Life to live and explore

Lower your car or mortgage payment

With the rising prices of gas and everything else, if you have a mortgage and auto loan to pay, it can be quite suffocating. If a big chunk of your monthly salary goes to fixed payments, you would have very little cash flow and might not be able to save much.

Other than trying to earn extra money to cover the extra expenses, you might want to check out how you can lower the payment amount of your mortgage and auto loan. Is it possible to lower my payment? You may ask.

We do not have an auto loan currently, so we are not sure what you can do with it. But, we recently requested for an interest reduction with our mortgage lender and were granted a two percent interest reduction that resulted in about one hundred bucks saving per month.

Check software to help you balance your books

When we were still running the preschool, we have an accounting software that we purchased off the internet. It’s really a user friendly accounting software for dummies who don’t know much about accounting. We just have to post all the receivers and outgoing expenses, and we can get the cash flow, loss-profit and balance sheet summary at any dates in a few seconds.

It’s true that not everyone is born with the ability to balance the check books manually. I know for sure that we have one who need help. Where do you get your business checks and accounting software? Have you heard of VersaCheck software? May be it’s worth checking out if you are struggling to balance your check books. :-)

Payday loan and emergency

Have been accompanying mom to the hospitals for the last few weeks and paid most of the medical expenses for her. Mom didn’t want me to pay for all of them as she knows I have paid more than 10k recently for the surgery and the subsequent cancer screening tests.

I told her not to worry as I have an emergency fund that can be used for raining days. It’s important to have an emergency fund so that we do not have to rely on loans when the unexpected happens. Taking a loan helps you to get through an emergency, but save up an emergency fund and be prepared for the unexpected that life throws at us helps us get through life. :-)

You must have health insurance

Many of you know that I am making plan, in fact in the midst moving to IL to be united with my husband. The big boy has a steady job with medical benefit that covers the immediate family, so we would not have to fork out money monthly to pay for health insurance.

If you are working from home and your spouse doesn’t have an employer provided health benefit that extends to spouse and children, you probably need to get an affordable health insurance.

It’s extremely important to have health insurance as medical cost can be very expensive. The recent surgery and the cancer suspicion really scare the big boy to get out of the procrastinating mode and quickly put me on his employer provided health insurance before I am physically in IL. :-)

Tax rebate check is here

After so much excitement about getting a tax rebate check, the big boy received his rebate check yesterday. Guess whether he is going to do what the tax rebate meant for: stimulate America’s economy ? :-)

Isn’t that your own money that the government decides to return to you? Shouldn’t it be kept for paying tax year’s taxes? Why everyone is treating it like a windfall. Hey, most people we know have plans to spend it 64 times before the check arrives in the mail!!

The big boy knows he has to save it to pay for my air ticket to IL and all the medical expenses, let’s see whether he has the self control not to splurge it for hot wheels on Ebay.

Thank god we have an emergency fund for medical bills

The recent surgery, hospitalization and all the diagnostic tests I have to go through due to the cancer scare had cost us more than 10k out of pocket.

Can you imagine if we don’t have an emergency fund to pay for the medical bills? We would probably put it on the credit card and would have to take months to pay back with high interest. Or we would need to do a Debt Consolidation to get us out of the deep hole.

We are very grateful for god’s provision. It’s really a blessing that the big boy has started a full-time employment that brings in steady income since Nov 2007. We thank god that we were able to save up some emergency fund for unexpected expenses like this.

Loaded off a huge rock

Many of you know that I am planning to move to reunite with my husband in IL and is in the process of disposing the business and our belongings. It’s a big relief to be able to sell the ground floor setup of the business. The offer to purchase the business came just in time, it loaded off a huge rock off my shoulders!!

With the business being sold and money collected from the sale, we are well cushioned for emergencies once we move into an apartment in IL. I think we have saved up enough emergency fund to weather anything that crops up during the transition period.

When will the boy becomes a man

The big boy works hard and makes good money, but often wonders where his money has gone at the end of the month. He jumped on board with me, started a budget last month, so that he could spend his money on paper with purpose.

He busted his monthly budget last month, excuse being it’s the first time and it’s holiday season, but he did it again, buying “stuffs” that he didn’t put down in the budget. This is typical of the big boy, he will do things to please me but turn around do it his way behind my back. Saying I am very frustrated with his irresponsible attitude is an understatement.

Do you buy gold as investment?

If you are over 40 and you still believe in UFO and social security, you need to go for a brain scan! It’s better that we do not hope for the government who can’t keep its books to take care of us, we need to invest part of our earnings to build up nest eggs for old age.

The question is what kind of investment vehicle do we use? We currently have some money invested in mutual funds and stocks. But, we are rather disappointed in the ups and downs of the stock market and are on the looking out for secured investment that gives a more consistent return.

The worldwide energy crisis and inflation have caused our cash depreciated its value quickly. In fact, saving money in the bank gets us negative gain after considering the inflation rate. That’s why many people would buy gold coins and gold bars for investment and to prevent further depreciation. Prices of many precious metals including gold have gone up a lot in the last two years. Do you think it is worthwhile to invest in this precious metals when their prices are at their record highs?

What we think of credit cards

We have a credit card for the convenience of occasionally purchasing something online or through phone i.e. purchasing air tickets and as an emergency backup when we travel. Everything else we use cash. We find out when we pay cash, we can “feel” the money leaving us and therefore spend less.

This is not true with when you use credit cards, flipping a credit card up on a counter registers nothing emotionally. Statistics show that people tend to spend 12-18% more using credit cards. This is money you could have saved.

For us it’s important to cut out habits or behaviors that make us spend more. We do not believe that one can build wealth with 0% credit cards. We do that consider transferring debt in between 0% balance transfer credit cards as managing debt or finances.

The average family today carries $8,000 in credit card debt according to the American Bankers’ Association, that show that many people do not pay off their balance each month. We believe the multi-billion dollar industry exist for a reason, and we don’t think we’re going to win at their game. In another word, we don’t think we can beat the credit card companies.

Financial peace

We are in decent financial shape these days and are trying to stay debt free. Oh sure, we could be doing better, but when you consider the fact that we were stuck in a business that going no where for three years and recently sold part of it, it’s safe to say that we don’t have financial woes is pretty good.

When we were having financial problems, we were very lucky to have an interest free loan from my sister. So we never need to apply for one of those personal loans to get out of trouble.

Having been in that situation in the past I know how stressful it can be when you are in debt and have overdue bills piling up. We do not have any car payments and we are currently debt free except for the mortgage, we would want to maintain that financial peace that we enjoy now.

The only kind of loan we would consider in future is getting a mortgage to refinance our house. Since the mortgage we have has passed the locked in period and the interest is fluctuating, we are considering taking up one of those secured loans with fixed interest rate. We are currently doing our homework, trying to compare loans available through different lenders before we commit ourselves. We are expecting to completely pay down this mortgage within the next 3-5 years, and hopefully that will give us much financial freedom and peace.

Pay cash with money we have

It has been a year since we cut up and canceled all the credit cards, only left one for emergency use. That’s the resolution we made last December, to stay debt free and use cash for everyday spending.

We no longer use credit card to pay for grocery and miscellaneous purchases, we only use it when we have no other way to pay i.e. buying air ticket online. Otherwise, we pay cash with money that we have. Research actually shows using credit card makes people spend more and many people get into consumer debt because of that. We find spending cash have us feel the pinch and therefore spend less. Do you use credit card or cash?

One month break and financial freedom

I have just started my month long break, closing the tutoring business for the month of December and rest. It has been a gruesome three years starting a business from scratch and struggling with limited resources. I am glad we are doing alright financially right now and can afford to take a break.

One of the things that really help us is our focus to stay debt free, so that we are free to make choices and have the power to say “No” to things that we do not want to do. When we have no payments to make except the mortgage, though we are driving old cars and cannot afford many luxury things in life, we have the financial peace, and no waking up at night wondering how to pay that bills that overdued yesterday.:-)

Better paying job for hubby

Hubby has gone for a couple of interviews recently, even make it to the third interview for one of the jobs. So, I am keeping my fingers cross that he is going to land at a better paying job and we can afford to get our own place soon.

It’s not easy for hubby in the past one year, working at a low paying dead end job, trying to meet ends while looking for a better job. There may be a lot of jobs in Los Angeles and other big cities, but there aren’t many suitable jobs available in this small town. He had gone for countless interviews during the first six months he was back to IL, he got so fed up with the roller coaster rides, he just refused to go anymore for the next six months.

Last month, he decided to follow up with some applications that he has tendered a year ago, and surprisingly, they are calling him for interviews now. I really hope and pray that he will be successful in securing a better job this time.

debt free gives me so much freedom

Have been toying with the idea of starting a blog that share about how to be debt free and continue to live a debt free life based on my personal experience with The Total Money Makeover.

In December 2006, I started with about $4k in credit card debt, $5k in personal loan that I took from family and friends to start the business, and about $30k mortgage on the house. I was totally stressed out and worried about the debts, then I got to know about Dave Ramsey. I was too cheapskate to buy all the CDs and DVDs, I just downloaded the podcasts of Ramsey’s radio shows from the Internet and listened to him before I went to bed. It sounded like a workable plan to me, so I started following the “Baby steps”. I started a budget that I followed religiously. I also got rid of all the credit cards, paid them off one by one. 9 months later, I have totally paid down every cent of it and completely debt free except for the mortgage.

What really helped a lot in paying down the debt in such a short time was getting a second income i.e. making money off blogging. I am very thankful to God’s provision and for stumbling onto this opportunity to blog for money. I have so far make about $3k writing paid posts for 10 ad networks. It has all went into paying for expenses and debts.

Now that I have no credit card and car payments, my net income gives me so much more freedom and flexibility. I am saving up an emergency fund to take care of the rainy days and a fund for getting a new car. After that, I would be working on paying down the mortgage in a shorter period than the scheduled 8 years.