Monthly Archives: March 2008

Weekly Roundup: Easter Egg Edition

Posted on by  at  9:29 am
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Happy Easter to all those celebrating today!  It has been a great week here at Frugal Dad.  Some increased exposure brought new subscribers and introduced me to several new blogging friends.  The Life Skills Network is really taking off with the introduction of our new website.  We are fortunate to have such a diverse collection of bloggers writing quality content on a variety of subjects.  I’m honored to be a part of this group.

Here are a few Easter Eggs I found hiding around the web this week:

10 Things to Add to Your Life / 10 Things to Eliminate from Your Life offered some great suggestions for spring cleaning your home, and decluttering your life in general (@Remodeling This Life)

Why Be Frugal?   It’s a fundamental question all us “frugalites”have to face at some point. (@Gather Little By Little)

50+ Resources to Legitimately Raise Your Income is an awesome collection of legit ways to boost the money coming in. (@My Super-Charged Life)

Grow Your Investments One Snowflake at a Time (a guest post from Madison appearing on MSN Money) really got me to thinking about my “snowflaking” strategy.  The concept has been working for me when applied to debt repayment, but until this article I’m not sure I ever thought of it helping me accumulate investments (after my debt is paid off, of course).  This article is a keeper!

5 Ways I Plan to Survive the Recession This list beats anything put out by the mainstream media.  While they tend to focus on the “doom and gloom” aspects of a dreaded recession, Ron points out some practical steps to take to avoid a financial meltdown. (@The Wisdom Journal)

About to Enter the Workplace for the First Time?  Try the 50% Solution.  Great concept – wish I had read this ten years ago and applied it! According to Trent’s article, I would already have 10 years of financial independence banked!  (@The Simple Dollar)

Five Common Money Mistakes to Avoid describes a few of the fundamental financial screw-ups most of us have made along the way.  If everyone would read this article upon graduating high school imagine the improvements we could make in the world of personal finance! (@Milk Your Money)

How Do I Publicize My Blog?  Hank’s post features some great ideas for taking your blog to new heights.  This is a great resource for new bloggers, or “old” bloggers looking to improve their product. (@My Investing Blog)

Are You Selling Your Credit Score?  Of course, not all of these are bad, but as Pinyo points out you must pay these things off when the bill arrives or interest and fees can wipe out any gains you make. (@Moolanomy)

A Juicy StumbleUpon Tip for Your Blog.  One more on “blog improvement,” and it’s a dandy!  Ciaran gives some great ideas for using StumbleUpon as a tool to improve your roundup post development.  I took the advice to heart and used several of my weekly stumbles to develop this post.  It makes life a lot easier to have a ready-made list at the end of the week.  (@Chance Favors)

There’s No Shame in Renting.  When did renting become a dirty word?  Renting makes a lot of sense in many scenarios, but people bought into the “your throwing your money away” mantra of mortgage brokers and realtors.  Do what’s best for your situation, and follow Lynnae’s advice in this great post. (@Being Frugal)

Budgeting for Irregular Income offers up some great ideas for setting up a budget when earning income on an irregular schedule (commissions, part time work, etc.).  (@DebtFREE-Revolution)

Live Simple So that Others May Simply Live.   One of the side effects of a frugal lifestyle is that you use less resources than other consumers.  “Simple living” should be one of the tenets of any quality frugal living program. (@The Good Human)

Kiss the Rat Race Good-Bye

Posted on by  at  11:00 am
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There have been several popular releases in the “early retirement” genre recently, but I found this book hidden amongst the personal finance books at a local library. It was written in 1992, which made me a little skeptical as to its relevancy today. Great books can hold up to the test of time (Your Money or Your Life), but some are “dated” only one year after their release. I found Kiss the Rat Race Good-Bye to be in the category of those books which still have inspiring, relevant personal finance information many years after their initial release. Let’s dive in with a detailed review.

A Look Inside Kiss the Rat Race Good-Bye

Chapter 1: Here Today…Where Tomorrow?
kiss the rat race good-byeAre you one of those people who put their dreams on hold to pursue a “safe” career? I wrote about this myself a while back, and I think at some level we all are guilty of doing this at some point in our lives. Unfortunately, it isn’t a realistic expectation that everyone in the world can realize self-actualization in their careers from the very start. For most of us, work involves toiling away at the daily grind to pay necessary life expenses, provide for our families, and save for a rainy day. However, at some point we should all aspire to break free from the rat race and do what it is we believe we were put here to do. If you personally believe you were put on this earth to sit in an office nine hours a day and create reports on widget production then congratulations – you probably won’t have a hard time realizing your ultimate dreams. For the rest of us financial independence comes with the promise of blazing our own trail, setting our own schedules, and doing work we love.

Chapter 2: Life Begins at…
This was by far one of the book’s best chapters. Author Elizabeth Lewin establishes the ground work for creating different kinds of goals: short-term goals, medium-term goals, long-term goals, lifestyle goals, and financial goals. Each type of goal has a different time line associated with it, but each is establish through the same methodical approach described by Lewin in Chapter 2. If you need to brush up on your goal-setting or finishing skills this is a great section for you.

Chapter 3: Up Your Assets
As I mentioned in my 7-Day Turnaround series, the first step of determining direction with any new plan is to establish a starting point. Lewin describes in Kiss the Rat Race Good-Bye her ideas for “gathering the data.” This involves taking inventory of all important financial accounts related to your assets and liabilities, and Lewin includes a handy checklist for recording this inventory. After identifying each type of account as an asset or liability you can put together your personal balance sheet, a task Lewin suggests readers do at least once a year.

Chapter 4: You Can Design Your Life-Style
The most significant thing keeping most of us from retiring early is the lifestyles we have chosen. By saddling ourselves with debt, expensive mortgages, car loans and student loans, the idea of retiring early is a pipe dream. After all, we’ll need to work fifteen years just to pay this stuff off and get back to zero! Lewin makes the point in this chapter that is the lifestyle you choose that has the most impact on whether or not you will be able to make an early exit from the rat race. There are some great tips in this section on setting up a budget, monitoring your cash flow and quite a few money-saving tips as well.

Chapter 5: Managing Your Debt
The opening sentence of this chapter is, “Buy now, pay later.” Might as well be the mantra of the average credit card user. Some are responsible and paying for it “later” means when the bill arrives. Others take “later” to mean some point in the future after interest and fees have doubled the initial cost of that single item bought years earlier. Lewin presents an eye-opening statistic on debt levels at the time this book was written.

When the Diner’s Club card was started in 1950, the total outstanding consumer debt (excluding home mortgages) of the American consumer stood at $21.5 billion. Forty years later, the figure had reached $750 billion.

Now that’s a sobering statistic! Obviously this amount of debt is disproportionate to the population growth during this period, so something else has to account for the staggering increase in American’s debt loads. That “something” is spending. We have bought and swiped ourselves into a financial hole that many will never dig out from. Nothing can derail your plan for an early retirement like amassing large amounts of debt.

Chapters 6-16
The next ten chapters covered many of the same topics you will find other personal finance books. I have consolidated their review here not because there is nothing remarkable, but in the interest of time (mine and yours), and because these are fairly standard sections in any book about money. Of course, this book introduces all the concepts with an added sense of urgency since the ultimate goal is to get us out of the rat race within the next decade or two. Topics covered include social security, corporate pension plans, company and other tax-deferred plans, saving and investing, mutual funds, investing for college, insurance, estate planning, and record keeping.

Chapter 17: Putting It All Together: Real-life Scenarios for Kissing the Rat Race Good-Bye
The final chapter of Kiss the Rat Race Good-Bye was an inspiring summary of the plans detailed in previous chapters. The last chapter provided some real-life scenarios of people who had managed to reach their goals of financial independence in ten to fifteen years. It’s always nice to hear of others who manage to break free from the rat race. It makes the very idea a little more believable to those of us who have a hard time imagining what life would be like without doing the corporate shuffle five days a week. I recommend this book for anyone not doing the work they love, or hoping to step away from the rat race to pursue a more fulfilling calling free from financial concerns.

DIY Plumbing Repair: Now I Know Why Plumbers Are So Well-Paid

Posted on by  at  7:00 am
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A couple weekends ago our guest bathroom toilet developed a slow flush. I plunged a few times thinking someone was probably guilty of not being frugal with the toilet paper, but the problem seemed to be getting worse. This was the first time vigorous plunging was not a successful remedy to the slow flush. Like all frugal dads, I was determined to solve this problem myself and set out to learn more than I ever wanted to know about the anatomy of a toilet.

The internet offers a wealth of information when it comes to do-it-yourself home repairs. A quick search on the web revealed some promising leads. Apparently, they make a toilet snake, or toilet auger, that is approximately three feet long and has an extended protective coating to prevent damage to the porcelain bowl. My regular plumber’s auger is much longer, and does not have a protective surface. I shut off the computer and ventured off to the nearest home improvement store.

In the plumbing section I found several varieties of toilet augers with a wide range of prices. The Cobra Heavy-Duty Industrial auger was $48.93. Since I wasn’t planning to snake but one toilet I thought this was a bit unnecessary. The Cobra “Homeowner” edition auger was more my style – $7.48. I also picked up a wax ring just in case I had to pull up the bowl to snake the main drain in the bathroom floor. Not much selection here – just a good old-fashioned $1.54 wax ring with flange.

harold-the-helicopter.jpgI returned home to test out the new toilet auger when some new evidence was introduced. My son confessed to Mrs. Frugal that he had thrown a toy “down the potty.” Hoping it would be a small toy that would eventually pass, we asked which one he threw in the toilet. He replied, “Harold the Helicopter.” Fans of Thomas the Train will recognize Harold as the helicopter who buzzes around the Island of Sodor. My main concern was that Harold’s blades would snag on the toilet’s exit and create a messy backup. Then again, this would be an ideal situation as opposed to it snagging in the main drain several feet below the house.

As excited as I was to try out my new toy I put away the auger for fear of pushing Harold further down the drain. I proceeded to turn off the water at the wall, flush several times to attempt to drain the tank and bowl, and then unbolt the toilet from the floor. I laid the bowl on its side, and guess who I found clinging to the very bottom of the exit? Yep, it was Harold. I pulled him out, along with some other stuff I won’t mention – just in case you are reading this on your lunch break. I cleaned off the existing wax ring, affixed the new one and reseated the toilet to the floor.

My household repair material costs totaled $9.65 with sales tax. I spent around an hour of actual labor time, not including my trip to the store. I’m not current on the going rate of plumbers around the country, but I imagine it would have cost more than $9.65 for one to the come to our house, diagnose and rescue Harold the Helicopter.

So what is the point of all this? Besides telling you way more than you ever wanted to know about toilet repair, the story serves as a reminder to try to develop some handy skills so you can make your own minor repairs around the house. It will save you a ton of money versus calling in a professional. However, there are times when a professional is needed. For example, I don’t pretend to know anything about electrical circuits or related equipment. Attempting to “wing it” could be hazardous to my health, so I call in an electrician when electrical repairs, or new wiring, is required.

I also consider my time valuable. Besides working full time, writing part time, and being a husband and father all the time, trying to squeeze in household repairs can create a schedule crunch. There is a break even point, financially, where you would be better off to hire someone and continue to work on money-making endeavors. This is especially true of emergency situations that happen in the middle of the week, or the middle of the night. A busted pipe, or a fried electrical panel, could potentially tie up quite a lot of your time to repair, even if you have the know-how. Instead of sacrificing time you could be using to earn money, you may very well be better off hiring someone to give you a hand.

If you are looking to get into DIY home improvement and plumbing work, check out coupons from Lowes and home depot in my coupon directory.

Image Credit: D’Arcy Norman

Category: DIY

Be a Blogger: Lessons Learned From a Traffic Surge

Posted on by  at  1:00 pm
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be a bloggerThe following is part of Frugal Dad’s weekly series, “So You Want to Be a Blogger?” which chronicles the development and optimization of a blog’s lifecycle.

One of the keys to being a successful blogger is flexibility. I had a post all planned out for today’s So You Want to Be a Blogger series, but as I mentioned yesterday Frugal Dad had an unexpected boost in traffic thanks to an article appearing on LifeHacker.org, and subsequently on the front page of del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking site. Instead of pushing ahead with regularly scheduled programming I decided to postpone my planned post for next week, and instead share some lessons learned from yesterday’s boost in traffic.

Prepare for a surge in traffic before the tsunami hits. Quite honestly, yesterday’s surge in traffic came as a complete surprise. The article I wrote about square foot gardening was picked up by a fellow blogger and referenced in one her posts on the same subject. At some point it was identified as being worthy to appear on LifeHacker.com as a featured article, and 14,000 visitors later I’m sitting here in new-blogger shock. Consider only one in six blogs draws more than 500 page views a day! It was a fun ride, and I am thankful for the opportunities to meet several new people, and pickup many new subscribers. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a few things I could have done better to capitalize on the traffic.

  • Have a standard “introductory” post ready to go. I scrambled to put together an introduction post welcoming the waves of new visitors, but wasn’t able to publish it until my lunch break, several hours after the initial reference from Life Hacker was published. The purpose of this introductory post is to capture the interest of some of this new traffic and attempt to pull them deeper into your blog. A link to your archives, a “best-of” section, or a popular series post is a good way to attract interest beyond the article the visitor landed on.
  • Create a new campaign on Crazy Egg or Google Analytics to see where users are clicking. 10,000-hit days are uncommon for relatively new bloggers, and they provide an excellent opportunity for you to analyze what’s popular on your blog. Keep in mind that if the majority of this traffic has been referred from a social bookmarking site they may be on a stop-and-go pattern, pausing just long enough to read a few paragraphs from your article and then move on. For this reason, average page views or number of clicks per visitors may be misleading. Still, those that do click on a link on your blog will help you determine which sections of your content are most popular. This could be important down the road in terms of advertising, article promotion, etc.
  • Promote subscriber options within the post. Be sure visitors know how to subscribe to your blog. A highly visible subscriber area near the top of your blog is a good start. If a particular article has drawn some extra attention make it even easier for new visitors to subscribe by placing a line near the end of your article with links to your RSS feed and/or email delivery signup page.
  • Fortunately, my host held up to the traffic and I am not aware of any significant downtime. If you use WordPress to maintain your blog, consider the wp-cache plugin to reduce the database round trips your server has to make to serve new visitors. Basically, this plug-in saves your pages in a static file which is available for a short time for new visitors. This makes your site run much more efficiently versus the normal request, database pull, code compile and display routine.

Normally a post like this would appear near the middle of a “how to become a blogger” series, but I wanted to share my experience with you while the lessons were fresh. Hopefully, if you experience a wave of traffic early in your blogging journey you will now be better prepared to handle it.

Blogging is a rewarding experience. It provides a creative outlet for those with an interest to share their thoughts and ideas with others. It can develop into another income stream which could add to your “snowflakes.” Best of all, you will build relationships with some fantastic people along the way. If you are one of those new subscribers who landed here yesterday, welcome. Thanks for joining us!

Ready to start your own blog?  I host my blogs with HostGator–a great host with awesome support!

How to Live on One Income for Ten Years

Posted on by  at  7:00 am
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My wife and I are about to celebrate our ten year wedding anniversary (in April). This is a momentous occasion, and brings back memories of other anniversaries in our lives (when we met, our first date, etc.). One thing it reminded me of is that we are also closing in on ten years of living on one income.

Nearly a full year into our marriage we found out my wife was expecting our first child. Since my wife relocated when we married it meant a job change for her, and for the first couple months we were married she struggled to find a job comparable to the one she left.

My wife had only been working a few months when we found out she was pregnant. I remember the range of emotions I felt as a “soon-to-be-dad” – excitement, joy, and sheer terror! Not only did I have the normal doubts about my parenting ability, as any new parents would have, but I also wondered how we would manage on one just one income.

Before marriage my wife and I agreed she would stay home with our kids, at least until they were school age.

Unfortunately, I realize we failed to put in enough planning for living on one income. I was low on the totem pole in my career, and was barely earning enough to take care of myself when we married. My wife’s added income made us comfortable, but we were not savers by nature, so any gains we made were squandered on newlywed purchases – a new car, new clothes, things around the house, etc.

We should have been piling up cash like crazy in anticipation of her departure from full-time employment (well, paid full-time employment – being a mom is a full-time job!).

At five months pregnant my wife came home because the stress of her job was taking a physical toll. The last trimester of her pregnancy was difficult, as was the delivery (in fact, I almost lost both my wife and daughter that day). After an emergency cesarean delivery and a long recovery for mom and baby (neonatal ICU for daughter, long hospital stay for mom and daughter) we finally came home nearly a week after my daughter was born. It was an emotionally taxing time for everyone involved, and the last thing I wanted to think about was money.

We spent the next few years spoiling our little girl, paying minimums on medical bills, eating out frequently, traveling to see the in-laws, and spending all of my salary (and then some). That salary didn’t change much those first few years as my company had maxed out growth and even began rounds of layoffs. Fortunately, I avoided getting a pink slip, but went two or three years in a row with no raise and no chance of promotion.

We finally broke out of the mess when I took a new job in a new industry and relocated, but the damage was done. We now owed credit cards, medical debts and left over student loans from my first two years of college. My wife was now expecting our second child, around the time our first child was heading to school full time.

It was clear my wife wouldn’t be returning to the workforce anytime soon, and we would have to continue living on one income. It was a sobering wake up call, financially.

With the benefit of 10 years of hindsight, I offer these tips for one-income families (or those considering a move to living on a single income).

Keys to Living On One Income:

  • Before making the move, pay off debts and stack up some cash. If we had it to do over again we would have made a stronger push to be debt free before my wife quit working, and we would have had a sizable emergency fund that could have helped with the labor and delivery expenses, and future emergencies thereafter. Park it in a top online bank for safety and higher earnings.
  • Stay away from new cars. Car dealers love new parents because they can usually sell them on safety, added space, and “convenience” features. Don’t be fooled. There are plenty of safe, roomy, convenient options in the used car market. Remember, you are living on one income – you can’t afford a new car or new car insurance coverage!
  • Do not underestimate expenses for the stay-home parent. With someone occupying the house more hours of the day, utilities will likely increase. It is no longer feasible to set the temperature to 80 in the summer and 60 in the winter during the day. The family pet will appreciate the gesture, but you will pay for it when the energy bills arrive. While employment expenses obviously decline, other expenses do go up.
  • Do not attempt to keep up with two-income families. We made this mistake because several of our friends were two-income families, and they frequently bought new cars, new homes, new furniture, etc. We tried to keep up initially, but eventually realized they had more disposable income than we did, and we had to adjust down.
  • As a stay-home mom or dad, look for ways to be a “home economist.” Cook meals from scratch, clip coupons, make homemade crafts, or even start a garden. In other words, look for ways to save money that you probably wouldn’t have time for if working a full-time job.

Being a full-time parent can be a rewarding experience, for both the parent and their children. However, it does not come without sacrifice. Plan accordingly so you can enjoy the process, instead of resenting it because you are struggling with money.