Category Archives: Personal Finance

Tools

Getting Organized

I wasn’t completely disorganized in my financial life, but I knew we could do better.  This is an area where I’m always challenged.

Several years back, a friend had recommended Mint.  Setup was easy and linking my accounts worked pretty well.  This gave us a general view of things and I set up a budget and some goals for paying off debts.  It was nice for a while, but I never really felt like it made an impact on our behavior.  There wasn’t a clearly visible trend-line for me to track and the budget became more of a suggestion than a hard rule.  Oops, we went over on groceries again!

Last Fall, I decided to try out Personal Capital.  Again, setup was easy and most of the accounts worked*.  This had exactly what I wanted.  Net Worth and Cash Flow graphs are right there on the home screen.  I now had a better graphical representation of how things are changing over time.  This suits the way my brain works.

In my next post I want to talk about learning to understand cash flow and how i’m adding that to my view of our financial health.

Cheers,

-cb3

 

*There is an issue with Associated Credit Union 2-factor that makes me re-authenticate every time but PC is aware of the problem and stated that it will take a code update on their part to fix

 

Personal Finance

Flashback to 2014

First, I want to back up a bit and give a summary of last year.

We started the year out with around $236k worth of outstanding debt including our mortgage.  Here was the breakdown:

  • $181k mortgage
  • $18k car loan
  • $28k credit cards (Holy Hell!!!)
  • $9500 student loans

The credit cards were an interesting build up of several years with a lot of small purchases and the occasional big ticket repair.  I was always paying more than the minimum, but I had never put together a spreadsheet to track purchase + interest.  I wasn’t even keeping up with the amount we were adding!

So, finally, in August I started putting together a nice sheet to track our overall debt and projected payoff for the year.  Once I had it all laid out, I could clearly see what the interest was doing to us.

I was able to transfer around $13k to a combination 0% introductory offers from our bank and Chase Slate.  These both expire at the end of 2015 which I projected to be achieveable.

Another $10k was moved into an unsecured loan from the bank with a low interest rate.  Not ideal, but way better than the rates we were paying and predictable.

By the end of 2014, we had only reduced our overall debt by 2.8%.  It was a step in the right direction, but I feel we can do better.  I do NOT want to spend the next 20 years working on this!

-cb3

(currently feeling angry about getting there yet determined not to let it happen again)