money

FinCon 19: C.U. in D.C.?

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Once again I’ve been chosen to be one of the more than 200 speakers at . This year FinCon takes place in Washington, D.C., from Sept. 4 to Sept. 7.

I’ll be coming in a few days early for some sightseeing and to hang out with my daughter. And maybe with some of you, but more about that in a minute.

First, a shout-out to any other personal finance bloggers out there: How would you like to get free admission to FinCon19?

If you can meet a couple of conditions, then I urge you to apply for the FinCon19 scholarship. Those conditions are:

You started your money blog/podcast/website/YouTube channel after January 2018.

You haven’t already registered to attend FinCon19.

 

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Salary vs. the “right” job.

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My least-favorite job ever was working at the glass factory, right after high school. Great salary, for its time and for my age. But it was hotter than the hinges of Hades (thanks, glassmaking furnace!). Loud music (mostly country and western) blared nonstop. We stood on concrete floors throughout our eight-hour shifts.

Well, eight hours for some people. That summer I did a lot of double shifts. Here’s how my regular schedule looked:

Work from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. for five days, then get a day off.

Go in at 3 p.m. the next day and work from 3 to 11 p.m. for five days, then get two days off.

Go in at 11 p.m. and work until 7 a.m. for the next five days, then get two days off and go in at 7 a.m. the next day.

Labor, rinse, repeat.

Except, as noted, I worked a lot of double shifts. Normally I might have grossed anywhere from $163 to $171 per week, depending on the shift. In two months of work, I grossed a little over $1,800.

 

While the job stank on ice, it was a good example of what I didn’t want to do for a living. It wasn’t that I was too good for the work, but rather that I wanted something different. Some people got married, bought homes and raised families on glass-factory salaries (which increased as you gained seniority). That was fine for them. It just wasn’t a good fit for me.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether I’d say “yes” if Company X asked me to return to the world of full-time work. After all, I’ve still got some years left before retirement and wouldn’t mind goosing my Social Security check a bit. Thus I decided that if the mythical Company X offered me a job, I might take it – provided there were an obscenely large paycheck attached to the gig.

How large? Not sure. But certainly more than the $77,000 annual salary cited in a recent study from the fintech company Self Lender.

 

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Financial planning: Too many women don’t care.

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This just in: In the 21st century, plenty of women are still leaving the long-term financial planning decisions to their husbands.

According to a study from UBS Global Wealth Management, 58 percent of women let their spouses handle the big-picture finances.

Here’s what really startled me, though: In the United States, 56 percent of millennial women (ages 20 to 34) were okay with letting their husbands handle the big money choices.

Have we learned nothing from the past few decades?

As a very young woman experiencing poverty, sexism, harassment and exploitation, I used to think, “Things will be better for our daughters.” Surely they would have more. More education. More redress. More lifelong options. More financial security.

Yet we’re still raising our girls to think they’re not good with money, or maybe that men are somehow better at it.

 

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How many credit cards should you have?

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This is not a fun topic to tackle, since so many people hate credit and the credit scoring system. But in a recent post on The Simple Dollar, “You need at least two credit cards: Here’s why,” I take on the issue of how many credit cards you should have, and also our love/hate relationship with plastic.

You need at least two forms of payment in case of fraud, robbery or card loss. And no, debit card use is not a good substitute; it puts your personal cash at risk and does not help you build a credit score.

Who cares, you ask? Isn’t cash king? Ideally, maybe: We would all buy only what we could afford and pay cash on the barrelhead instead of running up debts.

But to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, life is never pure and rarely simple. Less-than-ideal things happen all the time.

The post explains what might happen when you lose a card or it gets hacked and you have no other form of payment, and also what could happen to those who use debit only.

It also points out the benefits of rewards credit cards, one of my enduring frugal hacks. Every time I cash in points for a birthday gift (which I recently did), a home improvement project or some kind of entertainment, it reminds me how much I like being rewarded for buying something I was going to buy anyway.

 

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America Saves Week: Grow your dough.

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As a country, we’re not saving. Our personal savings rate is at its lowest level since the 2008 recession.

How’s your savings going?

Plenty of reasons explain why people aren’t saving: un- or underemployment, tax issues (local, state or federal), stagnant wages if you do have a job, illness (your own or a family member’s), the rising cost of living or even good old-fashioned bad luck (of all the cars in the parking lot, yours was the one that got sideswiped by a guy who just kept going).

Fact is, we have to do better. That’s why America Saves Week was created. Even if you don’t take the America Saves pledge (which apparently gives you the chance to win cash) or follow any of the suggestions in the ASW tool kit, the program might help you focus on this essential fact: It’s up to us to save ourselves – and one way to do that is to SAVE.

 

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No-spend February, Week 3: Taming the reflex.

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It has been a quiet week in Lake Spend-be-gone*. In honor of no-spend February, this has been a week without  questionable stock-ups of Tater Tots, trips to the movies or other unnecessary expenditures.

One big-ticket item, though: a plane ticket to Phoenix* for next month, which set me back close to $600, including trip insurance. Of course, I expected to pay a lot: Right now is the high season for people wanting to get out of Anchorage.

But this trip is an essential expense: My daughter is having cataract surgery, so I’ll be driving Miss Abby. Also painting her bathroom, doing a few household chores, making some casseroles and scooping the litter box. And, yeah, taking daily walks on gloriously ice-free sidewalks.

I watched “The Walking Dead” at my niece’s home for free, rather than go to a local bar and have to spring for a soft drink and a tip. The writers group to which I belong had its monthly meeting, and I brought a spice cake made from ingredients we already had. (More on that later.)

While I’d planned to get some vanilla ice cream on the way to the meeting, to go with the cake, I forgot all about it. Turns out it wasn’t necessary (very moist cake!), and besides, the forgetting jibed with something from last week’s comments section.

A reader named mdoe37 said she’d picked up a planner to help organize her household. Soon afterward she had what she calls a “hello!” moment: Don’t I already have a couple of binders at home, and couldn’t I go online for some organizational sheets to print out?

Somehow her first impulse on seeing a planner was to buy it: Look, a thing that will help organize all those other things! Upon reflection, though, she decided to return it and save a little over $5.

“It’s all about taming the reflex,” she notes.

If people take away nothing else from the no-spend month, I hope they get this part.

 

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No-spend February, Week 2: Lots and lots of Tater Tots.

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This week reminded me, once again, that retailers are ultra-skilled at coaxing us to spend on stuff we hadn’t expected to buy.

Yep, I backslid.

But since it was all in the food/healthcare category, I’m going to give myself a pass rather than regret the dollars that flowed from my wallet – or the chopped, formed and extruded potato scraps that landed in our freezer. (More on that later.)

After all, one of the points of the no-spend month is that each person gets to determine what “essential” and “non-essential” spending means. What’s vital to you might be a pffftttt…are you KIDDING me? to someone else.

For example, some people consider coffee an urgent need (DF calls it “God’s blood” – and he’s religious) while others can take it or leave it. The first group will therefore deem a replacement bag of grounds, or daily cups from their favorite java joints, as essential.

The second group will shrug and say, “Not in the budget right now” and either stick to water or bring coffee from home. Which brings me to the mad frugal skillz of a reader named Kate.

 

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Will the next bank outage ruin YOUR day?

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If you’re a Wells Fargo client you already know that one doozy of a bank outage happened last Thursday.

Those customers who wanted to use an ATM, buy something with a debit card or pay their bills online were left in limbo after a data-center fire knocked the nation’s third-largest bank off its pins.

Consumers were, understandably, more than a little ticked off.

Imagine needing gas to get to work but your debit card won’t function. How embarrassing to have to tell the babysitter you don’t have enough cash to pay in full.

The system was back up by late Thursday, although some users reported issues the next day. Among those issues was direct deposit of paychecks. Good times!

The bank promised to pay any Wells Fargo fees resulting from the outage. Whereupon one super-irate customer tweeted about an upcoming appointment to sign mortgage documents. Trouble was, at that moment the lender could not access the system to generate those documents.

“If I can’t close on my house and the seller defaults me, then what? U giving me my $45k earnest $ back?” the would-be buyer asked.

All in all, an unsettling situation, especially for paranoid dweebs like me. My initial thought was, “Data-center fire, huh? Or was it a trial run by hackers planning to bring down the country by bringing down the banks?”

I bet I’m not the only one who thought that.

 

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Join us for a no-spend February.

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Is your budget suffering a holiday hangover? Were you caught in the government shutdown? Or are you just interested in getting control of your cash? A no-spend month could be the right first step to take, and NerdWallet is sponsoring one for February.

To be clear: That doesn’t mean no more fresh fruit until March, or having to shine on a prescription refill. A no-spend month is actually more like a “spend-super-intentionally month.”

On the NerdWallet “Community” message board, my former MSN Money colleague (and now NerdWallet columnist) Liz Weston describes the event as a month where you try to avoid any non-essential spending. Each participant gets to define what is and isn’t essential.

Having done a no-spend month before, Weston describes it as “kind of magical.” Specifically:

“Not only do we save money, but we get creative finding no-spend workarounds when unexpected situations pop up.

“We get clearer what’s a necessity and what isn’t, which can really help us get a grip on our spending going forward.

“We appreciate that having any discretionary spending is a blessing. For many, every month is a no-spend month because they don’t have any extra money beyond what it takes to survive (and sometimes not even that).” 

Sound good?

 

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Found money, food money.

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All year long, I find money: on the sidewalk, on the floor in the checkout lane, in the Coinstar return bin. And every year I count it, round it up and donate it to the food bank.

This year’s take is $10.25: a dollar bill, 12 quarters, 45 dimes, seven nickels and 140 pennies. This adds up to $10.25.

Picking up found coins is one of the tactics I suggest in the “Challenge Yourself to Save” chapter* of my first book. The reason? It works. Despite my not walking nearly as much in Alaska as I did in Seattle, and despite my mostly staying out of the stores, I still managed to glean a little over 10 bucks.

 

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