I’m currently reading Stay Mad for Life, the latest offering from CNBC and TheStreet.com money manager, Jim Cramer. By the way, I personally think this is Cramer’s best work as it focuses on all areas of personal finance, not just stock picking. In the early chapters, Cramer discusses a unique way of budgeting that carries monthly expenses out to yearly outlays. It got me to thinking. My wife and I are big soft drink drinkers. Besides them not being healthy, I wondered in what other ways these things were affecting our lives.

In a given week we probably go through 2 twelve-packs of Coca Cola (or Diet Coke, depending on how good we are being, or not being). Our local grocery store generally offers a 3/$10 deal making these close to $3.50 each with sales tax. That comes out to $7.00 a week on soft drinks. Convert that to a 52-week, annualized expense and it comes out to about $360 a year, nearly a dollar a day!

Over the next couple days my wife and I plan to take a look at our budget and annualize all our expenses to determine what’s costing us the most over the course of a year (can you imagine what the cable bill looks like…yikes!).

Technorati Tags: Stay Mad for Life, Jim Cramer, personal finance, budgeting

I was reading through some older posts on my favorite personal finance blog, The Simple Dollar, and I saw a post related to a debt snowball plan I’ve been wanting to employ myself. Trent calls it the “Scared Straight” snowball. Basically, the plan is to make minimum payments on all your debt and pile your remaining get-out-of-debt money into a high-yielding savings account. When the balance in that savings account exceeds the balance of your smallest debt by 30% transfer the money into checking and kill off that debt.

As Trent points out this is probably not the smartest (mathematically) way to approach the debt snowball, but for those of us with somewhat shaky jobs, or in one-income families, it makes for a better night’s sleep to have a few thousand in savings at any given time. I may make one slight variation to his plan and preserve a $1,000 savings threshold - so when my savings balance equals my smallest debt + $1,000 I will bring the savings balance down to $1,000 and pay off the debt. Another idea to consider if you have several smaller debts (like I did in the beginning) would be to group those debts together to make one larger debt. For instance, I had three debts under $500. If I was using the “Scared Straight” plan back then I would have grouped them into one $1,300 debt and used that as my target savings amount.

My daughter received $50 from her great-grandfather for Christmas and we all agreed that there was absolutely nothing left on her list that she really needed. I pitched the idea of buying a share or two of stock with the money so she could watch it grow over time. Honestly, I thought this would be a great way to introduce her to some investment concepts, and when I was her age I thought the idea of owning stock was cool.

I offered up a short list of kid-friendly stocks that I thought would provide good growth and dividends over the long term, nothing too speculative for her first pick. She settled on Disney and we were off to Sharebuilder to create a custodial account. The thing I like about Sharebuilder is that you can buy partial shares, so by committing the $50 for her first purchase she should be able to buy around 1.4 shares of Disney stock (trading around $32). I decided to keep this money out of the Educational Savings Account, and her 529 College Savings Plan, because it may not be used for educational purposes down the road. Who knows…maybe this will buy her a car in ten years (with a little help from Mom and Dad, and a few more contributions from Papa).

I can’t wait to show her “DIS” in the stock report of the newspaper and begin explaining what happens when stocks go up and down, etc. My wife is convinced I am WAY more excited about this whole process than my daughter is! She’s right, because no one ever explained these concepts to me and what a leg up I would have had to have someone “coach” me on such financial matters a young age.

Technorati Tags: stock, investment, Sharebuilder, Educational Savings Account, 529 College Savings Plan

If you are reading this it means the site conversion from Blogger to Wordpress is now complete. I’d like to thank Amy over at My Debt Free Goal for providing outstanding instructions for implementing a Wordpress blog. I’ve been a fan of hers for a while now, and if you haven’t had a chance to check out her story I encourage you to do so.

Well, what now? Actually, quite a bit! Now that we are out from under the limitations of Blogger I hope to expand the site a bit. Literally, I want to expand the idead of living a frugal lifestyle and discuss more wide-ranging personal finance topics. I have a ton of thoughts in my head on a range of topics from mortgages to credit cards to retirement savings, so forgive me if things appear a bit disjointed at first. After the first week or two I should get in a rythm, and may even dedicate certain days to certain topics (Manic Monday Mortgages, or Super Tuesday Savings).

Thanks for joining us on this journey to financial freedom!

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Wordpress, mortgages, credit cards, retirement