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13
Aug 2007

Expenses Mid-Month

FrugalBabe

We’re 13 days into tracking our expenses.  I’m using the same software that I use to keep track of our business income/expenses, and I’m having fun looking at all the nifty charts and graphs that it creates.  There haven’t been any big revelations, because I was pretty darn good at keeping track of everything in my head before I started writing it all down.  We only use one credit card, and I’ve always checked the balance and transactions on it every day. 

What I’ve noticed is that we’re getting closer to spending the way we did two and three years ago, when our debt was at its highest.  During that time, we basically cut out all unnecessary expenditures.  As we’ve gotten out of debt, we’ve relaxed a bit with our spending, but we’ve remained very much on the frugal end of things.  Now that we know that every purchase has to be recorded in Microsoft Money and posted here at the end of the month, we’re less likely to spend money. 

I plan to keep on tracking our spending, and I’m sure that as I get used to it, we’ll drift back into slightly higher spending again.  But overall, I know that it’s making us think twice before we hand over the credit card. 

I had thought about posting mid-month on our spending so far, but it doesn’t give a very good picture.  Things like the mortgage and insurance that only get paid once a month would make our mid-month numbers much higher than half our monthly expenses.  Also, we plan to go to Costco next weekend, so our grocery spending so far is a lot less than half of the monthly total.  On the plus side, our dining out expense is only $7 so far this month (snacks at the food court in the mall – a planned trip for ice cream and popcorn). 

So I’ll wait until the end of the month to post everything, but I’m feeling pretty good about the amount we’re spending.  I think we’ve found a good balance, we’re having fun and saving money at the same time – most of the stuff we do for fun requires little or no money anyway.  We do have to renew our registration for both cars this month, and pay for emissions testing on them.  We also have to pay our car insurance for the rest of the year, so we do have a few higher than normal expenses.  Hopefully tracking our money will keep everything else on the low end to make up for the unavoidable higher expense categories.

Category: tracking expenses  Leave a Comment
12
Aug 2007

Paying for Wind Power

FrugalBabe

Last month, we signed up for wind energy from our electricity company.  We just paid our first bill with the wind energy charge, and it was pretty easy on the check book.  We used 857 Kwh this month (as opposed to 1073 last year – yea!  keeping the temp. higher and drying clothes on racks instead of the dryer is working!).  The total windsource charge was $32.67.  But then there’s a “windsource adjustment” that subtracts $18.78 from the bill (I assume this is a state refund type of thing, sort of like the tax break for buying a hybrid car).  So the extra charge for using wind energy for all of our electricity came out to $13.89 for the month.   That’s in July, which is a high energy month (even though we’ve been keeping our thermostat at about 78 degrees, the ac has still been running quite a bit, just to maintain that level).   Most months of the year we don’t use more than 500 Kwh, so our average windsource expense is probably going to be under $10/month.  And it’s money very well spent.

Category: When we spend  4 Comments
08
Aug 2007

More On My Crafty Cards, and Consignment Adventures

FrugalBabe

I just got back from taking my card samplesto the store I found on Sunday… now I have to wait a week for them to look over my stuff and get back to me about whether they want to carry my cards in their store.  I decided to hold off on the other two stores for now, until I get some feedback from the first store.  The three stores I checked out on the weekend are all on the same pedestrian mall, within 10 blocks of each other.  The store I left samples with today was the only one that was able to give me concrete info last weekend – the others just gave me a name of a person to talk to, but in two attempts now I have not been able to get ahold of either person.  The first store said that they prefer that their artists don’t have stuff in all the other stores along the mall, although it’s not necessarily a deal breaker.  But if they’ll sell my cards, I won’t pursue any other stores on that mall, and might even go to another town to check out other stores.  We’ll see.

Another little venture that I tried today… We have friends who own a consignment store on the same pedestrian mall with the art store.  I’ve never consigned any clothes there, but we were in there last weekend and it got me thinking.  We live very close to an out-of-the-way thrift store that sells all of their clothes for $2.  Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Wal-Mart t-shirt or a pair of Armani pants – everything’s $2.  So yesterday I went in and bought several things – all upscale stuff with good brand names.  Today, I took it all to the consignment store, along with a bunch of stuff that I weeded out of our closets.  But alas, I forgot about the seasons that clothing retailers work with.  Turns out a bunch of what I had was winter stuff, which they don’t start taking until September.  And a bunch of it was summer stuff, which they have stopped taking until next spring (strappy tank tops and the like).  Aaaagh! 

They took 3 pairs of jeans and a pair of boots, and told me to come back in a month with all the winter stuff (and in about 7 months with the summer stuff….)  So, lesson learned.  But I’m excited about it anyway.  We still have more stuff in our closets that we canconsign (in the past we’ve always just given it back to the thrift stores as a donation, which we can still do with the stuff that’s not high-end enough for the consignment store).  I go to the $2 thrift store about once a month, so I’m sure I’ll find other good stuff.  There have been lots of times that I’ve seen great stuff in there that isn’t my size – now I can just get it anyway and consign it.  I just have to remember my seasons!

Category: hobbies, lessons learned  5 Comments
07
Aug 2007

$750 in the Bank

FrugalBabe

We sold our Oldsmobile on Sunday.  We were both kind of sad to see it go, but since my husband’s parents gave us their old car last month, we didn’t need the Oldsmobile anymore.  We sold it for $750, only $50 less than we were asking, so we were happy about the sale.  We posted the car on Craig’s List and it was gone in a just a few days.  The lady who bought it said that she had been to a casino the night before and had won the money there.  That’s good use of gambing money – much better than giving it all back to the casino with more bets!  She was thrilled with her new car, and we were thrilled to have the money.

I put the money in the bank today, which brings us much closer to being able to max out my husband’s IRA for the year.  We’ll open a Roth for him as soon as we have $1600 saved, and combined with the $200/month we put into his traditional IRA, we’ll max out his contribution for the year.  This will be the first year either of us has ever maxed out a retirement account – it feels great.

Category: goals, savings  Leave a Comment
05
Aug 2007

Can I Make Money With My Crafty Cards?

FrugalBabe

For the last few years, I’ve been making greeting cards for our family and friends.  I’ve also made sets of photo greeting cards and given them as Christmas presents, with 10 cards and envelopes tied in a bunch with pretty string.  Time and again recipients have told me that I should sell my cards, but I’d never given it much thought.  Recently however, I started thinking more seriously about it.  I love making cards, and if I could earn us a little extra money by making more of them, it would help us meet our financial goals faster. 

Yesterday, we went to a nearby pedestrian mall, and I inquired at three crafty/arty stores about how the whole process would work.  I still have to contact the people who handle cards at each store, and submit samples, but I’m optimistic after my initial meetings.  It looks like in general the artist gets about 50% of the sale, and handmade cards sell for between $2 and $7, depending on the complexity.  I have a pretty wide range of cards, and I would probably sell the photo cards for about $2.50 ($1.25 for me), and my more ornate, stitched cards for about $4 or $5 each.  The photo cards are very quick to make, once I take a good picture.  The hand stitched cards take a lot longer to make, so I wouldn’t make as much money on a per hour basis with those.  But if I were able to have about half photo cards and half stitched/papercraft cards, I could probably end up with about $20/hour for my time. 

This is of course assuming that the people in charge like my cards, and that customers buy them.  I looked at the cards on display in the stores yesterday, and my designs are very different – I didn’t see anything that looks like what I do.  I really like my cards, and hopefully other people will too.  The nice thing about this particular pedestrian mall is that it’s in a high-income town and there are lots of tourists, pretty much all year round.  And it seems that they are all spending money, judging from the shopping bags we always see people carrying and the prices of the stuff in the stores.

I’m going to work on this project this week.  I have to take samples to one store, and contact managers at the other two stores to see what they’d like me to do.  I’ll let you know how it goes after I get through the “interview” process. 

Category: hobbies, work  10 Comments
02
Aug 2007

Eating Out On the Company Dime

FrugalBabe

Once we incorporated our business in the spring of 2006, we officially split our business finances from our personal finances.  Obviously that isn’t entirely true, since the business is our main source of income, and we are the only two employees.  If the business makes money, we make money – if it doesn’t, we feel the pinch.  But technically, we’re different entities. 

Since I’m very aware that every penny the business spends is less money that can be used to pay our salaries and dividends, I make sure that there is no unnecessary corporate spending.  The business goes through about $700/month on internet, phone, advertising, quote software, and the few other odds and ends we need to keep it running well. 

Last year, our total business expense for ‘meals and entertainment’ was zero.  Seriously.  We stopped meeting with clients about three years ago when we started being able to do almost all of our work over the internet and phone, and now we physically meet with clients maybe two or three times per year.  We didn’t need to spend a dime on entertaining last year, so we didn’t.  Much to the chagrin of the accountant I started using on a consultation basis earlier this year.  She told me that we need to be having business meetings when we go out to dinner and writing them off.  I told her that we just really don’t go out to eat that much.  The other reason was that I’m always erring on the side of caution when it comes to taking deductions, so when we do have a $15 dinner out, we just pay for it with “our” money instead of business money.

My husband has been reminding me of the accountant’s advice, and has suggested that tomorrow night we go for a long bike ride that ends at Baja Fresh.  He mentioned that if we designate dinner as our time to catch up on work stuff for the week, we can put it on the business card and deduct it (well, half of it anyway).  So Baja Fresh, here we come.  It will be our first ‘meals and entertainment’ expense for the year, and it will come in at under $20.  Not exactly big corporate spending, but a good baby step for me. 

The nice bonus is that I won’t have to list it as an expense when I total up our expenses for August.  It will lessen the amount available for our pay this month, but it won’t be a personal expense.  I promise not to make a habit of it.

Category: work  2 Comments
01
Aug 2007

Stock Market Blahs

FrugalBabe

I just checked my IRA balance and it’s gone down by about $1000 in the last two weeks.  What a bummer.  I know I’m not alone, and I know I can’t even touch that money for 30 years, so it doesn’t really matter.  But I think I’ll wait a few weeks to update our net worth figures.  I like the mental boost of seeing the numbers go up, regardless of how abstract the values really are.  On days like this I like my ING account a lot.  

Category: net worth  3 Comments
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