Goodbye For Now

The Money Maiden has been struggling to keep up with all of the demands on her time. Therefore this blog will go (fully) inactive for some time. The posts have been few and far between but the item on the task list has been great for guilt-induction. Therefore it's been removed from the task list and The Money Maiden will focus on balancing life in addition to the checkbook.

The blog will remain up for the day when life's demands lessen some (maybe retirement!?).

Thanks for reading and goodbye for now!

Savings and Debt

How do you actually save for a special item or get out of debt? Of course you’re already putting regular money into savings. This is referring to that trip or expensive new item you need.

Step 1: Determine how much money you need.
If you’re working on getting out of debt, don’t forget to factor in interest payments.

Step 2: Determine how long you have to save, or how soon you’d like to be out of debt.

Step 3: Divide the total needed by the number of months to figure out how much money you need to set aside each month or pay to your creditors.

This also works for Christmas. Yes it just recently ended, but now is the best time to think about how much money you’ll need next December and start setting aside a monthly allowance.

Here's a link to a wonderful story about a family that paid down over $90,000 in debt in a very short time. You might find it inspirational!

You Still Have To Save

I wear corrective vision lenses. My vision started to decline when I was in college, so I got glasses. At first I only had to wear them when I was sitting in the back of a lecture hall or driving at night so it wasn’t that inconvenient. Over a very short period of time, my vision deteriorated to the point where I needed to wear the glasses all the time. I was finally convinced that I needed to move to contacts when I realized how problematic the glasses could be. I know lots of people wear glasses with no problems, but I wasn’t one of those people.

I tried out ROTC one semester in college. I decided not to enlist when I was offered a full-ride scholarship for the rest of college. I know, it doesn’t sound like it makes much financial sense, but I wouldn’t have been able to be in the reserves if I accepted that scholarship, I would have had to have gone active duty once I graduated, and I just didn’t want to do that. But for that semester, I had PT (physical training) every weekday morning at 5 AM. It was really cold most mornings, so we’d come in from running and my glasses would fog up. So I’d take them off while we were doing the floor exercises like sit-ups and push-ups. One morning I had to miss my classes for the rest of the day because my glasses got stepped on while they were lying next to me. That did it for me, well that and vanity. I ordered contacts that night when I got my glasses repaired.

I’ve never really been comfortable with contacts either though. I get dull headaches on a pretty regular basis. Of course it doesn’t help that I wear them from about 5 in the morning until almost 10 at night. So I decided that I wanted to look into corrective vision surgery. I am slightly nervous about it, after all there are risks associated with any surgery, and other than inconvenience, there aren’t any real risks with glasses or contacts. But my eye doctor was one of the first to start doing the surgeries in the area and so has tons of experience and a really good track record. The next obstacle was of course the money. It’s a fairly expensive procedure, but other than having to pay for it all at once, it’s actually cheaper long-term than purchasing contacts over my life-time.

After deciding that I wanted to pursue this option, I made an appointment to find out if I was a good candidate for the surgery and exactly how much it costs. I am fortunately a good candidate for the surgery, and after saving money for nearly two years I now have enough money to pay for the surgery.

I’ve had several people at work say to me, “Just use your flex account.” They are referring to the IRS-approved flexible spending account program that allows us to set aside tax-free money to spend on eligible medical expenses. This is a great option to save a little money, and I will be using it. However, because I live on a budget and my checks will be smaller after the money is withheld for the account, I still had to save for it.

I’ve written about saving up and delayed gratification before here. Even if you can find an alternate financing method, whether it’s a flexible spending account or a line of credit, it’s still a good idea to save first for anything that isn’t an emergency need. This coming fall I’ll be getting the surgery done and will know that it’s paid in full when it happens.

Money Management and De-Stressing

I don't post on this blog as often as I'd like to. I get caught up with parenting, work, household chores, and sometimes with feeling like I haven't got anything new to say. I am going to keep the blog up and continue to post as I'm able though. I'm good at budgeting; and the couple of times I had to take on debt, I was good at getting quickly back out of debt.

So I'll keep writing because my stress level is much lower than other's because of the way I manage my finances. If I can help just one other person to get control of their financial situation and decrease their stress, it will be worth the effort.

Financial Education in School

Time Magazine recently published an article titled How to Teach Kids About Money. The article stated that kids aren’t receiving enough information about money management and even more startling, that financial education programs don’t always work. I think it’s wonderful that schools are trying to teach children about how to properly use money, it’s an invaluable life skill and is as important as learning to work with people who are different than you are. But no one should be surprised that financial education in school isn’t enough. Children don’t perform as well in any of their subjects if they are lacking support at home for whatever reason. Parents cannot abdicate their responsibility to educate their own children in any area of academics, including financial literacy.

Of course there are many parents out there who didn’t understand how to manage their own money as evidenced by the amount of mortgages that people couldn’t afford long-term. To be fair, some people purchased responsible mortgages then lost their source of income; but there were also those who purchased ARMs or other risky mortgages and found themselves in over their heads.

There are scores of people today who are learning how to manage their money because they have no other choice. This is a golden opportunity to teach our children by allowing them to understand how and why we’re making the decisions we are about our money. If they hear us talking about saving for a big purchase rather than buying on credit, or making value decisions about what we need and what we want, they’ll learn to make responsible decisions with their money. Of course the kids will make their own money mistakes and mistakes can often be the best teacher, but giving them a solid foundation could help those mistakes to be less catastrophic.

Spending Money We Don't Have

I’ve been a bit reticent in my posting lately because sometimes life just gets in the way! However, I recently ran across a story on NPR that I just had to chime in about though. Consumer Spending Up, Incomes Lag talks about the increase in spending that resulted from programs such as Cash for Clunkers while income growth continued to be just about flat.

As a proponent of good debt only, this story scares me a bit. If we’re not making more money, we shouldn’t be spending more money. The statistic offered about the falling savings rate was also a bit disconcerting, but did have some good news when compared to savings rates last year.

“The big jump in spending and much weaker gain in incomes translated into a big drop in the savings rate. Personal savings in August fell to 3 percent of after-tax incomes, down from 4 percent in July. That was still nearly double the savings rate of a year ago. Economists say the savings rate will keep trending higher as households try to repair investment savings shredded by the recession.”

We all want the economy to recover, especially so people can get back to work. But a recovery based on additional debt won’t be a long-term permanent recovery, it would just put us back on the precarious house of cards that our economy was built on before the recession occurred. So the Money Maiden’s advice is to keep putting that money into savings so that we can all benefit from a stable economic recovery.

How The Recession Can Help Us

Back when I first started this blog and before the recession had really taken hold, I posted a link to a very good article by Liz Pulliam Weston. She talked about the impact it would have if we all started to increase our savings and use our money more wisely. She predicted that the short-term impact would be a global economic recession since our economy was so dependent upon consumers. But she thought it would be good in the long-run because of the positive impacts to both individuals and the broader economy.

I remember at the time thinking that managing our money and living within our means was still the right thing to do, but that it might be hard to convince people to do this because of the pain of going through a recession. Well folks, the recession happened, whether or not we wanted it to. So if we have to go through this, it’s encouraging to me to hear that savings rates are going back up (although no where near the high of 14.6% we saw in 1975). More people are starting to live within their means now. So maybe we’ll get the long-term benefits the article listed even though this wasn’t an entirely voluntary decision.