After a recent trip to the grocery store, Julie brought up a really important point: we have no credit cards, rarely carry much cash, and do most of our business with our credit union debit card.  What would happen if that account was somehow compromised, and she was in the middle of checking out at Meijer with a full cart of groceries?  Or, what if I was out on a recruiting trip for Hope and needed to make a personal purchase?  We would have no way of quickly accessing those funds.

We quickly decided that we needed to have some kind of backup account for just such an occasion, sort of akin to the idea that you should back up important files on a computer’s hard drive.  Well, there’s no such thing as Dropbox for personal finance, so we thought opening an additional checking account would be the way to go.  We tossed around several ideas as to where to open this account, but the reality was that we didn’t want to deal with another physical bank in town.  So we looked to online options to see what would make the most sense for us, and here was our checklist:

• FDIC insurance
• debit card for each of us to carry as a backup
• no minimum balance
• interest rate wasn’t incredibly important, as we weren’t going to be keeping much money in there anyway
• ATM access not crucial, but nice to have anyway

With these things in mind, we ended up going with an Electric Orange Checking account from ING Direct.  The application process was really straightforward, and we had the account set up within 20 minutes.  It takes a few days for the account verification process to take place, but we should have our debit cards within just 10 business days or so.  We’ll keep a relatively small amount of money in there, but it should safeguard us against any embarrassment during a future transaction.

Do you keep an additional account like this, just for emergencies?  Or do you maybe go the “backup cash in wallet” route?  We’d love to hear about it, so please leave your thoughts below.

Back before the cable cutting of early 2010, we were blessed to have a channel that we guiltily watched just once a week.  Drumroll, please… Yup, you guessed it, QVC.  So, here’s the deal: we’re big Food Network fans (yeah, we’re in a little bit of remorse about not having that, too) and QVC has a great show on Sunday afternoons called “In the Kitchen with David.”  They basically feature kitchen gadgets, recipes, and other cooking-related gear.  Nearly every week that we watched they featured one item that continually caught our eye: the Keurig coffee maker.

If you know Jules and I, you know that we really can’t begin a morning without having 1 or 2 cups of coffee.  So when we saw the Keurig machine, we had to restrain ourselves from making the quickest impulse purchase we’ve ever made!  It’s so great — similar to the Tassimo and other single-serve coffee machines, the Keurig uses its own single-serving “K-Cups” to make really nice, consistent cups of coffee (and even tea and hot chocolate as well).  And it’s the consistency part that has eluded us, as we continually tried to make our coffee taste the same each day.  They offer tons of varieties, including well-known brands like Green Mountain (the parent company that actually owns Keurig), Caribou Coffee, Emeril’s, and Gloria Jean’s.

The machines themselves aren’t that expensive; they come in several models with varying numbers of features, and range anywhere from $90 to $180 in price.  Definitely more expensive than even the most feature-laden Mr. Coffee that you could pick up at Target!  We’ve seen the K-Cups themselves at a unit price from anywhere around 50-80 cents apiece.  And it’s really the price of the K-Cups themselves that held us back as we contemplated bringing home one of these nice machines.  The reality is that bagged coffee is just plain cheaper for feeding this delicious addiction of ours.

We went back and forth about it during the holiday season, and then finally decided to go for it in January.  QVC was running a special for the Keurig B30 Mini Brewer [Amazon affiliate link] for something like $79, with 28 free K-Cups and a personal “My K-Cup” filter for brewing your own bagged coffee.  Unfortunately that deal has passed, but Amazon continues to offer a great Keurig [affiliate link] machine, K-Cups, and accessories.  Our thought was that we would use the My K-Cup on a daily basis with bagged coffee and then reserve the actual K-Cups for special occasions.  It didn’t end up going this way.

Brewing coffee with the My K-Cup works pretty well, but it’s hard to get a really consistent cup of coffee with it.  All the variables that are eliminated by the pre-packaged cups come into play.  So we quickly realized that our plan was not going to work exactly how we had thought.  But, we had invested in the machine, so we needed to try to figure something out.  Crowdsourcing to the rescue!

Julie was talking recently about our new coffee-making appliance with some friends at work, and one of them mentioned that we ought to take a look at buying our K-Cups from Bed, Bath, and Beyond (my favorite store, obviously).  Here’s the thing: triple B allows you to use their famous 20% off coupons on everything, including our precious coffee cartridges.  So we traipsed out there last Friday night (basically in a snowstorm) to find that they have a huge selection of boxes for $9.99.  Let’s do a little math:

Option #1: $9.99 for 18 K-Cups = about $0.56 each – 20% = $0.44

But that’s not all!  As we were heading up to the counter to buy the 2 boxes we had selected, we saw some variety packs in the aisle.  They had 2 different options, and here’s that arithmetic for you:

Option #2: $29.99 for 60 K-Cups = about $0.50 each – 20% = $0.40
Option #3: $24.99 for 48 K-Cups = about $0.52 each – 20% = $0.42

They’re all pretty much in the same ballpark, but we ended up going for Option #2.  So, for 40 cents a cup, we get really consistent, awesome-tasting coffee.  We’ll take it.

Some friends of ours recently knocked it out of the park by paying off one of their cars 2 1/2 years early!  We understand that it was taking a look at the video above (from Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University) which really encouraged them to get serious about getting rid of the debt.  Posting the news on Facebook (along with the video) unleashed a fury of great thoughts and discussion related to the revolutionary idea that owning a vehicle doesn’t mean owning a payment as well.  We thought it would be great to add our two cents to the discussion

******
“It’s great in theory. I would venture to guess 95% of Americans lack the discipline to make this happen. I also like how during the stepping up process they fail to account for depreciation in the used vehicles.”

We absolutely agree that most people probably lack the discipline to make this happen, and the truth there gets at a bigger issue — behavior.  We’ve been indoctrinated with the idea that our credit score is somehow reflective of our self-worth, and that causes many people to view debt as a means to an end.  We would argue that no debt should be what we’re working towards and with some amount of discipline and education, anyone can get there.  Having a good credit score doesn’t really matter when you have no need of borrowing money, right?

The second point is valid as well; the video does a poor job accounting for depreciation.  However, the chapter in Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover that describes this same vehicle purchase process points out that within the time frame between car purchases in this plan, most used vehicles are unlikely to depreciate all that much.  This is particularly true if the buying and selling transactions are taking place among private parties, rather than with a dealer.

“The video makes it seem easy but there are quite a few holes. 1) you can buy and sell a car with ease (and get your money back!) 2) the average cost of a car keeps going up but you still only have 17K 3) discipline to not touch the car fund.”

1)  This is a good point — we think buying a car is pretty easy to do, but selling it (particular to another private party) could be a little tricky.  It’s definitely possible, though, if you take advantage of all the opportunities to freely market items.

2)  $17,000 will buy you a nice car for some time to come (particularly used) — we don’t know if this argument holds much water.

3)  Ah, yes, discipline.  This is the major variable when it comes to Ramsey’s car-buying proposal.  He presupposes that you will stick to the plan.  We would argue that those who would be going through his program are very likely to have started with or developed the discipline to make this plan happen, but observing from the outside it does seem like a drastic measure.

“I do think the 12% interest is extremely aggressive. And my car payment is no where near the ~$450 mark, more like $250, which also makes it longer to accumulate enough to buy up to the next car.”

Both points here are well-taken.  12% does seem pretty aggressive, but even 6 or 8% is going to get the job done.  As far as contributing a lower amount goes, that makes sense as well, but the timing of Dave’s plan is fast.  Stretching out the time frame by a few months probably wouldn’t make a particularly significant difference in the outcome.
******

Again, we’re pumped about our friends’ taking on the challenge of paying off their car loan, and in such quick fashion!  Their posting of this video opened the doors to some really nice conversation.  It definitely reflects the fact that there are many ways to think about the issue of buying vehicles.  Dave’s video is striking because it challenges us to think differently about the process.  Is it a “one size fits all” plan?  Not necessarily, but the principles embodied within it — saving, delaying gratification, stewardship — are the kind of principles that we believe will help anyone win with money.

On Monday we shared about Alice, our favorite new site for purchasing common household items in a really convenient way.  But there’s more to the story that we think you might find interesting as well, and it has to do with our favorite multi-purpose, uber-useful device — the iPhone.

Sidebar — It seems the best of web 2.0 (I wish there was a better way to say this) companies that specialize in fully-functional web applications have realized that in order for their site to really gain a significant userbase, they need to have a really nice companion application for the iPhone and other mobile platforms like Android and Blackberry.  I would point to financial site Mint as a good example of this — give your customers a really great mobile experience, and they are going to keep coming back to the desktop browser version.

The Alice iPhone application is really terrific, and includes features like:

• a look on your shopping list, and the ability to search the Alice database and add products on the fly
• a listing of all available coupons
• ability to make purchases right from the app
• tracking capabilities for your existing orders
• access to videos documenting the experience of current Alice customers

So, as you can see, the experience of shopping on the website is sufficiently translated to the iPhone application.  However, there are two tremendous features that are specific to the mobile application itself — “concierge” customer service and an amazing bar code scanning system.

Concierge customer service

This is an extremely clever way of taking advantage of the iPhone’s built-in microphone and recording capabilities.  You can simply leave a message for the customer service team at Alice, it will be associated with your account, and then they can respond as quickly as possible.  The app also provides additional examples of ways to use the concierge service, like requesting a new product, or even asking the Alice team to add an item to your shopping list.  It’s a useful feature and a really natural extension of the hardware on which the application runs.

Bar code scanning feature

Perhaps the most useful of all the features on Alice’s iPhone application is the ability for it to scan a physical product and then identify that same product within the site’s database.  In the example below, we scanned a package of Starbucks ground coffee — you simply line up the barcode with the guides provided and it works right away over the phone’s data or WIFI connection.  Below that you’ll see the screen that came up after we scanned the coffee.  This could be particularly useful the first time you are using the service — imagine being able to walk around your house or apartment and scan in all of the household products that you’re currently using.  Alice will then have all of your products on file for future purchase — pretty stinkin’ clever.

Well, there you have it — a look at a great extension of Alice’s website.  As you can tell, we’re pretty pumped about the Alice service, and it looks like after our round up on Monday, many of you were excited as well and created your own accounts through our link.  We thank you for that, and if you didn’t happen to create an account and are planning to, doing so through the banner below will ensure that your purchases are supporting Earn Give Save — so, thanks again!

We’ve been meaning to share with you about our new favorite online shopping site — Alice.  The basic idea of the site is that you’re able to purchase many basic household items and as long as you order the minimum number of items (6), they will simply ship the items to you — at no cost.

We’re guessing the name of the service is a riff on the cheerful servant character on TV’s “The Brady Bunch.”

I had stumbled across the site some time ago, but hadn’t really thought about using it because I figured the prices weren’t going to be competitive with purchasing the same items in the grocery store.  However, on one recent Sunday, Julie was lamenting about having to go to both Meijer and Aldi in the same trip.  (She’s recently discovered that she can do nearly all of her grocery shopping at Aldi, but is then forced to head to Meijer because Aldi doesn’t carry a significant number of these necessities; things like paper towels, aluminum foil, and plastic baggies.)  I quickly remembered Alice, and we set ourselves upon creating our first order.

One thing that sets Julie apart in this area is that she’s keenly aware of the quality of sale and regular prices.  Her prior knowledge made it easier for us to decide if Alice’s pricing was competitive enough for us to proceed.  She decided it was, and in no time, we had our first order ready for submission.

Alice also makes good use of the kinds of social features which we’ve come to expect from our online shopping experiences, things like:

• Built-in coupons that are only available to a limited number of customers
• Reviews for each product that continually scroll (in a non-annoying way) across the bottom of the screen
• Social profiles where individuals can share about their favorite products, chat with other customers, post photos, and send messages
• It appears also that the site will begin to implement badges — “achievements” that have quickly become the hallmark of many social sites

Social features of Alice.com

There are also advanced budgeting (yeah, we’re into that sort of thing ) and product planning tools (how you might re-order a certain item).  It also appears that an “auto-ship” function is on the way as well.  I also appreciate the fact that Alice is really just a beautiful website — it’s well-designed and the graphics are really well done.  Simply put, it’s the kind of website I like to spend time on, and I’m guessing that this is pretty crucial when you’re trying to sell things on the Internet!

We’re guessing that Alice is able to offer free shipping because they require the buyer to select at least 6 items for purchase.  This makes a lot of sense when you stop to consider that they are mailing out generally heavy things — items like laundry detergent, batteries, and even pet food!  The premise is further supported by the built-in tools that let you plan out for up to 12 months of purchases.  So, here’s a look at some pics from the recent order that came to us:

Trendiest box you've ever seen.

Eco-friendly packaging to keep everything in its place.

Our items arrive safely and soundly!

As you can tell, we’re pretty pumped about the site!  And although it’s going to take some figuring to see how it might affect our weekly budget for the brick-and-mortar stores, the convenience of the site is more than worth catering to.  But wait, there’s more — we’ll be back on Wednesday with a look at another feature of Alice that our mobile-Apple-phone users will really enjoy!

Feel like giving Alice a try?  Click the banner below and you’ll get a $10 credit when you reach a total of $50 spent on the site.  (Oh, and you’ll be supporting Earn Give Save in the process — so thanks in advance!)

Have you been to an Aldi’s?  For some reason I always thought Aldi’s was a second hand grocery store — like a place where they sell damaged and nearly-expired food.  But in recent months, I’ve seen and tasted how amazing this Iowa-native grocery store truly is.  Here’s a few reasons:

1.  Price, price price! From basic pantry staples to specialty items, you simply cannot beat the prices at Aldi’s.  To compare a few items…

You may be thinking that saving $0.11 on yogurt isn’t a big deal, but when you’re saving even just a dime off of every item, every week, the savings add up!  I can do all of our weekly grocery shopping at Aldi’s, including fresh produce and some extra treats we don’t need for easily under $50.  And how do they keep their costs so low if they’re not compromising quality?  It’s simple things such as bagging your own groceries, limited advertising, warehouse-style shelving, and bringing your own grocery bags that allow shoppers to save dollars off their bill (and I’d rather bag my own groceries to ensure my eggs end up on TOP!).

2.  The quality and variety of Aldi food has surpassed my expectations.  Every time I’m there, I find new products that interest me.  Although they don’t have every single item that a larger supermarket carries, I’m amazed at how many different types of products they do carry in each little store!  Some of my favorite less-than-usual items include soy milk, low-fat shredded cheese, fresh salsa, organic frozen pasta dinners, multi-grain tortilla chips, and fresh mozzarella.  Mmm, I’m getting hungry…

3.  I can get in and out of Aldi’s with a full cart of groceries in about 30 minutes.  Because it’s a smaller store and there’s not 10 different brands of diced tomatoes, it makes getting through my list much more efficient.  And you should watch those cashiers go!  Sometimes they can be intimidating — the way they whip through that conveyor belt and start the next order before you hardly had time to push in your PIN.  But if that means saving time and money, it’s AOK with me!

Now, I will tell you a few downsides of Aldi’s before you visit there and blame me for a poor experience!  Even though I love Aldi’s and have talked about it as if I’m receiving an endorsement deal (I’m not), you should know a couple of things…

• No credit cards accepted (debit cards are, don’t worry)
• Bring your own bags or expect to pay a nominal fee to purchase theirs
• They don’t have EVERYTHING — the selection can change from week to week, so what’s there one week might be gone the next
• Bring a quarter… you need a quarter to ‘rent’ a shopping cart (again, to keep cost low by not having to pay a cart corral-er)

Aldi’s helps you keep your grocery budget under control without having to live off of Ramen noodles.  It may take a few visits to feel comfortable and fall in love with it the way that I have, but give it a chance and see what you find!
__
Photo Credit: lauramary // Creative Commons