Posted by Forest on October 23, 2008
I just spent $18.97 to renew my subscription to Entrepreneur magazine for another 3 years. I’ve been a subscriber for almost 4 years now and I think it’s a great magazine. I find myself inspired by all the entrepreneurs and their stories. There are also a ton of helpful tips in it. I think the 3 years subscription for just about 50 cents an issue is an incredible value.
This morning a coworker gave me a $20 gift card today because her husband got it for Christmas last year and it is for a store that he doesn’t like. But I do. Score! This little gift from her offsets the price of the magazine subscription!
Posted by Forest on September 25, 2008
Last night I tookabout 30 minutes and loaded my car with eight (count them, 8!) boxes of books and headed down to Half-Price Books to sell them off.
15 minutes later I walked out of there with one dollar and fifty cents. Count it, $1.50.
I actually laughed when the guy told me their offer. But hey, I wasn’t about to haul 8 boxes of books back to my garage. And to be fair to HPB, they didn’t rip me off, these were really junky books. I’m sure they are going to recycle about 90% of them. These were leftover books from the book business I once was a part off. Books that we got off Craigslist either for free or from some other bookseller. Old books in poor condition and poorly written books that don’t deserve to be sold.
So I wasn’t really upset. I was actually kind of glad to get rid of 8 boxes out of my garage. The only thing is: I still have about 40 boxes full of books!
They’re not all bad books, but most of them are. It’s not going to be worth my time to load them all up and make multiple trips to Half-Price. I may end up hauling them all to Goodwill, though. But before that, I will do what the people before me did and put them on Craigslist and see what happens.
Oh, and that $1.50…I’m saving it for something special.
Posted by Forest on July 30, 2008
Last Friday when I checked my paycheck, I noticed that there was more money on it than usual. I really had no idea where this extra money came from. Upon further investigation, it looks like this was the money that was taken from my previous paycheck for the ESPP. So it looks like my opt-out worked after all. That’s nice because I really didn’t want to have to keep track of another account especially since I wasn’t planning on contributing any more to it.
Posted by Forest on May 29, 2008
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that every now and then I find random ways to earn some extra money. Well, one of these opportunities came up this month and now I have a crisp 100 dollar bill in my pocket.
I have a friend whose parents are quite wealthy. They have a cabin in Wisconsin and twice a year, they hire their son and his friends to spend a day working at the cabin. We do things like yard work, dock work, and other miscellaneous tasks. Basically, in the spring we prepare the cabin for summer use and in the fall we winterize it.
It can be hard work (in the physical labor sense), but here’s the catch: It’s just a bunch of guys who are all friends and have the ability to have a great time doing anything, so it never feels like work at all! It’s the best 100 bucks I make twice a year.
This is how Cabin Clean-Up day went two weeks ago: All the guys met at a local donut shop and everyone got donuts and coffee on the dad’s tab. Then we all drove up in the parent’s mini-RV which has a Playstation in it. It’s about an hour and half drive out there and then we stopped at the cheese store (it is Wisconsin after all) for award-winning string cheese.
When we arrived at the cabin, my friend’s mom greeted us with a homemade treat — so we’d eaten three times already and hadn’t done any work yet. At last, we began to do some work. It wasn’t too hard, just hauling stuff from the garage to the boathouse or vice versa. Some guys worked on yard duty; raking leaves and picking up sticks that had fallen over the winter. Other guys did random tasks like cleaning the hot tub or setting up hammocks, etc.
Then we had a delicious lunch cooked by his mom. After lunch we worked on putting the dock in. This is always the hardest task, but it can be fun, especially if someone falls in the water…then it’s hilarious. This year, putting in the dock was interrupted by the appearance of water snakes. So work came to a halt as we splashed around trying to catch the snakes. Which we did.
After the dock was completed, his mom brought us treats from Dairy Queen. Then we put the boat in and finished up any remaining tasks that the dad told us to do. At the end of the day, my friend’s dad handed out $100 bills. Essentially, I get $100 to stuff myself silly with food while hanging out with some of my favorite people in the world and laughing the entire time. It really is one of my favorite days of the year. And then we get to do it all over again in the Fall.
Posted by Forest on May 28, 2008
Thinking back over the weekend, I did more than just work on the house. Here’s a brief recap:
Friday Night: A friend of mine is a rockstar and his band recently got their first record deal. So Friday night we all went out to their cd release concert. The show was supposed to start at 9, but the first band didn’t begin to play until 10:30. By the time the second band began to play, I was getting sleepy. My friend’s band didn’t go on until 12:30 and by this time I was barely awake. One of the guys that rode with me needed to be at work at 7 the next morning and so we ended up only staying for three songs. Yeah, I know….but seriously, I was exhausted. I’m old!
Expenses: $5 cover charge, $5 for the band’s EP, $3 for photobooth photos with a friend.
Saturday: We met with the realtor Saturday morning and then spent most of the day cleaning the garage and moving stuff out there. We ordered pizza for lunch. Saturday night a friend came over to take me out to dinner for my birthday. We had some great Thai food and ended up renting a movie from the Redbox (I love it) and she made me cupcakes.
Expenses: $12 for pizza.
Sunday: More moving and cleaning. While cleaning the house, I heard my friend’s band on the radio. It was a surreal experience. I had leftover Thai for dinner.
Expenses: $0
Monday: Monday was my birthday and I woke up feeling even older than I did on Friday night — stiff and sore from moving stuff all weekend. Monday involved more cleaning (best birthday ever! j/k). You would think that my house was just an absolute pigsty, but that’s not the case. We had some demolition work to do (taking down a wall we built) and the resulting clean-up took a long time, not to mention all the other general cleaning that had to be done. That night I went out for birthday dinner with family and it was a lot of fun. As for gifts, I received some money from my parents along with a gas gift card* (very handy!) and a Chipotle gift card* (very tasty!). One brother got me a Cub Foods gift card* (this will help when I begin my old grocery routine) and the other brother got me a membership to the Sovereign Society (check it out, it’s weird!). This was actually a hilarious gift; it was totally back-handed because I know he wanted to join but didn’t have a good excuse to, so he got me a membership and told me to share my password with him. To be honest, I haven’t even had time to explore their website yet. After dinner, I stopped to fill up on gas (goodbye, gift card) and then stopped at Target and ended up buying a few groceries and decorations for staging the house.
Expenses: $64 at Target, $35 for gas
Income: $225 in birthday gifts!
All in all, it was a nice long weekend, I would have rather spent more of it outside, but you can’t always get what you want. Plus, with birthday money and free meals…I came out ahead.
*For accounting purposes, I treat gift cards as cash.
Posted by Forest on May 16, 2008
When money comes in, this is what I do with it:
The first 10% is allocated to church/charity and then another 10% goes to the money market savings account.
The rest of the money stays in my checking account for the duration of the month. Because I’m not much of a spender, I don’t worry about my spending. I don’t live a luxurious lifestyle, but I don’t feel deprived either. I could probably maximize my savings a bit more if I really wanted to, but for now I consider myself lucky that I’m naturally inclined to save more than spend.
I keep my receipts and record all the income and expenses for the month. On the first day of every month, I run the numbers for the prior month. This is when I spread out the remainder of the money from that month.
I take all income (minus the 20% that’s already been allocated) and subtract expenses. The balance gets divided like this:
40% to the money market (general savings)
25% to my Roth IRA (until I reach my contribution limit)
20% to my future Vanguard account (minimum of $3,000 to open an account)
10% to my stock portfolio at Zecco
5% to my emergency fund at ING
It can get a little messy and it varies from month to month depending on my spending, but it seems to work for me.
Basically, my personal money philosophy looks like this:
Pay God first. Then pay yourself. Feel free to spend, but never more than you make.
Posted by Forest on May 14, 2008
One of my longterm goals is to multiply and diversify my streams of income. Here is where my money comes from these days:
The Day Job Income - During the day, I don the uniform of corporate America (not to be mistaken with Captain America) and head to my special place (it’s a cube). There I sit for 8 or 9 hours and do my work while I dream up ways to never have to wear the uniform or sit in the cube again. Sometimes it’s a lot like The Office, more often it’s like Office Space, but mostly it’s a lot like Groundhog Day (as in it’s the same thing over and over again for those that haven’t seen the movie). I have much more to say on work, jobs, dreams, etc. so stay tuned.
The Small Business Income - About a year ago, I started a small business (very small) that I run part-time on nights and weekends. It’s profitable but I won’t be quitting the day job anytime soon.
The Internet Income - I make minuscule amounts of money from advertising on this very blog and a couple of other sites that I run.
The Random Income - Every now and then, I sell things on eBay or pick up a random one-time job (one of these tomorrow!) or receive money as a gift. This category also includes interest from bank accounts and dividends received in my stock portfolios.
So that’s where my money comes from. Next time, I’ll take a look at where it goes once I get it.
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