Making Me a Millionaire

Getting in Shape Without Going Broke

I’m the kind of chick who has always been weight conscious.  I’ve never starved myself or cried over my weight but I always make sure I get a good workout in and I hate the discomfort I feel when I put on weight and my jeans dig into me.  Because eating is truly a joy in my life, I can’t do the diet thing and have to keep my weight in check through exercise and portion control.  Over the last 10 years, I have spent too much money on exercise.  I’ve joined gyms, signed up for personal trainers, ran in races, invested in dumbbells, yoga mats, medicine balls.

Now that we’re moving, it’s time to cancel our pricey gym membership.  I’m sad to not have access to a nice gym but I vow to get my exercise in without going broke.  In the past, this is what exercise has cost me…

• Gym membership ($180 a month for 2 people) – we did get good use out of swimming pools, tennis courts, exercise classes and a rock wall though!
• Personal trainer – $80 for a 1/2 hour session
• Running in a race – anywhere between $20 and $80 depending on the length and size
• Indoor rock climbing – $25 a session

Now that we are moving to Seattle, I plan on taking advantage of the beautiful outdoors and saving on exercises expenses.  I’m going to put off a gym membership for as long as possible by doing the following:

• Walking.  The great thing about living in downtown is that you don’t need a car and you can walk everywhere.  All this walking helps to keep the fat off.  I used to live in NYC when I was younger and walked everywhere.  I never ever had to think about my weight because I was doing so much walking everyday!
• Hiking. With the mountains and hills everywhere, I will make an effort to go hiking on the weekends with my husband.  Great for a nice butt!
• Biking (maybe). We don’t have bikes right now so if we decide to go biking, we’ll have to invest in bikes which are expensive.  I’m also not sure if we’ll have space in our apartment for 2 bikes so we’ll have to see.  It is tempting though because there is a waterfront bike trail right outside the apartment building we’re looking at!
• Fitness DVDs. I believe in the benefits of resistance training, yoga and pilates so instead of signing up at a studio, I figure why not do it at home on my mat?  Most DVDs are around $13.  Here are some great ones…

$11.49 on Amazon.com

$8.49 on Amazon.com

$14.99 on Amazon.com

$11.99 on Amazon.com

Exercise is not only a great way to keep the fat off but it’s also very beneficial to your health.  If exercising can help reduce your chances of heart disease or cancer or stroke, I’d say it’s well worth the amount of money you put into yourself right now rather than having to pay medical bills later on.

Are there any other inexpensive/free ways of exercising that any of you out there practice?

Feb Net Worth

Well, it looks like this month has been a terrible one when it comes to the stock market.    I was excited last month and thought maybe a recovery was on its way but this month wasn’t what I was hoping it would be.  Let’s hope the January indicators won’t be an accurate in the portend of 2010!  I saw that the loss of $17K was in green in the chart above but it should be in red.  Just too lazy to redo and upload again!

How have the rest of you been doing?  Was January a bad month for you as well?

Oh, How I Love OpenTable

The husband and I love to eat.  It’s a great way to just get away, experience different cuisines and have some private time to talk and bond.  Although I’m all for saving money, I just need to eat out at least once a week.  It’s one of those things my husband and I really enjoy and aren’t willing to cut out.  So if we’re going to be dining out, why not earn points towards a free meal in the future?  That is why, I always use OpenTable to make reservations.

Here’s how it works:

1) Make your free reservations at OpenTable.com

2) When you arrive at the restaurant, let the host know you have reservations and give them your name

3) Enjoy your meal

After your meal, you should see points added to your account.  Most restaurants will offer 100 points for dining.  Each city has a list of restaurants that offer 1,000-point reservations.  I’ve noticed in the cities I looked at that there are many good restaurants that offer the 1,000 point reservations.  These are great as they allow you to build up points much faster than the regular 100 point restaurants.

What do you do with all these points? You redeem them for Dining Cheques!  They are basically gift certificates that you can use at any OpenTable restaurant.

2,000 OpenTable Points = $20 OpenTable Dining Cheque
5,000 OpenTable Points = $50 OpenTable Dining Cheque
10,000 OpenTable Points = $100 OpenTable Dining Cheque

I always always always use OpenTable to make my reservations.  You can even use it for lunch reservations and small restaurants.  It doesn’t hurt to always check before you head out to eat!

Back from Seattle

Sorry folks!  I’ve been MIA for a while because we’ve been in Seattle checking out the city and deciding whether or not it is the place to move to.  Well, after much thought and discussion, we’ve decided that Seattle will most likely be our new home!  Now we’ll just have to work out the kinks and start downsizing.  We currently live in a 4br townhouse and have accumulated a bit of junk.  We’re looking to move into a 2br/2ba apartment in Seattle so we’ll need to spend lots of time on Craigslist  trimming down on stuff.  I’m glad we’ll be downsizing because after living in such a big house, I really do believe the bigger the house you have the more money you spend to furnish it!  I am however, sad that we won’t be owning property.  I really hope we can get back into the world of real estate before home prices get too high again.  Sometimes I wonder if this move is a good idea.  It’s definitely a great place to raise well rounded kids but with our families back east I’m sometimes conflicted.  My husband doesn’t seem to have this problem as he just does it without worrying so much.  Would you ever move across country to save yourself from state income taxes?  Would you move far from your family to give your kids a good environment to grow up in?

January 2010 Net Worth

Here’s an update on my net worth for this month.  I’m feeling good with every month that passes!  But then again, when the economy has hit almost rock bottom, going up is not a big surpirse.

This month, we’re in the green by $26548.60!  The only thing that depreciated was my car.  We actually sold it (haven’t gotten the check yet though) for $24,000 so I know we lost $1k there but that’s OK.  I just canceled the auto insurance for that car so we should be saving a little bit more money.

Here’s a graph that shows how much the net worth has gone up in the last few months.

This has been the best month so far!

Next up:  Once we get the check from the car we sold, I’d like to use that money (and pull out some money from our cash savings) to pay off that home loan of $36,978.55.  With that paid off, we’ll have an extra $600 a month to play with and we’ll save ourselves a couple thousand dollars in interest.

Download a David Bach Book for Free!

Walletpop.com is offering a free download of David Bach’s latest Start Over, Finish Rich: 10 Steps to Get You Back on Track in 2010. Great deal for all us fiscally conscious folks!  The offer is for today only so make sure you go and grab a copy soon!

Goals for 2010

I’m very happy with the way we managed our finances towards the second half of 2009.  We curbed our spending and made sure we weren’t being reckless with our money and as a result, we managed to accumulate a good chunk in our emergency fund.

In 2010, we will be selling our house and moving to a new city.  We booked our tickets to Seattle for January 14 so hopefully that will help us in making our decision on where to move to.  With all these big changes, its a bit more difficult to have aggressive goals but I will still list some that I plan on aiming for this year.

1) Max out the Roth IRA for 2009. Since we still have until April 2010 to put money into our Roth IRA, I plan on maxing both our accounts out.  The Roth IRA is one of the best retirement vehicles and I plan on taking full advantage of it while we still can.

2) Put away $50K into our down payment fund. 50K sounds like a lot to be able to put away, but we’re lucky that my husband still has 5 months of his severance left!  We plan on putting away his entire severance and continue living our lives like we normally do (ok maybe with a little more spluring than usual).  We want to buy a home soon and we all know how insanely expensive west coast home prices are.  We probably don’t want to carry more than a 300K mortgage so that means we’d have to put down at least 200K.

3) Invest more in stocks. In 2009, we focused mostly on mutual funds and not enough on stocks.  This year, I plan on evening it out and investing in both stocks and mutual funds and try to do dollar cost averaging.  I also want to learn a little more about ETFs.

4) Spend less on food. This past year, we spent over $16K on dining out alone!  It’s carelessness and gluttony at its best.  I’m not proud of it.  I hope to cut this in half for this year by cooking more at home and being more mindful and aware of what we’re ordering and what kind of restaurants we are going to.  I’ve also wasted groceries on many occasions when we had food at home but we chose to dine out and ended up throwing out the food later on.  My new goal is to eliminate excess and waste!

5) Give more. My husband and I have a foundation set up with Vanguard.  The purpose of this foundation is to one day either set up a school for underprivileged kids or to offer scholarships to students who cannot afford college.  I would like to contribute $10,000 to the foundation this year.

6) eBay. With the big move happening this year, this is a great opportunity for us to sell some of our furniture or clutter on eBay.

7) Prepare for a baby! Ideally, we’d like to start having kids soon and with each pregnancy/delivery costing around $20K we need to start preparing.  I don’t want to actually set aside the money for a baby but I want to be aware of the costs and prepare accordingly by putting some money away and being smart with our spending habits.

It will be fun to look back on this entry and see how many of these goals were met.  I hope we succeed in achieving our goals and I have great hopes for 2010!

Where Do You Stand?

So today I was curious to find out where exactly my husband and I stand compared with people our age and compared with people who make around the same amount of money.  I did a little bit of Googling and discovered some handy tools on CNN. At age 30 and an annual income of $145,000 this is where we stand:

With our current net worth hovering around $300k, I’d say we’re doing pretty well compared to others who are our age.

However, compared with others who have a similar income, I guess we’re not doing as well….

A grade of “B” is not bad but there are definitely areas that we can improve on.

Based on the Financial Health calculations, I need to:

• Allocate more money into stocks
• Decrease the percentage of money we have in company stock
• Increase our life insurance benefits

So I’ve learned that we are doing well for our age but for the amount of money that is coming in we should be doing better.  My guess is that since most people who are making $145K are probably older than us, they’ve had more time to accumulate their assets and therefore have much higher net worths.

After we move, I’d like to straighten out our investments and invest in more stock.  My husband will be participating as much as he can (we’ll have to figure out what the best contribution amount will be)  in the employee stock purchase program but I’d also like to diversify our investment portfolio.

Happy Holidays!

Well, in the last few weeks, we’ve been completely swamped.  After sending my husband off to NYC for his first project, I packed up the house and headed home myself for the holidays.  With all the stress of the holidays looming overhead, I’ve been frazzled and distracted.  So distracted that I left my 4 month old MacBook Pro at the airport!  Luckily, after many frantic calls to the airport, TSA found my laptop (along with 32 other laptops that were left behind that day before noon!) and they will be shipping it to me over here in NY.

What have I learned from this?

1) Always put a password on your laptop

2) Always back it up before you go on a trip

3) Never have auto-login for your email account or anything else

4) Always be thinking about your valuables when you go through a security line at the airport.

We’ve had a crazy busy Christmas this year and spent quite a bit of time with family.  Being around all these babies makes me want to have one soon even more!  Yesterday we also went to see Avatar in 3D at the AMC IMAX theater.  I usually try not to watch movies in the theater unless they’re action movies or visually stunning.  Avatar was both and I would happily pay to watch that movie again.  It was probably the most amazing movie I’ve ever seen and it is definitely one that will revolutionize film making.  If you’re planning on seeing it, just to give you an idea of the costs, you can watch the matinee show (first show of the day) for $10 per person.  Regular tickets go for $14.50 and in Manhattan they are going for $17.50.  I know, it’s expensive!  But definitely well worth it!

Hope you all enjoy the rest of the holidays!

An Act of Charity

We’re back from New Orleans!  Had a great time there although we ran into a few storms which made it difficult to walk around.  I’m glad to be back home though and to start the research/planning process of our move.  My husband started work today but we’re not sure exactly when he’ll officially be on the road.  Once he starts traveling, we’ll make a trip to Seattle (which takes the top spot in places we are considering to move to).  When it comes to places with no state income tax, Seattle is really the only one on the list that we are both willing to move to.  Las Vegas comes in second but I don’t find it to be a family friendly place.  Ideally, we’d love to move to California but I think we’ll wait a few years for that because if we moved now, we probably wouldn’t be able to afford a very nice place to live in there.

So back to New Orleans.  We went with a group of friends which made the trip lots of fun.  But it was heartbreaking to see such poverty everywhere.  We also went to the lower ninth ward which was devastated by Hurricane Katrina and it was really an experience of a lifetime.  I recommend stopping by there to anyone who visits the New Orleans area.  It’s incredibly sad but it brings you closer to the event and allows you to see how terrible the destruction was.  It’s been 4 years and the area still has not been rebuilt.  Homelessness was everywhere and it made us wonder how many of the homeless were victims of the hurricane.

We went out for lunch on our last day and decided to pack all our leftovers into a box and offer it to the next person we saw who could use a good meal.  Just seeing the look on the man’s face when our friend handed him the box and how he immediately began eating ravenously was one of the greatest feelings.  It felt so good to know we weren’t wasting food by leaving it at the restaurant and that we were offering food to someone who was hungry.  I encourage all of you to consider doing something like this the next time you are at a restaurant and haven’t finished your meal.  There are plenty of people out there who would love to finish it for you!

The only thing that disturbed me was the fact that we had to use a styrofoam box for the food.  I doubt it got recycled.  I’m going to have to start carrying biodegradable boxes or something!

Before I sign off, I’d like to share a photo I took of steps leading to where there once was a house.  It was a heartbreaking image for me.