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?

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Photo Credit: denverjeffrey // Creative Commons

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!
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Photo Credit: wwworks // Creative Commons

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.

• 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?

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!

]]> http://earngivesave.com/2010/07/16/groupon-launches-in-grand-rapids-2/feed/ 0 http://earngivesave.com/2010/07/12/quick-post-keep-an-eye-out-for-banksimple/ http://earngivesave.com/2010/07/12/quick-post-keep-an-eye-out-for-banksimple/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:00:03 +0000 Andrew http://earngivesave.com/?p=1690 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.

Not to worry, though, as we think we’ve got things under control.  So, without further ado, here is our hotter-than-hot summertime cooling game plan:

• Vacancy.  Both of us work, so the house is nice and sealed up during the day.  No reason to run the central air we don’t have when no one’s here.  Now, when a baby comes along, that may be a different story [someday, not now, read nothing into that].  Cost: nothing + we’re making $ at work.
• Fan-tastic evenings.  When we want to relax in our living room, it’s warm, but we get along just fine with a ceiling fan, floor-standing oscillator, and the windows cranked open.  Cold beverage not included.  Cost: $30 + electricity.
• Underground.  Like most people, our basement is as cool as a cucumber (never actually written cucumber in a sentence before).  We’ve got a nice finished room down there, so we grab our current read (Linchpin [affiliate link] by Seth Godin for Andrew, and A Painted House [affiliate link] by John Grisham for Julie), head down there, and just chill.  Cost: $0.
• Window unit air conditioner.  We wouldn’t survive the night without it.  (Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic.)  The sun goes down and our cute ol’ house heats right up as the bundle of hot air sinks from our attic, descending upon our 2nd floor boudoir.  Makes the room blanket-worthy at about 2 AM, and that’s okay with us.  Cost: $100 + electricity.

There you have it, the ways in which we cope with the 8 days of warm weather Michigan gets each year. That’s not to say that we won’t ever be plugging into central air, but we’re pretty happy with what we’ve got.

Then comes the next question: how am I going to pay for this generous upgrade?  I had been planning to sell my current iPhone 3Gs on eBay when I became eligible for the phone, but to be honest, using eBay as a broker always makes me a little uneasy when it comes to something with a high resale value like an iPhone.  I’ve heard quite of few stories of winning bidders not being reliable in terms of actually paying, stuff like that.  eBay is great for a lot of things, but I was expecting it to be a hassle when it came to unloading my phone.

I quickly remembered the post we never wrote (I thought we had, but we hadn’t ) about Gazelle.com [referral link].  Gazelle is a really great site which allows you to sell back unwanted gadgets in a simple, hassle-free way:

1. You log on to Gazelle’s website and search for the item you’d like to sell.
2. If it’s in their catalog, Gazelle will ask you a few questions about the condition of the device and then make you an offer for it.
3. If the offer sounds good to you, Gazelle will send you a prepaid box for you to ship the item to them.
4. You choose the method of payment: by check, PayPal, or even an Amazon.com [referral link] gift card for a 5% bonus

So, I logged on to find out what Gazelle would offer me for my iPhone 3Gs.  I have to say, I wasn’t expecting much because I figured so many other people were probably on there doing the same thing.  But, lo and behold, Gazelle comes back with an offer of $201 for the phone!  So, already it’s a push between the current value of my phone and the cost of getting the iPhone 4.  Now to take care of that pesky $18 upgrade fee.  I could call AT&T and probably get them to waive the fee, but to me that seems like wanting to have your cake and eat it, too.  Then it occurred to me that my favorite podcast, Macbreak Weekly, has Gazelle as a sponsor.  I plugged in the promo code “macbreak” (no quotes), and there it was: a 10% bonus for my troubles.  That’s right, another $20.10, and suddenly the upgrade fee is merely a distant memory.

It’s important to note that I don’t have to send the phone in right away.  The quoted price is good for 30 days, and I’ll easily be able to get the new phone and send in my old phone within the appropriate window.  Sure, there would probably be a premium for going through the business of listing the phone on eBay, but this is a sure thing, and you can’t beat that!

Give Gazelle [referral link] a try, and let us know what you think!

It’s not the kind of shopping experience that most of us are used to.  We normally plan to order something online, or plan to head to the store to pick something up.  The brilliance of Woot is that is compels you to come back and check it each day.  You want to see what the new item is for the day.  I even have an app on my iPhone that shows what Woot has going for that day.

Not only that, but Woot has other sister sites as well, like sellout.woot, shirt.woot, wine.woot, and kids.woot.  They’re selling different categories of products but running the same exact show, and if you ask us, it’s a recipe for impulse purchases!

Okay, don’t get us wrong — we’re big Woot! fans.  My $25 computer speakers have been awesome since I picked them up from Woot! in 2005.  Julie’s sister and her husband swear buy the Sansa mp3 players they snagged for 3 bucks each.  There’s nothing foul about getting a good deal; we just think that this famous quote (from Julie’s mom) truly applies here:

“You’ll go broke saving money!”

The idea being that just because something’s a good price doesn’t mean you need it or should buy it.  Don’t worry — I’ll be checking the app every day to see what’s happening with our friends at Woot!, but we’re probably not going to buy anything on it, unless:

1. It’s something we were looking for a deal on and were planning to buy anyway, or,
2. It’s something for which we think we might have reasonable need in the future, and it’s an amazing deal.

Okay, lecture over. Thanks for listening.

(Seriously, though, Woot!, you’re cool in our book.  Keep up the great work.)

Most Flickr power users tend to share all of their photos with the world, and while we have no problem with that, we’re more interested in making albums available to just our friends and family.  Flickr has the privacy controls for this, but it doesn’t make it really easy to share your photos.  The other problem that I have personally is that I really don’t see a lot of innovation with Flickr at this point.  There were doing a lot before Yahoo picked them up in 2005, but since then the site has felt pretty stagnant to me.

By contrast, Google has been continually improving their competing service, Picasa, since they purchased it in 2004.

This past November, Google also expanded their menu of options for purchasing additional storage, and ever since, I’ve been percolating on ways that we might use their service.  Photo storage/sharing seemed to be the most natural option, and with 20 GB (yes, gigabytes) costing just $5 per year, it was something worth going for.

So we decided to move our photos from Flickr (which we weren’t really using that much anyway) to Picasa.  It’s a work in progress.  We had something like 5,000 photos stored on Flickr, and it took a ton of time to get them downloaded (in an organized fashion) and uploaded back to Picasa.  Now it’s on to the even bigger task of re-captioning and even more organization.

In the end, we’re saving $20/year on the deal.  Doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s those kinds of small changes that can really start to add up in the end.

Interested in how we actually made the switch and moved the photos? Leave us a comment below and we’ll follow up with another post on that very subject.