Seems like just yesterday (or about a month ago) that we were getting set for the latest rivalry games between Hope and Calvin.  Today will be a renewal of that rivalry as both the men’s and women’s teams do battle in the MIAA tournament championships.  It should be a great day of Hope basketball, that’s to be sure.  Do you have a similar rivalry in your home area?  Let us know in a comment below!

So that’s coming up later today.  Now, have a look at what we’ve been reading this week in personal finance:

WC, a guest poster on Get Rich Slowly, shares the narrative “What Marriage Has Taught Me About Money.”  We don’t totally agree with WC or JD when it comes to the first point, “There is no I.”  For us, marriage meant that our finances do come together as one, but it’s not a chore as the writer seems to describe it.  We consider ourselves equal partners in the process of being good stewards of resources we’ve been blessed with by God.

Along the same lines, Jason from One Money Design shares 10 Smart Personal Finance Tips Before You Get Married.

PF Journey is a new blog to us this week, and Lakita gives us this great post — Cutting Cable Saved Over $70 per Month.  One of our favorite topics, as you can read here and here.

Flexo at Consumerism Commentary previews the new Quicken Essentials for Mac.  Walt Mossberg’s full review is available from All Things Digital.  Sounds like it just doesn’t get the job done — hopefully, Intuit’s acquisition of Mint means that much of Mint’s goodness will make its way into the desktop software.  For $70, though, we’re not going for the upgrade just yet.

It was hard to decide which Money Crashers posts to include this week, so our advice is to take a look at each of these:

• How to Get Cheaper Entertainment Without a Cable Subscription
• How to Spend Less on Music Downloads
• Set a Budget for “Hobby” Expenses
• 3 Ways To Build Wealth At An Early Age

Mike from Gather Little by Little takes a look at the Pros and Cons of Using Prepaid Debit Cards.  We just got one of these as a perk from upgrading our internet service with AT&T U-verse — interesting concept, and we like the idea of using them for gifts or kids’ commissions for doing chores.

And finally, Jason from Automatic Finances (another new blog to us this week) provides his take on a major debate, “What’s More Important: An Emergency Fund or Being Debt Free?“.  We tend to agree with Ramsey on this one — small emergency fund, pay off debt quickly, build up to a larger emergency fund.

We had the opportunity to catch up with some good friends this weekend, and it was during our visit that seeds of an impulse purchase began to take root!  After dinner we headed into the living room for a couple rounds of Sequence (with the Winter Olympics on in the background, of course), and as we were playing, I noticed a new beautiful pair of speakers that I hadn’t seen before.  (From what I could tell from searching on Amazon after the fact, they appeared to be Polk Audio Monitor 30s, just in case you were interested.)  Sure enough, they were a Christmas present to the couple, and I found myself immediately covetous of their good fortune.

Now, I’ve been wanting a pair of speakers for some time now, and particularly so since we made this special purchase just before Thanksgiving.  That being said, I think I’ve done a good job keeping at bay the impulse to somehow force this into a new “electronics we definitely need” category in our monthly budget.  Then I saw those nice little bookshelf speakers with their cherry wood cabinets and trendy updated Polk Audio logo, and all I could think was… I want.

That was Saturday.  I mentioned it to Julie on Sunday, and she suggested maybe setting up a search for similar speakers on Craigslist or eBay.  A totally reasonable suggestion, to be sure, and I even went so far as to take a look at both sites.  The problem is that their is no finality in that process for shopping.  No, the stereotypical masculine shopping plan was quickly rushing into action, and this is how it tends to go for me:

1. I know what I want.
2. It is my perception that I have the means to make the purchase.
3. The purchase is made.

Translation: I want some stuff, I have the cash money, and now I’d like for said stuff will be mine.

So, I ran out of time and energy to think about it any more on Sunday.  Didn’t come to mind on Monday.  Then Tuesday came.

One of my favorite sites to frequent is Deals.Woot, and I thought I could maybe set up a search for bookshelf speakers on there.  I did a quick search, and up pops up those darn Polk Audios in their pretty goodness.  Must. Discuss. With. Wife.  Knowing that these are the types of decisions we make together, I passively-aggressively emailed this deal to Julie and indicated that we could talk about it later on.

The discussion arrives, and we decide that the funds are available in our household category, so I’m feeling free to make the purchase.  I log on to Amazon, and nothing.  I can’t even bring myself to add those beauties to my shopping cart.  The desire to have them make their way to our house has completely left me, and I realize that it was not meant to be, for now.  I had been bitten by the impulse purchase bug and miraculously recovered before our debit card could do its thing.  Read back a little ways on EGS, and you’ll realize that this was not always the case.

So, if you ever hear that little voice in the back of your head that’s asking you to ask yourself a very important question, let me offer a little advice: listen.  It’s asking you the question: do you really need this?

We love a good garage sale.  You get up early on a Saturday morning, brew a pot of coffee, and out in the driveway you set up those folding tables you borrowed from church.  Then you start hauling up tons of junk from your basement, out from underneath the couch, from the shelves of that one closet — heck, maybe there’s stuff in the bathroom you can sell, so you bring that outside, too.  You then get the pleasure of arranging those items on said tables, figuring out the most that anyone would spend on them, and then writing that amount on those stickers that you would never buy unless you were having a garage sale.

You then plunk yourself down in one of those camp chairs that sport the moniker of your favorite sports team or the bank that gave it to you when you opened a checking account with them (it was either that or the cooler).  Folks come around throughout the day, and you get the opportunity to haggle over that favorite piece of Tupperware or the Amy Grant CD you bought in 1992 (no, wait, it was actually a cassette tape).  At the end of it all, you have to do everything that we talked about in the first paragraph (backwards this time), and really, what for?  A couple of hundred bucks (maybe) and the sense that the Saturday you lost will never, ever be returned to you.

We’ve never had a garage sale.

Okay, now that we’ve removed our tongue from our cheek, we should really be straight with you: we have nothing against garage sales.  It just seems like a whole lot of work for what you actually end up with.  And when it’s time for us to unload some old books or musical favorites like Blues Traveler and Blind Melon, we think we’ve got a better plan: Amazon.

Isn’t Amazon always the answer?

We’ve had a ton of success selling items on Amazon, and here’s how you do it:

• Log in to Amazon.com, and click on “Your Account” (it’s in the upper right hand corner).
• Now, on the right hand side of the page, click on “Sell Your Stuff.”
• Here’s where it gets kind of cool — Amazon takes advantage of the fact that it sells almost everything and lets you search for the item you are trying to sell.  If you can find it (you will), you’re done.  Whenever anyone searches for that item on Amazon, they’ll be able to get to your listing under the “new” and “used” sections listed with that item.
• When your stuff sells, it sells.  You can see what similar items are selling for, and price them accordingly.
• All you then have to do is ship the item, and Amazon provides you a credit for the shipping costs.

It might just be us, but we like this plan compared to what we described earlier in this lengthy narrative.  There are other options for selling your stuff online, but we’ve found this to be one of our favorites.  So, the next time you call the church or VFW to borrow those tables, you might give Amazon a try — oh, and you won’t have to buy those stickers, either.

As we posted Saturday on our Facebook fan page, this weekend we were able to knock out our income taxes!  Many thanks again to the big ol’ Money Crashers giveaway that left us with a free copy of TurboTax Premier [affiliate link].  The process is, to some small degree, enjoyable, as we think about the past year and how God has continued to provide for us in a really big way.

The funny thing is that, although we’ve been using some variation of TurboTax for the last several years, the whole process always ends up taking more time than we ever expect it to.  We begin our taxes well-organized and prepared to complete it in a reasonable amount of time, perhaps an hour or so.  But there I was on Saturday afternoon, and before I knew it, 3 hours had passed me by.  Part of it seems to be that there are things about filing our taxes that I seem to forget each year and then remember only while I’m doing it.  So, here are a few items that we’ll keep in mind as we go through the year ahead and prepare for filing our income taxes in 2011:

1. A file folder does not mean one has reached organizational greatness. As different tax-related statements come throughout the year, we tend to put them in a specific tax folder and not think much about them until the time for filing comes.  This weekend I quickly realized that we might have benefited from organizing these documents into different categories prior to logging in to TurboTax.  It meant that I couldn’t really get into the rhythm of going through the program, as I was working to get mortgage/property tax statements, listings of charitable contributions, and other W-2 and income items all into place.
2. Store receipts are actually important. We’ve shown you our budget and receipt-keeping process, but I continually forget that it’s important to keep track of the purchases we make online.  The state of Michigan requires that you claim whatever online purchases you’ve made for which you’ve not paid state sales tax, and since we didn’t keep track of that this year, we ended up having to pay the maximum amount of tax ($50) for an assumed amount of $1,000 in online purchases.  Since we didn’t want to take the time to figure out what we actually spent online without paying sales tax, we took a bigger hit than we probably should have.  Better planning will help us avoid this in the future.
3. Use a great new tool — ItsDeductible. We weren’t aware of this great online tool, which allows you to keep track of charitable donations throughout the year and then import them into your TurboTax online or desktop software when tax time comes around.  We believe that part of good stewardship means making sure that you receive credit from the government for the charitable contributions we make during the year — it helps to  ensure the financial freedom to continue giving.

So, these are just a few ideas we’ll put into place as we look ahead to this coming year.  As with anything, the more refined the process, the more easy and enjoyable the end result can be (if that’s possible when it comes to filing taxes).  What are your tips for tax time and planning in the year ahead?

Another weekend is here again, and we had the fortunate opportunity to spend a few days away during the past week!  We headed up to frozen Elk Lake (near Traverse City, Michigan) and spent the week cross-country skiing, drinking tons of coffee, eating much cake, and watching every possible minute of the Winter Olympics   It’s good to be home, though, and we’re excited to bring you our favorite articles from this week in personal finance (and maybe some other stuff, too).  Enjoy!

** Craig at Money Help for Christians includes selected posts from Earn Give Save with Christian Personal Finance Blogs | January Highlights.  Thanks for including us, Craig! **

Amanda at My Dollar Plan shares 9 Tips to Stretch the Life of Common Household Items.  The laptop battery point is particularly important, as they are usually crazy expensive to replace.

Jim over on Bargaineering provides a TurboTax Tax Year 2009 Review.  We find this one pertinent because we’ll be knocking out the ‘ol income taxes this very weekend.  Looks like TurboTax continues to be a reliable product.

Jason at One Money Design asks, Income Tax Refund: Is It Good or Bad?.  Jason is responding here to another post over at Christian PF.  This is a perennial conversation, to be sure.  We’ll add our two cents in a post coming up this week!

Five Cent Nickel provides the encouragement to Re-Evaluate Your Recurring Expenses.  Sounds like a solid monthly plan to us — we find ourselves doing this each month just by virtue of having a meeting about it.

Redeeming Riches shares some good thoughts on Overcoming Anxiety – How Worry Reveals What We Worship.  Always a good reminder about what really matters.

Linda at Christian PF brings us her first review of taking the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University class.  We’re excited to read the week-by-week review of the class, as we’ve thought about taking it at some point.