarter, we were able to quickly pay off our debts.  Then the extreme saving/investing started.  We couldn’t believe how much we were able to put away.  Many times we’ve said to eachother, “Why did we wait so long to wake up?”