I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘cool stuff’ Category

I’ve been spending the holiday weekend with my family and because of the holiday here in the US, I’ll be doing my normal “Sunday Morning Link Love” post tomorrow morning instead, since for me that’s the end of my weekend. 

But I wanted to announce the winner of the SmartyPig $50 gift card contest!  I had 52 entries, and I numbered them as they came in.  I used random.org to generate a random number between and inclusive of 1-52 and the winning number was 23 – which was Scott H!  I have contacted Scott via email for his mailing address and will mail out the card Tuesday morning. 

If for some reason I do not hear from Scott before next Sunday, I will draw another winner.  Thanks for entering!!

Over the past week, there has been a 6 word memoir meme going around some personal finance blogs, and I managed to be tagged not once, but three separate times, first by the Journal of Healthy Living, then by Five Cent Nickel, and finally by Remodeling This Life. And so, here it is, my 6 word memoir:

Life Is Meant To Be Lived.

I think a lot about our finances, maybe because I spent a lot of time in the past not thinking at all about them, and I spend a lot of time and energy trying to use our money wisely, save money, reduce debt, and generally improve our lives for the future. But, that doesn’t mean that I feel that everything should be for “someday”. Life passes all too quickly and life is meant to be lived. I have trouble with this myself – I need to find a balance between living in today and preparing for tomorrow. But I believe with all my heart that I try to live each day to the best of my ability, and be present in that day.

This has come into focus more me more sharply in the past few weeks. It is not completely official yet, but it looks like I may end up ranked in the top ten in my age division in weapon forms for this competition year in the style of taekwondo I study. It has been a dream of mine for a long time to be a world champion in weapons forms, and I have been ranked in the top ten twice before. Once I won the bronze medal at world championships, and the second time I was too pregnant with my son to travel to the worlds competition (he was born a week after world championships that year in fact). I wasn’t aiming to be in the top ten this year – I only competed in our regional competitions where I was required to attend for my job. But I won a number of times in my division ring, and ended up, with the unofficial results at least, ending up in the top ten. To become world champion, you have to travel to worlds and compete.

And I want to. There is no guarantee I’d win, or even place, but I want to try. We can drive there, but it is about 12 hours away so gas would not be an insignificant cost, and we’d have to stay in a hotel for two nights. It would be another delay in our plans to get out of debt.

So the question remains – which do I want more? To be out of debt, or to have the chance to be world champion? I can’t quite answer that question yet. The competition is in late June, and I basically have until then to decide.

With that, I am instructed to tag five more people. So I shall tag:

• Debt Kid
• My Good Cents
• Mrs. Micah
• Frugal in the Fruitlands
• Self Made Chick

A while back, Frugal in the Fruitlands tagged me to complete a “Four Things” Meme. I am really bad about completing memes, so it took me this long to get to it. It looked familiar, so I searched my archives and found I had already completed this meme a while back. But this version has a few new topics, so: Here are 4 topics from the four things meme I will tell you four things about me in. If you want even more “four things” be sure to visit the first time I completed this meme.

Four TV Shows I Love

1. Law and Order
2. Gilmore Girls
3. Dinner: Impossible
4. Throwdown with Bobby Flay

Four Places I’ve Been on Holiday (Vacation)

1. Minneapolis, MN
2. New Orleans, LA
3. San Francisco, CA
4. Memphis, TN

Four of my Favorite Dishes

1. Potatoes Au Gratin
2. Macaroni and Cheese
3. Black Bean Burritos
4. Chocolate… anything

Four Websites Visited Daily

1. Google
2. Tutor.com
3. Google Reader
4. Moolanomy

I need to get on the whole meme-answering thing, since three different bloggers have already tagged me separately for another meme, my 6-word memoir… I am still working on not being verbose. Heh!

I was approached by the team at SmartyPig a week or so ago via twitter and asked if I’d like to give away a $50 SmartyPig gift card on my site. I do love to give things away, so I said yes, and went off to investigate what exactly SmartyPig is. I had heard of SmartyPig before from reading reviews on other blogs (see the list at end of this post), but I wanted to go to the source and see what it was for myself. I’ve spent the last week or so thoroughly perusing the SmartyPig website, as well as setting up my own SmartyPig profile (although I have not set up an actual funded savings account yet, more on that later) and I think I know enough to give my opinion. I didn’t have to give my opinion to give away the gift card but I decided to anyway.

What is SmartyPig? SmartyPig is basically a savings account (that earns 3.90% APY) through an actual bank (WestBank) and is FDIC insured. The difference between SmartyPig and a regular savings account is that you set a savings goal and a funding source, and you need to fund your savings goal (minimum of $250) through that funding source by automatic monthly withdrawals. It is the online version of a piggy bank. Making deposits is free, and withdrawing your money is also free, which you can do in the form of a gift card (which you get a bonus for depending on what retailer), a SmartyPig debit card, or a check. Direct transfer back to your funding source is not yet available but is supposed to be in the future. If you are saving for an item which you can buy with a gift card, this would be a nice way to get a bonus for your money. Friends can also make deposits to your account if you make your savings goal public – and they can do so for free if they have a SmartyPig account to do so with.

What do I like about SmartyPig? It encourages the idea of saving. Saving is important and far too little of it is generally done. I like that they’ve made funds available by other means than just a gift card, although I do think saving for a material item is the most effective way to use SmartyPig because of the gift card bonus. I also like that friends and family can make deposits to your account.

What I don’t like so much is that you have to set up a direct debit each month – which is why I haven’t actually set up a saving goal yet. My spouse and I talked about using SmartyPig for him to save for his Playstation 3 – but I don’t feel far enough out of debt yet to tie up our money monthly in that manner. Just say I have a fear of commitment. You can cancel you goal at any time and get your money back via a check, so it isn’t irreversible, but I’m not quite ready yet. But, soon. He’s been saving his birthday and Christmas money for two years and he deserves to see the fruits of his labor. I’d feel better if I could just deposit his current savings though and leave it alone vs making monthly deposits.

If you have a savings goal you’d like to let SmartyPig help you meet, I have great news for you! I have, as I said at the top of the post, a $50 SmartyPig gift card to give away! Just look for the secret phrase at the bottom of every post in my RSS feed or my email subscription, and email that phrase to me -send your emails with the secret phrase as the subject line to paidtwice at gmail dot com. The contest will end Saturday at 11:59 pm EST and I will announce the winner Sunday morning. Good luck! I have a physical gift card to mail to the recipient so I will need your mailing address, and I am not responsible for the US Mail service delivering it.

If you’d like to read some other perspectives on SmartyPig, here are some of the reviews I read previously:

• Gather Little By Little
• Moolanomy
• Being Frugal
• My Money Blog
• Lazy Man and Money
• My Dollar Plan

I am a tutor for Tutor.com, an online tutoring service that offers help for students in a variety of subjects including Algebra, Geometry, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Social Studies, Calculus, English, and more. The service is pretty neat in my opinion, students log on to an interactive classroom environment where they talk online to a tutor in the subject they chose for that session, and they talk via an instant message type window that has a whiteboard attached to it where you can work out examples in real time. Tutors in each subject are available 24/7 so the students can get help when it is convenient to them and use as few or as many minutes as they need.

One of the Tutor.com staff is a reader of this blog and contacted me to offer an exclusive trial to readers of PaidTwice – if you’d like to try out Tutor.com for yourself (or have your 6th to 12th grade child try it) instead of the normal 25 minute free trial, by using this link you can get 50 minutes free from Tutor.com. You can also use the promotional code PDTWICE to redeem your 50 free minutes. You don’t have to use your 50 minutes in one session – any unused minutes stay in your account for later use.

Generally, when I tutor, I have sessions ranging from a student who has already worked out a problem and just wants me to check it, to students who are completely lost on a particular problem and need me to help them understand it step by step. Tutor.com is not an answer service – we’re trained to help students through guided questions to understand concepts themselves so they can apply them to further problems down the line as well as solve their questions. I really enjoy tutoring and think that this service is an efficient way to do so – you use time in increments of minutes, so if it only takes 14 minutes to work through a problem, you still have the rest of your time bank to work on something else down the road.

Tutor.com also gave me a free trial to try the service from the perspective of a student, which I did this weekend. I found my tutor helpful and useful, and I was able to go through a complex chemistry problem with them by preparing much of it beforehand in only 22 minutes. That is another thing I like about the service – you can prepare what you already know beforehand as to not use up extra time in the session.

So if you are interested in trying the Tutor.com service – use my link and you’ll get twice the normal free trial minutes: 50 instead of 25. And if for any reason you’re not satisfied with your session, you can get a session credit to refund your minutes. Good luck and have fun!