This might be one of the easiest ways that you can make a positive change in your financial situation.  Maybe you’ve heard it before, but it’s so worth repeating: brown bag it! That’s right, instead of heading out at noon to one of those awesome restaurants within walking distance, or worse, getting in your car to drive to some fast food joint across town, why not bring your lunch to work?

Disclaimer: This post is in no way a person indictment of your lifestyle.  Going out for lunch is awesome and like anything, fine in moderation, it just that it may not be the best financial decision you can make.

So why go through the hassle of (gasp) packing your lunch for work?  Well, besides the fact that it’s totally old school (elementary school style, that is), it also just might make your life a little happier.  Here’s why:

• You’ll almost certainly eat healthier. Instead of knocking down that Big Mac, Cheesy Gordita Crunch, or amazing BBQ chicken pizza from that brewery down the street, maybe you’ll be enjoying leftovers from last night’s home-cooked dinner or a nice sandwich.
• You will save money. It’s much harder to spend money on lunch from home, unless you’re going crazy on processed, packaged foods from the grocery store.  We’re definitely fans of leftovers from supper the night before, but we also do things like make of a big container of a cold salad or get sandwich fixings for the week.  Any of these options will be less expensive than going out.  Imagine that the average lunch out (conservatively) costs $5.  Imagine also that you go out 3 times each week.  That’s $15 per week, and about $65 per month.  We don’t know about you, but that’s a large percentage of our monthly budget (relative to everything else), and it’s just for one person.  Definitely worth thinking about.
• You’ll have more time for lunch. With no travel required, you can simply walk out to your office’s fridge, snag your meal and go to town.  If you were to drive somewhere to have lunch, you’d end up spending half your lunch in the car.  The car is so much more boring than that copy of Fast Company that you brought to peruse during lunch.

We can think of one great reason to go out for lunch, and that’s those occasional times that it’s a social activity.  There are few activities at work that are more fun than going out with your awesome colleagues for laughs and a great lunch.  Just be sure to do this sparingly — trust us, you’ll enjoy it more.

What’s your lunchtime strategy?

__
Photo Credit: denverjeffrey // Creative Commons

We bought our house in December 2007, and from the first payment in January 2008, we’ve committed to one little step that we think will eventually make the difference.  It takes discipline, but it’s so simple at the same time: round it up, we say.  From day one, we’ve rounded up our mortgage to the next hundred.  The additional amount ends up being fairly small compared to our total payment, but it’s definitely changing the outlook of our loan.

Like many mortgages, ours is a 30-year, fixed rate loan.  If nothing changes, making this small additional payment each month will knock 5 years and about $28,000 in interest off the life of the loan. (Want to figure out what a change like this will do to your mortgage? We used the mortgage calculator at DaveRamsey.com.)

Now, here’s where things start to get really crazy.  Let’s say we spread that $28,000 over the 25-year life of the loan.  That’s about $93 per month that’s now available for investing.  Yeah, it will be smaller in the beginning and become larger as the amounts amortize, but for the sake of argument, let’s say we invested that in mutual funds over the 25 years.  If the fund averaged about 8% over those 25 years, it would be worth somewhere around $175,000 at the end of the loan.  (Oh yeah, Dave’s got an investing calculator, too!)

Okay, so this is a really basic way of looking at things, but it gets at a really important point.  The more aggressive you are about paying down your house, the more you are going to be able to make your money work for you in the long run.  We do plan to move at some point, and unless we are really fortunate, we’ll need to get another mortgage.  We’ll go with a 15-year, fixed rate loan, and we will pay it off as quickly as possible.  In the meantime, any extra principle we pay on this loan is well worth it!
__
Photo Credit: wwworks // Creative Commons

Here’s the thing: most of use the Internet a ton, and we’re constantly storing passwords and identity information in our browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, et al) for quick and convenient access when we return.  The problem is that the browser is not a secure silo for housing your login data.  If someone was to steal your computer (the most likely of all scenarios), they’d be able to access all of that information and do who knows what with it.

That’s where 1Password comes in.

It’s a piece of desktop software from a company called Agile Web Solutions.  1Password has set a standard for storing sensitive information on the Mac, including:

• usernames/passwords
• identities
• credit card information (for online shopping)

The great news is that 1Password isn’t just available on the Mac.  It can also be installed on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and there’s even a Windows public beta available.  We rarely buy new software for our computer, but a program like 1Password is just too valuable not to have.

Beyond keeping your private data safe, another main benefit of using a program like 1Password is that it stores and remembers data so you don’t have to.  There have been so many times that we’ve had to go through the process of requesting a password reset, creating a new password, and then having to remember it for the future.  1Password remembers everything with one “master password” so you don’t have to.  The software includes built-in browser plugins (for every web browser you could think of) that let you call up usernames and passwords with a quick keystroke.

You can try 1Password and any of Agile Web Solutions’ products free for 30 days.  We’ve found it to be extremely useful, so give it a try!

Bonus: 1Password stores your data locally, but for those of you that are itching for an offsite backup, you can simply save your 1Password keychain in your Dropbox.  If something happens to your computer, you’ll be able to restore all of your important data.

This one’s a little update on the way we’re managing our budget these days (read our first post on the subject).  Ever since Mint came on the radar back in 2006, I’ve been clamoring to make it our budget management tool of choice.  Here’s a quick look at Mint’s main features:

• Ability to import transactions from multiple checking, savings, and investment accounts (many, many banks now supported)
• Great budgeting and goal planning tools
• Mobile access to your Mint account on iPhone and Android
• Recommendations for new banking services based on the accounts you already have

It’s essentially a souped up, web-based version of Quicken that was eventually bought-out by Intuit, the makers of Quicken products.  The problem was that our bank (United Federal Credit Union, it rocks!) wasn’t supported by Mint at the time.  So we’ve been waiting and waiting for UFCU and Mint to become friends, and just recently, they did!

We’ve basically eliminated Quicken for Mac from our budget management process.  We still use a master spreadsheet to keep track of our income and expenses each month, but Mint does all of the heavy lifting for us.  Add in the iPhone app, and it’s a huge win.  With the ability to look at the numbers on my phone, we’re able to make purchase decisions while we’re at the store.

Now, we know what you’re thinking… this all sounds great, guys, but do you really expect me to hand over my bank account information to these guys?  Isn’t that totally unsafe?

That’s what we thought at first.  What’s to stop this little start-up from accessing our accounts and cleaning them out?  The truth is, while that might have been cause for concern in the beginning, Mint has established itself as the premier online tool for budgeting and money management.  Heck, they were even acquired by Intuit (makers of all those nifty Quicken products) for $170 million last year.  We think it’s safe to continue using Mint to manage our finances.

In the next few weeks, we’ll bring you some additional posts about how we use the various individual features of Mint.  Until then, why not give it a try?

We talked about Groupon a while back, and at the time we were pretty sad because it hadn’t yet launched in our area.  That’s changed this week as Groupon Grand Rapids has made its way to the good ‘ol world wide web!

If you’ll recall, the idea behind Groupon is to offer a worthwhile, location-based deal.  A threshold of purchases must be met before “the deal is on” (rarely does this not happen, if ever), and to our knowledge, there isn’t a limit to the number of purchasers.  This deal looked pretty darn tasty to us, but we didn’t happen to go for it.  (Actually it kind of reminded us of Restaurant.com, in a way.)

We think Groupon is great, and it follows in line with other great “entertainment shopping” sites like Woot!, LivingSocial, and others.  But, as we conjectured in our ode to Woot!, there’s always a little bit of danger when it comes to sites like these.  You run the risk of spending money that you didn’t expect to spend, and most times, your budget’s not going to be happy with that.  But, if you happen to run across a deal for something that you were looking for already… well, then that’s worth going for!

I recently came across banksimple, a new online bank that is due to open up for business later this year.  I had stumbled upon the first post in banksimple’s blog, which makes some pretty strong arguments against the current state of banking in the United States today.  Their premise is that most American banks have lost sight of what once was their original purpose and vision: to take care of their customers’ money; that the consumer is in a losing position due to unfair fee structures and lack of customer service.

I made a quick note to keep an eye on banksimple, until later, when I heard one of their founders, Alex Payne (one of the original employees at Twitter) talking on Dan Benjamin’s podcast, The Pipeline.  If you’re interested in hearing how new technology will change the way we manage our money, I would definitely recommend giving it a listen.  It’s really exciting stuff, and we’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for banksimple‘s launch later this year.  It sounds like they’ll be doing some really interesting things with mobile apps, cell phone imaging for deposits, etc.

In the meantime, we are extremely satisfied with the banking experience at our local credit union.  They give us great customer service (although it appears the tellers are instructed and encouraged to make the sell for credit cards and lines of credits), ATM fee refunds, and a current interest rate of 3.65% on our balance up to $25,000.  It’s a great place to bank, but competition’s always good for the consumer, so we’re looking forward to what banksimple will do to the market.