Author Archive for MiserlyMike

Choices, Sunshine, Happiness

Published by
MiserlyMike
at April 30, 2008 in Emergency Fund, Karma, Personal Finance, Spending and Weekend Recap. 0 Comments

After three weeks back in Syracuse, NY, I’ve returned back to Florida, and I must say I love the weather here.  As nice as it was back in NY, we really don’t hold a candle to Florida.  Anyway enough of that.

I have been assessing my current financial situation and reflecting on the recent market activities and I am a little torn on what to do.  I currently have 3500 in cash in my Roth IRA from this year’s contribution.  I didn’t contribute the maximum, due to the recent loss of my job, though I probably could have.  I like to play it safe and keep that cushion.  I have available credit, other than my parents that I could really draw upon in case of emergency — and I like it that way.  Cash is king in my life, except for the largest of purchases;  tuition, mortgage, etc.

I have $2,500 remaining in my checking account, and another 1100 from my last paycheck.  I also collect $250 a week from unemployment.  This gives me a grand total of $4,600 by the end of april.  After bills and the like I’ll be down to roughly $3600.  If I live an extremely meager lifestyle, I should be able to sustain solely on my unemployment checks and keep around $3,000 in my checking account.  The choice I have to make is whether I want to continue this lifestyle, unemployed and living in the sunshine and doing as I please, or go back to work and make money again.

Ideally, I could do both.   To those that are, you live my dream.

Karma Chameleon

Published by
MiserlyMike
at April 24, 2008 in Budget, Emergency Fund, Karma, random thoughts and work. 0 Comments

Things tend to happen in odd ways. The past three weeks have been one long drawn out party with my old friends. It was much needed. I’ve become pretty content with not working. Financially, I’m not in any immediate trouble due to a healthy nest egg from being uber-frugal, the assistance from unemployment, and my low cost lifestyle. I decided to take this time to think about what I really want to do with my life, and if working an 8-5 job is the right lifestyle for me. I still haven’t decided what the best course to follow is, but I know that 8-10 hour workdays just aren’t for me. I need flexibility. I’m a quick and diligent worker, and logging a 10 hour day, when I could probably pop off my entire days workload in a few hours is nonsense. I’m going to try my hand at developing some passive income streams to supplement my lifestyle. If I am able to develop enough alternate income, then I see no reason to go back to work, and can pursue my real interest, which is starting a legitimate business. As I mentioned in a previous post, these alternate income streams will flow hopefully from affiliate marketing, and the facebook application I am in the process of developing.

So as for the title of my post, sometimes things happen at odd and unexpected times in your life. Here I am content as a pig in shit for the time being. I’m studying for my graduate entrance exams, working on side projects, and going out with the guys every night like the world might run out of whiskey at the end of the week.  I meet a fellow over a game of pool that works for a local defense contracting company. Sure enough he is  a Sr. Software Engineer for said company and tells me to send him my resume as his boss is a fellow RIT Alum.  Now I have an interview tomorrow morning for a position I wasn’t searching for. Great! It is certainly a mixed bag as far as feelings go. On the one hand, if I did happen to get the job, as far as jobs go, it is pretty fricken’ sweet. Great pay, security clearance, great benefits, relaxed workplace. On the other hand, it is a job. And I don’t like “jobs”. It would require me to relocate back to Syracuse from Jacksonville. I’m not sure if that is the best course of action for me either.

Either way, I’m really excited for the prospect, and it just shows that if I did happen to need to actively look for a position, it wouldn’t be very difficult to sniff one out. Anyway, I’m off to brush up on my C++ skills. It has been a long time since I looked at C++ code, I spend too much time in .NET!

And so it goes..

Published by
MiserlyMike
at April 24, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Beautiful day here in Syracuse.  I’ve been back at home for nearly three weeks now, after spending the last 9 months of so in Jacksonville, Florida, and I must have brought the nice weather with me.  I couldn’t have asked for a more pleasant stay.  It isn’t everyday you see sunshine in New York.

I’ve been staying in Syracuse on “vacation” — I was recently fired from my job down in Jacksonville — and thought I would use my free time and one of my flight vouchers to visit family/friends.  I saved up a decent chunk of money, so I’m in no rush to find a new job, plus I am getting unemployment at the tune of ~$250 a week.  Nothing to write home about, for sure.  It will keep me going afloat for quite a while though.  It should cover the majority of my bills(mainly student loans) and housing costs.  I haven’t worked out all the numbers yet, but it is one of the first things I need to do once my “vacation” is over.

New Beginnings?

Published by
MiserlyMike
at April 23, 2008 in Personal Finance. 0 Comments

After a little pushing from an old friend, I figure I might try to start writing here again.  I never really got off the ground last time, as I got extremely busy with work and lost the motivation and lacked the free time during the work day to write posts.  Anyway, I am working for myself now.  I’ve been learning the Facebook application api lately, preparing for my first full fledged facebook application.  I’m also going to be working on setting up a couple affiliate marketing sites, and see if they can generate any income, in addition to doing side work for some miscellaneous websites.

I will keep posting hopefully steadily daily.  I am going to try to have markedly shorter posts than previously, though.  I think the length of my original posts were one of the reasons I never could keep motivated at writing.

Thank you Andrei.

Financial Decisions: Part 1 — What vehicle do I buy?

Published by
MiserlyMike
at August 22, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to put my money to the best use. I haven’t really come to a conclusion yet, so I figured I’d hash it all out in writing and maybe something would come to me. Think of this as my actual thought process, a stream of consciousness type post if you will.

Let me first off outline my current financial obligations to adequately frame the scenario with my particular situation.

I have significant debt (~$21k @ 7%), in the form of student loans.

Second off I need to find an alternate vehicle. My auto right now is on its last legs and I would really rather not drop any more money into fixing a vehicle that I have no interest in keeping, especially since it is in pretty rough condition already.

Third, I need to continue to invest money into various places. — Unfortunately, this is going to require quite a bit of leg work since I lost my list of funds I wanted to invest in. I had already done all the research and picked a portfolio that I felt comfortable adding money into. It was balanced to my liking given my contributions that I already make to my 401k and RothIRA. This is going to take me quite a bit of time and prognostication to do because I am completely anal about researching a product before I purchase it.

I suppose up to this point it seems pretty straight forward. Some of you are probably thinking where is the problem, make you payments on your loans, start putting money away for a new vehicle and get to crackin’ on your investment strategy, boy! I guess I just need to make sure that the money is allocated in a way that is going to make it work the hardest for me and that each decision is carefully thought out an calculated to make sure it meets the needs of my lifestyle.

I’ll go into more detail on the decision to purchase a new vehicle first. I drive a pretty ragged ‘96 Ford Contour currently that is probably going to need significant and continued work down the road. The air-conditioning doesn’t work because of a hole in the line. I live in Florida and I commute upwards of 45 minutes to and from work on some days when the traffic is bad. This is a big problem for me. The starter is also making a quick screeching/zipper noise which means it might need to also be replaced in the near future. Not to mention the massive rusting of the underside of the vehicle.

One thought is to keep the car as backup transportation and buy a high MPG motorcycle. This will serve its purpose and also save me money in two ways. First, I can pick up a reliable, newish, low mileage,motorcycle for about $3,000 on average. Pretty cheap. Second, a bike will run me around 65+MPG. More than double what I get now. This would save me considerable money in the long run because of my daily commute.

Let’s break this down into the numbers. I’ll use some estimates since I don’t have any raw data to support this….yet..

MSN Auto tells me my ‘96 Contour gets me about 25mpg. (This is probably a high estimate considering most of the time I am sitting in traffic doing stop and go driving). My commute everyday is just over 25 miles a day. How convenient. This means I’m burning around a gallon of gas a day just during my commute. At $2.75/gallon that is costing me $13.75 a week of work or $715 a year. That is assuming I don’t drive my car anywhere except to and from work.

Now If I got 65MPG I would only use about 38.5% of a single gallon. That isn’t even two gallons a week! At $2.75/gallon that would cost me $5.28 a week or $275 a year. That is a savings of $440 a year just on driving to and from work.

The other option is to buy a used car that gets about 30-35 mpg and is fairly reliable, costing me somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. The upside to this is that I could sell my Contour, probably for no more than $800.

I suppose the first thing to do is to see how difficult it is to become a licensed motorcycle operator.

Debt: My student loans.

Published by
MiserlyMike
at August 21, 2007 in Budget, Consolidation, Debt, Interest Rates, Personal Finance and Student Loans. 1 Comment

After ~5 years of private university, (I wish I went to public uni!!) I amassed a fairly large sum of money in student loans. Thankfully, my mother was in a very low income bracket for which I received substantial financial aid packages, one of the perks being all my loans were subsidized by the government until repayment began after graduation. This meant that the money that I borrowed didn’t/doesn’t accrue interest until repayment when you are no longer a full time student.

Unfortunately for me, graduation has since come and gone and I’m entering repayment on what I have realized is a lot of money with high interest rates(~7%).

Let me first break it down into cold hard numbers. You’ll notice that I rarely talk about anything financial without associating the talk with hard pen and paper numbers(yes, I actually write this stuff down compulsively on scratch paper).

First off I have a $3,000 loan that is a federal perkins loan with RIT. This hasn’t gone into repayment yet, but will in the next month. I also have another $3,000 loan for Georgia Tech that is the same. I have a citibank subsidized stafford loan with a balance of $2,362.99. This loan has a payment of $100.61 a month.

The mother load resides in Direct Loans that are federal subsidized Stafford loans as well. I have a balance of $12,738.90 with a fixed interest rate of 7%, and a payment of 150.13 a month, for what seems like eternity. I consolidated this before the recent interest rate hike of .08%. Still not sure how I feel about this, but what is done is done and I’ll have to live with my decision.

Loan Summary:

Institution || Principal || Rate || Payment

Georgia Tech ||$3,000 || — || —

RIT-Perkins || $3,000 || — || —

Direct Loan || $12,738.90 || 7% fixed || $150.13/month - 10yrs

Citi || $2,362.99 || 6.97% variable || $100.61/month - ?

—————————-

Total $21,101.89

OUUUUCHHH….

I’m not sure what I should do at this point. Interest rates are at an all time high, but at the same time, I’d like to start getting some nice borrower benefits through the consolidation company. I’ve been mulling it over for a few weeks now and I decided I’ll probably just keep my rates where they are for a year and make the payments every month and see if Congress is going to step in anytime soon and help out borrowers.  Right now I’d say we are getting the shit end of the stick.

Catching Up on my Wallet — Part Two

Published by
MiserlyMike
at August 17, 2007 in Budget, Emergency Fund, Personal Finance and Spending. 0 Comments

Yesterday I combed through the massive amount of purchases I have made in the last month. I was a little bit ( a lot bit ) depressed seeing my balances and where the money actually went.

Here is a breakdown of the graph generated by yodlee. These numbers are all very accurate and account for every single dime I spent in the past month and how it was spent.

Rent: $563.00 –Pretty self explanatory. Rent is $550 a month and I owed my roommate :10bux:

Travel: $475.21 –This is for two plane tickets, and the money spent in the airport on food and also my rental car.

Pets/PetCare: $467.50 –This one actually has nothing to do with pets. I had owed someone money and it was a one time payback. I categorized it under pets since I don’t actually have pets so I would remember what it was.

Automotive Expenses: $415.75 — The cost of having my brake line repaired and the diagnostic fee at the dealership.

Clothing: $372.31 — This is the cost of the suit and shirts I bought and also the two pairs of shorts I bought when I moved to Florida.

Entertainment: $322.75 — Sadly, this is how much money I spent at the bar…Looking to cut that number down quite a bit.=/

Electronics: $210.28 — HDD, phone, HD enclosure

Restaurants: $ 200.74 — Not bad I must say, this is lunch every day @ work and all the money I spent eating out.

Groceries: $128.27 – Again, doing okay in this category for a month.

Gasonline: $121.53 — Little below average since I didn’t have a car there for a bit.

From this I look at where my money actually goes and was a little disappointed with myself. $322 on bar tabs is quite the cost. That was only money spent in bars too, nothing else. I know I did have a little excess here this month because of the move and the wake and meeting new people, but still, that number needs to go way down. I am looking to keep it under $150.

Things that should trend toward $0 this month are automotive expenses, pets/petcare, and probably travel. These three things amounted to about $1350, which came out of mostly my emergency fund. They make this month look very bad on paper. With any luck, I won’t have any “emergencies” anytime soon.

Clothing was another $372 which also came mostly out of the emergency fund. I’d like to cut back to $0-50 for this upcoming month. I think I’ll need some new socks, maybe a pair of shoes.

The other things on the list were misc. expenses, gas, household items, haircuts, and books. I did very well on my casual spending this month.

Overall, In the past 30 days I spent $3421. 60. An astronomical number. If I subtract the bulk of my emergency expenses, and $300 in clothing costs, I get ~$1800 in expenses. This is a lot closer to what I want to be spending, but still a fair amount over. Under $1400 this month is the goal.

I’ll need to cut down on my entertainment costs and not buy anything this month. It is time to tighten my belt for the next few months. I have my sights on buying a motorcycle, so I really need to start putting some extra away for that. This should help save on the rising cost of gasoline and also the future repair costs on my car.

Catching up on my Wallet — Part One

Published by
MiserlyMike
at August 16, 2007 in Budget and Personal Finance. 0 Comments

Reckoning time has come for my wallet and I. My spending over the past month has been largely unaccounted for, due to a number of circumstances that I spoke to in past entries. Now it is time to go through all my records and figure out how much I have spent in the past 30 days and what I have spent it on.

Luckily, I keep pretty meticulous records thanks to my friends over at yodlee.

I am not a very meticulous record keeper (hell I’m not that meticulous with anything). Thus keeping track of my finances is something I have had difficulty with in the past. I have solved it by doing the following. I open up a checking account with direct deposit. For this I used ING Direct. Then I sign up for their check card. They have 3% APY and give cashback. Then I signed up for a yodlee account and linked it to my ING Direct account. Then I make all my purchases. Every single one of them, on my check card. Where I can’t do this I take money out of an ING ATM to avoid fees and categorize the transaction.

I also save EVERY receipt, though I just throw them in a box. This is because I am going to deduct EVERY single purchase I make while contracting to offset my tax burden. In case of an audit, it will be good to have these in my records. Using yodlee is much more convenient for me than balancing a checkbook or keeping track of a budget. With a few clicks I can categorize a transaction into a category or set up automatic rules for places of frequent purchase to move them into their related categories. It also has a ton of other nice features like bill reminders, billpay, portfolio manager, spending reports, net worth statements, budget thresholds, budget goals, etc.

Today I went through and categorized all my previously uncategorized purchases and this is what came up when all was said and done.Expense Report

I do the same with all my other financial institutions as well.

An In depth analysis and discussion to come tomorrow.

Emergency fund and Karma

Published by
MiserlyMike
at August 15, 2007 in Budget, Emergency Fund, Karma and Spending. 1 Comment

In my last post I mentioned there had been a death in the family that caused me to tap into my emergency fund once again. It ended up being a pretty deep tap when all was said and done. I had already tapped into my emergency fund to fix my vehicle and also rent a car and help my roommate out with some gas expenses. This time, I even had to withdraw from some of my liquid savings in order to cover all my expenses.

Let’s start with my flying fiasco first. Once again, my luck continues with flying and I had my flights on Thursday and Friday both canceled. On top of that my baggage was lost both on the way there and on the way back. I have since went back and complained to US Airways about my disasterous flying record and they have so far issued me a one way travel voucher for EACH trip that was interrupted. So now I’m waiting on my third travel voucher to be issued, hopefully this week. I will probably use them to go to Vegas with my brother for New Years. Sometimes it pays to complain.

Back to emergency funds. I spent a total of $400 on flights for the weekend. On top of that, I bought some new clothes. This was in part because they had lost my luggage and in part because I needed some new clothes (for work). Thanks to some thrifty shopping, I was able to pick up a suit (Pants, Jacket), a tie, and six dress shirts for under $300. The shirts will help boost my rather meager ration of three ill-fitting dress shirts that I wore to work. Now I have another rather nice suit, and some fitted dress shirts that make me look a hell of a lot more professional than before. The shirts were only $20 for fitted Stafford long sleeve button downs. On top of that I had two $15 off coupons. Normally the shirts alone probably would have totaled $250 and up on their own.

$700 right there that I was able to use from my emergency fund that allowed me to get to NY for my Grandmother’s funeral, and look pretty dang snazzy in the process. While in NY my four year old cell phone bit the dust. I’ve been putting off getting a new one for quite awhile now. It was literally falling apart. Taped and glued in multiple places. The screen was cracked. The battery didn’t stay in. When it did, it only held a charge for about 20 hours. The chargers were after market and regularly wore out or broke after a period of usage. It was in rough shape. On top of being functionally deficient it looked pretty crummy too.

I know that looks aren’t everything, but it wasn’t professional. It was difficult to take a call in a professional work environment with a ratty looking phone like that. Not that I need to have anything special, just something that doesn’t look like i literally fished it out of the trash bin.

I ended up purchasing the vx-8300. Not exactly new, not exactly old. It came with two chargers, two batteries, and an extended charge battery. On ebay it ended up costing me $96+$6 shipping for a total of $102. Even though I could have gotten an upgrade from Verizon for probably free, I decided not to, since my contract has been up for quite awhile now, and I feel much better not being locked into any obligation with them to continue their service.

I chalked these purchases all up in my “emergency expenditures”. Even though some of them probably weren’t true “emergencies”. This totaled to about $800 and change. Pretty hefty considering I just spend quite a bit getting the car situation straightened out.

On top of that I bought some books on Amazon and a laptop harddrive for my roommate. The books for 6 of them, ran me about $50. They were all professional development type books. Never Eat Alone, Who moved my cheese?, and so on. Now I just need to find the time to read them.

The hard drive I bought for my roommate to show my appreciation since the two of them have driven or picked me up from the airport 6 times, drove me to and from work for nearly two weeks, and just been all around great people for only knowing them for a few weeks.

Recently their laptop died and they have been griping about it for awhile. Since computers are sort of my forte I surprised them by ordering a hard drive ($40) off www.newegg.com and they came home to a working computer. I figure, if nothing else, a few bucks and some thoughtfulness can lead to a lot of good karma and probably a few friends in the process. A trade I’m willing to make any day.

I’m back!

Published by
MiserlyMike
at August 10, 2007 in Budget and Emergency Fund. 0 Comments

I regret to say it has been awhile since my last post. I had intended on writing a steady stream of entries every week, but due to circumstances (not having internet access or pc) I have been slacking. I have had a run of “bad luck” so to speak of late that has caused me some financial distress as well.

First, after moving into my new living situation, the cable and internet were shut off in transition to switching to different services. After that, my car died. Brake lines rusted through and had to be replaced. This caused me significant distress since I just started my new job and had no relationships to rely upon in Florida to bail me out. Luckily, my roommate was more than generous and kind to me and gave me rides to and from work every day for a week and a half thus saving me significant financial discomfort.

Apparently, Floridians are foreign to the rust buckets that we call cars upstate. After my car broke down, I figured I would just have it towed to the local Pepboys and they could fix me up, for what is usually a 300$ job or so to replace/repair a rusted line. I estimated I might pay up to $500 here to have it fixed. After a day of “diagnostic” they refused to work on the vehicle any further. What?. Flat out refused work…They must be doing pretty well financially to refuse work I thought. Apparently they didn’t want to take on such a time consuming and “difficult” job. This put me in a bind, now my car was at a shop, broken, and they wouldn’t fix it. So, I phone AAA and have it towed to a dealership. Bad move on my part. After a $1200 estimate and looking at a few used vehicles, I decided that they were off their proverbial rocker and I phoned up AAA once again to have it towed to yet another shop(cross my fingers), on the referral of a “friend”. Due to some confusion, the mechanic was unable to work on the vehicle because he took on more work than he could chew. He then brought the car to a mechanic across the street for me.

Finally, they were able to fix me up proper, after only a day. Nearly two weeks after my car originally broke down. In the end it only end up costing $400 to have the car repaired. In addition to this, however, I bought two tanks of gas($60) to help repay my roommate’s kindness, and had to rent a car ($60) one day to get from the Airport after flying back from my Father’s 50th birthday.

This week I had my car back, my wallet taking a significant hit in the process, but things were getting back to normal. I still needed to look for a new vehicle since my car is unreliable at best and I can’t afford to miss more days of work.

Yesterday, I get the news that my Grandmother who was very close to all of us has passed. I’d need to fly back out to NY for the services. And miss more work, I thought.

I’ve already been half a day late due to my car troubles, had to call in giving one day notice because of a canceled flight and no way to get back in town on time, and now I get the news that my Grandmother has passed. I hopped the first flight out ($400) I could get (Thursday), which of course was canceled. Next flight out not until the following day, so I rescheduled to fly out Friday morning.. Hopefully, things will go smoothly from here on out, as this will already be a stressful time for all of us. I won’t be returning to work until Wednesday. That is if my flights get me here by then. I’m not holding my breathe.

This has caused me a lot of stress about my job. I need to talk to me boss and express to him that this unreliability is not usual and it just seems a stretch of bad luck and unfortunate events have strung themselves together all at once.

—————————-

Fortunately, from a financial perspective I was prepared for these kinds of things. I had a good amount saved in a cash emergency fund that I was able to draw upon to pay for my car and plane tickets and the like. Though, my budget is all out of whack for this month. I haven’t had the time to pay anything more than cursory attention to my finances.

I’m going to have to sit down and have a thorough inspection of where I am financially, and see how far off track I am from my initial estimates. Pretty far I think. Every day I miss from work is $256 pretax that I’m effectively spending. Four days (Thursday,Friday,Monday,Tuesday) is $1024, plus the other day last week for a total of $1280. That’s no joke.

I’ll be happy when (if) I roll over to perm. in 6 months and I get proper paid vacation and some nice benefits to boot.

RIP Edna Borio

We all will love and miss you.