America Saves Week, what about you?

Okay, so did you know that this is officially “America Saves Week’?  This sobering statistic is why official weeks like this are needed to promote financial literacy and savings:

• National Savings Needs:  Most Americans do not have adequate savings to meet major emergencies, let alone accumulate enough savings for retirement.  The typical American household has less than $100,000 in net wealth, including home equity and 401k accumulations, and only about $10,000 in net financial assets.  Lower income families have much fewer resources. 

To learn more about America Saves Week click on the link:  www.americasavesweek.org

Budget?

I get asked quite often about budgets.  Most of the time the questions revolve around “How much should we budget for a certain area”.  It’s a tough question to answer and I generally try to tip toe around it.  Everyone is different in their spending habits so it is hard to come up with a generic budget that fits.  That is one of the main reasons I created myVizer.com.  Anytime someone asks how they compare to another planning client, I just refer them over to the website and let them see for themselves.  (it shows your percentages vs. the average percentage for other users)

Recently though I stumbled upon an interesting article in Kiplingers magazine that gives folks a basic budget.  The title of the article was “how to divvy up your paycheck”.  Here is the breakdown:

• 30% Housing (mortgage/rent/insurance/prop tax)
• 15% Food (groceries/dining out)
• 10% debt
• 10% utilities/household
• 10% transportation (loan, gas, maintenance, auto ins)
• 10% savings
• 5% clothing
• 5% entertainment
• 5% miscellaneous

It’s not a bad benchmark to follow.   It’s not perfect, but not bad.  

Out of curiosity, I will have to get the wife to see how she thinks we compare to those numbers!

in my next life

Okay, short post this week as I am a bit lacking for words.  I recently had a revelation that if I were to come back in another life it would be as a Hair Stylist!  Geez, the amount that females will spend at the “salon” is insane.  I have determined that I am in the wrong business.  Face it guys, you know these folks that own the salons are sitting back and laughing at you.  They know there is absolutely nothing you can do to deter your wife from spending boatloads to get her hair done!

I’m tired of waiting!

Ok..I know the hubby just posted a blog about how painful it is for him to finish the basement…blah blah blah! Don’t feel sorry for him. We have been in this house for over five years with the plan to finish the basement in “a year or two.” Well each year would come and go, and still no basement. We have desperately needed a playroom and a guest room and so now we almost have that. We have been very budget conscious while doing this project, and I have paid for a lot of things myself with my small but reliable “nest egg.” I have painted, designed, hunted down things at IKEA and Craigslist and done a pretty good job on a tight budget. So don’t let him fool you…yes the floors were a big expense (around $5K), but he installed them himself (and did an excellent job.) And lets not also forget that we are increasing the square footage of our home by 1/3 and adding serious value to it as well. In a week or so, I will post photos of the finished playroom and bedroom. Keep posted.

spending money at Ikea

For those following along with the basement finishing project you will know that this has been a painful experience for me.  Both in terms of my back and my wallet.  The Amex bill arrived and I knew that it was going to be painful.  I need time to digest these things.  All the items we had purchased in December including the hard wood floors were on this months statement.  Toss in the holidays and this one really hurt.  So mistakenly I am thinking we are going to slow down the basement project so that I can pay off what we have done so far.  Well the wife had a different idea.  Hope had decided that getting the kids play room and a guest room completed was priority number one.  So I started looking for ways to pinch pennies which brings me to this weeks blog post about Ikea.

You see the original plan was a nice wall of built-in shelving in the kids room.  Well after all that was spent on the wood floors there was no way I was going to shell out the cash for custom built shelves.  I turned Hope loose on a project to slim down the cost.  She went online and put together a wall of shelving units from Pottery Barn and presented me with a configuration that was about a 1/3rd less than the custom.  Being my miserly self, I said we still needed to cut that in half.  Having just watched a home show on TV, I mentioned to her to try Ikea. 

I have a real love / hate relationship with the Ikea store.  Back in 95, Hope and I spent half a year in Sweden (the birthplace for Ikea stores) and came to enjoy strolling through the store thinking how cool it would be to outfit our hip urban home with all there cool furniture.  Flash forward about 12 years and Ikea opens a store here in Atlanta.  If you have never been to an Ikea store it is a totally different retail experience.  They are like an upscale WalMart for home furnishings.  Maybe that isn’t the best description but their furnishings are low in price and very appealing.  Everything is very efficient, the trick is that you have to assemble everything yourself.  So the part I like about Ikea is that you can get really decent home goods at very affordable prices.  The part that drives me crazy is the fact that you need half a day to get through the store!  You see the store is layed out like a maze and you must stroll through all the “show” rooms and departments and see everything, almost like a living catalog.  Along the way you write down the isle number where a product is located and after you spend 2 days strolling through their showroom you are dumped out into the warehouse area.  From here you find your boxes, load them on your cart and proceed to checkout.

It’s a unique experience that everyone should try, just make sure you have several hours to kill. 

So in the end I purchased 3 different shelving units that took me about 3 hours to assemble, but cost less than 1/3rd what the original built-in’s would have cost me.  So while I hated spending the money I took some comfort in knowing we created a good looking wall of shelves for quite a bit less than we planned.

Smart Phones, iPhones, etc….

So, Hope had been on me for months to get her an iPhone.  I finally broke down and got her one for Christmas.  I was really dreading the purchase of this trendy device.  Why, you may ask?  Well because I am frugal and practical!  These phones cost a fortune but worse than that is the additional monthly charges on your cell phone bill.

For the last couple of years she has been using the phone you get for free when you sign up for 2 year plan with the provider.  I thought that was sufficient, I mean the phone is for calling folks right?

Well she said she wanted to check her emails remotely and listen to her iTunes without her ipod.  In the end she always wins, but I try to put up a good fight anyway.

To me these things are the biggest time wasters ever.  Well maybe second only to Facebook.  Really, with all the “apps” you can waste hours playing with the silly phone.  I can undertand email, especially for business use.  All the other stuff just seems like fluff to me. 

MISER TIP: I finally rationalized the purchase by buying stock in a little microcap tech company that does what?  Sells apps for smart phones!

spam….

Well I knew it was just a matter of time before all the spammers found this blog.  Unfortunately, that means that this will be read only from now on.  Recently I had been getting at least 20 comments a day from spammers, so I have had to disable the comment section.  If you have something to add just email me and I will include it.

thanks.

taming down the gift giving

I sit here staring at my kids christmas gifts piled up by the stairway just waiting to be taken to their rooms.  Like most folks, Hope and I put a limit on this years gift giving.  Honestly, it was more enjoyable.  I think the pressure of buying for everyone takes a bit of the fun out of the season.  This year we put a limit on how much we would spend for the kids and even got the grandparents to pare down the number of gifts they bought as well.  For the adults we either drew a name and only bought for that person (on one side of the family) or decided to completely eliminate adult gifts (the other side of the family).

I for one have always felt that the season is more for kids.  In fact I told Hope and the kids several weeks ago that instead of them buying me anything for Christmas that we would instead sponsor 2 kids through the YMCA angel program.  So two weeks ago we headed to WalMart.  It was girls against the boys and with a $100 budget for each of our “angel” kids we had a little competition to see who could get the most stuff.  While Hope and my daughter got the most stuff, I think my son and I scored by getting our kid a bike!  It was fun to be shopping for a child we didn’t even know.  Somehow it put the spirit of the season back into the hectic Holidays.

Somehow I don’t think our pared down holiday was much different from others.  It seems that everyone we know has been impacted in one way or another from this recession.  Getting the spending inline with reality and explaining to the kids that Santa isn’t immune to the recession has turned out to be a good thing.

finishing the basement part 2

The communication has been a bit slow, I know – lack of anything to post lately along with the holidays.  So today I wanted to give a quick update on the basement progress.  For those following along I mentioned last month that I was finishing our basement.  Although it has very little to do with personal finance, I am sharing the progress just for your enjoyment.  So the story is that Hope has been on me for 5 years to get the basement finished.  I of course didn’t want to spend the money.  But as with everything she finally won the battle. 

My thoughts were that as long as I was agreeing to finish the basement I would at least try to save a few dollars along the way.   Here is a quick summary of where we are at:

• had the HVAC folks run the ventilation and motorized damper $2200
• carpentry to frame out the vents (tray ceilings) $1000
• insulate walls and ceilings $600
• plumb the water lines for bath / wetbar $1100
• electrical $1500
• sheetrock $3300
• primer / ceiling paint $250
• floors $5000 (ouch!)

So around $15k right now invested and that will at least give us a finished guest room and playroom.  My entertainment room will be a bit longer to complete.  I was looking for areas that I could do myself to save some money, but after second thought I decided that plumbing and electrical needed to be done by pros that could knock it out in a couple of days.  If I tried to tackle it I would probably still be working on it.  I have also tried hanging and finishing sheetrock before, but I was smart enough this time to sub it out.  That takes talent and a strong back.  I did install the insulation which is another nasty job.  That fiberglass is challenging stuff to work with.  I went ahead and insulated all the interior walls and ceilings to cut down on noise.  That is one of my biggest pet peeves with home construction is that sound carries throughout all the interior rooms because there is no insulation inside the walls.

I knew the floors were going to be one of the costliest items.  I did my research though and actually saved about $1000 by comparison shopping on the web.  I was just about to order through one of the major wood flooring stores on the web and at the last minute found a store in Alpharetta called SimpleFloors that had a real nice wide plank hand scraped wood floor that looked great.  I opted to do the install myself, which I am now having second thoughts about.  It is tedious work installing glue down wood floors.  It is after 10pm on Monday and I just finished the first room.  I would estimate it took me at least 8 hours to complete.  Let’s see if my math is correct that room was about 200 sq foot.  I only have 1100 sq feet to go!  At this rate I should finish sometime around New Years.  So much for having the basement finished before the holidays!