I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Revolution Money Exchange - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Last month I signed up for Revolution Money Exchange, a service similar to paypal for person to person financial transactions but without the fees paypal charges. Since then, I have used the service several times, and honestly, I have had mixed results with it. At this point, I think it shows promise, but it is not quite ready for primetime.

In the beginning, I transferred money out of my account on two occasions that I had earned via referral bonuses. The process to set up my bank account was easy, and I had it confirmed within a few days. These transactions went off without a hitch and things looked fine. The money was transferred to my bank account without any problems within 3 days. But that’s where the trouble started.

I then did some person to person transfers (those were fine) and then transferred more money out of my account. I initiated the transfer April 16th, and it was not completed until May 9th. I called several times to figure out what was going on, and no one really had any answers for me as to why the transaction wasn’t completed. The people on the phone were pleasant, and once it was finally cleared to go through, I got two calls from Revolution Money Exchange to let me know. That was nice, but I still don’t understand what the problem was. I do have the money in my bank account now, though.  And it is nice that you can call them (you can email as well) and talk to a real live person on the phone.  I appreciated that.

The last problem I had was transferring money into my account. I initiated a transfer into my account from my bank account so I could pay something instead of using paypal. But the transaction took much longer than it should have (over 2 weeks all told) so I ended up just using paypal to pay instead. That’s a weakness of RME - you can’t use a debit or credit transaction so you have to have the money already in your account. Even if the transaction took what it was supposed to, 2-4 days, you still have to plan ahead much more than you do with paypal. That’s a good and bad thing, I think. Planning to spend money can be good, but its never going to catch on for something like eBay or splitting the check for dinner like it advertises if you have to plan so far ahead.

So as I said - it has potential. But there are still problems and I’m not sure what exactly causes them, so I can’t get fully behind it and say I’m going to start using it exclusively. I did get a $25 bonus for signing up and I still have some $25 bonuses to give away, so if you want a $25 bonus, feel free to sign up for it. Currently the bonus offer expires tomorrow, it may be extended but I don’t know if it will be or not.  Everything has been resolved to my satisfaction, I’m just not sure why there were things to resolve in the first place.

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Teaching A Spender To Save ~ More Praise For The Emergency Fund

On Monday I wrote my treatise on why I find value in having an emergency fund even while still in debt. Mathematically, there is a sacrifice in interest earned on savings vs interest saved by using that to pay down debt, but I feel the benefits are more than financial. The responses to the post were mixed - some agreed, some lamented the idea of following irrational financial decisions with even more irrational decisions, and some brought up another benefit to the emergency fund that I hadn’t touched on in my post - teaching a spender the art of saving.

I started my life a saver, but learned to be a spender, and building an emergency fund really did help me to rediscover how to save. Even if the amount is not much, the act of putting money into a savings account just to save it, and not for a predetermined purpose, was a very new act for me. Even when I saved money, I always had something in mind for it while I was saving it. But the emergency fund isn’t pre-spent before it is saved - it is just-in-case money, and the act of saving it teaches me to save for the sake of saving.

Someone that’s in debt and struggling to get out may never have actually committed to saving before. Learning to save, and making a commitment to saving, is teaching a valuable skill that is best learned hands on. Paying down debt is obviously important, and I fully believe in doing everything you can to pay down your debt and escape the bondage that debt brings. But learning how to move forward and handle financial crises, big and small, without turning back to the allure of debt is important too. Having that feeling of being able to manage things without debt can, dare I say, make saving feel fun.

On a personal note, I obviously have an attachment and fondness for the cash emergency fund for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I’ve had to use mine several times. And yesterday afternoon, I received in the mail the explanation of benefits for my CT scan, and learned that as I expected, I will be paying about $1100 out of pocket for the procedure. That includes my $1000 deductible (we pay 30% of everything over $1000 up to $3000 a year), so I know my colonoscopy in June will be less expensive - or, at least, we’ll pay a much lower percentage of the charges out of pocket at least. We’ve already shifted to a half debt repayment/half savings plan for the forseeable future, and so have enough saved to cover the procedure. If the hospital takes as long to bill me as they did after my daughter was born, I won’t see an actual bill now that I have the explanation of benefits for a few weeks yet, and we have about $300 left in our healthcare Flexible Spending Account that we’ll also be pulling out to apply to this bill.

So things will be fine, and we will carry on. Without any emergency savings, my spouse’s student loan would be $1400 less right now, but we’d also be charging $1100 on a credit card. Debt begets debt.

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Tell All Tuesday ~ Half Debt / Half Savings In Action

A few weeks ago, I made the decision to, for a short time, change our financial focus from primarily debt reduction to a mix of debt reduction and saving. Until our emergency fund is at $2000, all my snowflakes will be split evenly between our emergency fund account and our student loan payoff fund.  This was the first month I have put that into action (since everything last month went towards the purchase and installation of the new furnace), so yesterday I snowflaked $446.33 to my spouse’s student loan, and put the same amount in our emergency fund.  The emergency fund now stands at $1446.41.  Gotta love the $0.08 in interest I earned last month.  :)  Added to the debt snowball minimum of $437.59 I pay to that student loan every month, my total payment was $883.92.

When I went to redo my numbers, and recalculate the percentage of debt we have paid off, I saw that we are now at 39.95% of the original debt (as of June 2007) paid off.  It made me wish a little that we were more flexible in our payment ability for these loans, because I wanted to go pay another $19 and throw us over the 40% mark.  But I found when I did the payment from my Revolution Money Exchange bonuses last month, that for the Sallie Mae loan online, my payment has to be assigned to a “payment group” which is a minimum monthly payment - so if I make more than one payment in a month, I advance my payment due date by a month each time I make at least a full monthly payment.  I don’t want to do that, so I will only be making payments to the student loan once a month.

With that, here are the numbers:

Debt at start of blog (6/19/07) : $36,451.71

Current total as of 05/12/08: $21,888.57

Principal paid to date $14,563.14

Broken down into:

• Credit Card: PAID OFF 2/7/08

• Student loan (at 7%): $11,467.76

• Spouse student loan (at 9%): $7940.54 (made payment of $883.92)

• Car loan (at 4%): $2480.27

NCN Network Chart %:  39.95% (last week 37.65%)

When I think about the fact that we have paid over $14,000 to the principal amount of our debt in the past 11 months…  well, that is great but it is also depressing.  That is a LOT of money we could have done a lot with.  Yikes.  But hey, the spouse’s student loan is now under $8000!  And only about $22,000 let to pay before we are free of non-mortgage debt…

Someone asked me earlier if I thought we’d get to the debt halfway point by the blog’s first anniversary.  Then I was slightly hopeful, but now after the furnace, I think it will be a bit later than that.  We’d have to pay about $3700 to debt in the next month… hey - just about exactly what the furnace cost… heh.  But soon!  I have some survey income I just received that will go towards debt for the next month, and I’ll have some blog-related income and another check from taekwondo before next week.  We will definitely be over 40% paid off next week - just by paying the minimum payments on the car and my student loan!

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A Good Budget Is Not An Iron-Clad Contract

On Saturday I went grocery shopping, and as I posted about earlier, I found an amazing deal on energy bars that my spouse eats (they were being clearanced) and bought all the store had of them. All told, I spent about $50 on them, and have certainly busted the grocery budget for this month. However, since each bar cost approximately 50% less than their normal price, all in all I will save about $50 over the next several months not having to buy more of the bars. So should I be concerned about breaking my budget? A budget is meant to be followed, after all…

I contend that a good budget is not set in stone. When the artificial constraint of a budget is keeping you from making smart choices for the future, that budget needs to be re-examined and reconsidered. Even the tightest of budgets should have some flexibility built into them. The beauty of a budget is helping you understand where you spend your money, and making sure you understand the choices you are making - not making you spend more money in the long run to save money in the short run.

I started using a budget out of necessity. I knew what bills I was paying, how much they were, and where that was going. But I honestly had little idea where the rest of our money went, and our “fixed” expenses (bills) were very close to our income, so to avoid going into more debt, I had to know exactly where everything else went. Now, through a combination of my increasing our family’s income, and successfully so far paying down a portion of our debt, the gap between income and fixed expenses is larger, so we have more inherent room to play with. But without a budget, I know that our miscellaneous expenses would creep up to meet and exceed the increase of income, and we would be right back where we started.

The best aspects of a budget are the dual abilities to chart a course for the future and give perspective on where you have been. There is a huge emphasis among many people when the word budget is used on the idea that it is constrictive and keeps you from living life. But a life lived within the boundaries of spending less than you earned is a life well lived, and that is what a budget allows you to do.

As for managing unexpected finds such as a stock-up sale in my budget? I currently have a number of “irregular” expenses categories that I save monthly for, but only spend at certain times throughout the year. This gives me some flexibility I would not otherwise have. One of those is the “annual expenses” category, which sits currently at a little over $300. This month I will spend $73 of it on a car registration, but the rest is not slated to be spent for several months. If needed, I can borrow from this category and pay it back over the next month or two, well before my next annual expense is due. This is just an example, I have several irregular expense categories with various amounts of money left in them right now. And to me, that is one of the biggest advantages to a well-made budget - the ability to plan.

Don’t believe the hype - a budget does not have to be constrictive and controlling. A budget truly can enhance your life instead of limit it.

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ArtsCow Offering 400 Free Prints - My Review

A week or two ago, I read a post on My Good Cents about ArtsCow.com offering 400 free photo prints (200 4×6s and 200 5×7s) to new customers.  I had never heard of ArtsCow so I checked it out, and signed up.  I did get credits for 400 free prints (50 a month of each for the next four months, basically).  And their normal prices for 4×6s and 5×7s are the cheapest I have seen anywhere.  However, the site had some red flags for me - particularly that much of the text was not grammatically correct and because of that to me, didn’t quite seem professional.  I investigated the website more, and found that if I placed an order, I could pay via paypal, so I felt like my financial information would be secure.  So I decided to redeem my first 50 free 4×6 prints and see what I thought.

I had to download a Microsoft extension to be able to upload more than one picture at a time, and even then, I found the upload tool rather primitive.  Once uploaded, I could select matte or glossy, which made me happy because I prefer matte prints.  The pictures were available in 4×6 not the more digital camera-friendly 4×5something that a lot of sites are giving as an option now, but that was okay.  They are free, after all.  I then ordered 50 prints and paid through paypal - the prints were free, but I paid $3.99 shipping.  (Shipping on 50 5×7s is $5.99 for me at least, by the way.)  $3.99 for 50 prints was only a little under $0.08 a print.

It took about a week or so for them to arrive, and I was pleasantly surprised, but also quite confused.  My order was fine - the pictures were printed on Fujifilm paper and the quality of printing seemed good.  The paper did feel a little bit thinner than a normal picture, I think.  I could be imagining that.  Since I am using them for scrapbooking that really doesn’t matter to me.  The weird thing, to me, is they were shipped from Hong Kong.  They even had a customs label on them.  How could the company be making any money if they are paying for shipping from Hong Kong?   I don’t get it.  I just… don’t get it.  So I looked up Hong Kong currency conversions, and as far as I can tell, they only paid $2.89 in US dollars to ship the pictures to me.  I think.  My brain cannot understand how this is possible, but, I guess it is.  I asked Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity what he thought about the shipping from Hong Kong thing, and he postulated that once they had enough business, they could mass ship from Hong Kong to the US and ship individually from here.

So, in short, I thought the pictures were good scrapbook quality, and I ordered my free 50 5×7 pictures for the month of May as well and am waiting for them to arrive.   That, as I said above, is $5.99 shipping, so unless you want 5×7s specifically, not as good a deal.  But I did have a number of pictures I wanted as 5×7s that I have been collecting up over the past year or so, so I was happy to redeem my credit.  I haven’t decided if I will redeem the other 5×7 credits as they come up, but I will be redeeming the rest of my 4×6 credits.

The free 200 4×6 and 200 5×7 offer is still going on now -  and since I was satisfied with my experience I want to pass it on to all of you.  If you sign up, you will get credits for 50 4×6 prints and 50 5×7 prints for each of the next 4 months (May, June, July, and August).   To redeem, you just have to click on the link in your account page for the appropriate credit, and fulfill your order as normal.  I do get a referral credit for each person who orders something for free prints for me, 100 4×6 ones I think - but I have no idea if that counts if my referral just order the free prints since you are only paying for shipping.  That is fine though - just get free prints!  That is what I am getting. :)   Free prints for everyone!  This is a limited time offer - they are only doing the free prints until they give out a certain number of credits, so even if you aren’t sure you want to do it, you might want to create an account for to collect your free credits and then decide later.

You all know how I love free prints.  These aren’t quite free because you pay for shipping - but still less expensive than I can currently order pictures elsewhere.

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