Last year’s table-top design.  This year we’re going with several raised bed boxes.

This week I took a look at the 10-day forecast and it revealed temperatures hovering in the mid-sixties for highs, and lows safely above freezing.  That means it’s time to start thinking about gardening!  Last year we gave square foot gardening a try, and enjoyed some limited success.  This year we we plan to expand our plans from a simple tabletop design to a few raised beds directly on the ground.

So over the next couple weekends I’ll be building the 2×4 boxes, preparing the soil, and coming up with a way to keep our dog from trampling the garden (this might prove to be the hardest part!).  We’ve already picked up our seed packs and look forward to a summer crop of cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, peas, carrots, strawberries, and a variety of peppers for homemade salsa.  I’ll keep you posted!

The Roundup

15 Graceful Ways to Say “No.” My first year of blogging I said yes to everything – every deal, every freelance opportunity, and ever PR pitch asking for a mention.  I did it in the interest of growing the blog, but quickly found out it is impossible to say yes to everyone, so I’ve become a bit more discriminating to protect my own schedule.

Severe Drought Adds to Hardships in California.  We were planning to expand our square foot garden this year anyway, but news of water rationing in California (which will lead to higher produce prices this summer) have reinforced these plans.

Cheap Meals and Easy Dinner Ideas: Recession Dining For Under $10.  My favorite part of this post was the “Meals from the Depression” cooking YouTube video with Clara, a 91 year-old grandmother who cooks recipes right in her kitchen.  Cool stuff!

Mortgage Rates Are Low, But It May Still Cost You. A good reminder that while rates are hovering near historic lows, there are still plenty of fees to contend with when navigating a new mortgage.

Job Search – FInd a Freelance Job.  Nice rundown of the places to land a side hustle; something more and more of us may be looking for as traditional employment continues to dry up in many major markets.

Save Money on Hotels.  Planning a spring break getaway soon? Here’s a collection of tips to save money on your next hotel stay.  We are not planning an extended trip any time soon, but do plan to squeeze in a long weekend with a short hotel stay somewhere in the mountains this spring.

A Walkthrough and Cost Breakdown of Brewing Your Own Beer. I was at the grocery store last night and they had a deal where you could pick any 6 bottled beers and make your variety six-pack for a special price. It was tempting, but having just read this article hours before I decided to pass and reconsider home brewing.

The Pursuit of Wealth For The Sake of Others.  One of my motivators to building wealth is that I can give some of it away.  Admittedly, I would also like to help family first, but if I can accumulate enough I have a long list of “Secret Santa” missions I’d like to participate in!

Should We Downsize?  We recently addressed this same question in a review of our 2009 goals (one of which was to downsize our house).  In the end, we decided to stay put for now, but it remains a long-term goal for us to reduce our mortgage, our utilities, and our stuff.

Consumer Reports 2009 Best New Car Picks.  Still hard for me to get used to the idea that new cars could be a better buy than used, but in this market it’s true.  Regardless, I still get a little sticker shock at these prices – a Lexus LS 460 will set you back $64,000 to $77,000…Ouch!

The Frugal Dog – The Cost of Dog Ownership.  Frugal pet owners everywhere will appreciate this one!  I’ve been a dog owner my whole life, and this list inventories some things even I had not thought about.

Quick Hits

• Bargain Babe is giving away two chances at winning a $25 Starbucks gift card just for signing up to her new blog, BargainBabe.com.  I’ve followed Julia since her times at the L.A. Daily News, and have found her new blog worth subscribing to, with or without the Starbucks card!

• Chasing Dollars Instead of Passion (video).  So many of us have this backwards, and once you’re headed in that direction, it is hard to turn things around. Are you chasing your passion?

• User Testing Provides Valuable Feedback.  WC shared an excellent guest post over at SideHustleBlogging.com.  If you run a blog or website, consider asking a spouse, a friend, or even an unbiased third-party to look over your site and solicit feedback.

I recently stumbled upon the website for Backwoods Home Magazine and liked what I saw.  I considered subscribing, but was a bit hesitant, until my enthusiasm for the magazine was reinforced by a post just yesterday from J.D. at Get Rich Slowly. He posted an excellent review of self-sufficiency magazines and websites, and it seemed like this one intrigued him the most as well.

A DIY “Wannabe”

That’s me; a DIY, self-sufficiency wannabe.  I say that because while I have always been interested in living off the grid, I am fully plugged in at the moment and it is not likely that I will be able to “unplug” any time soon.  However, I still enjoy reading about others who have done it, and applying those lessons to my current situation.

Photo courtesy of Grzegorz Lobinski

Just because you live in a neighborhood, rather than a 5-acre ranch, it doesn’t mean the same rules of self-sufficiency do not apply.  There are a number of things you can do to make your small homestead more efficient, like building a square foot garden for vegetables, installing a clothesline to lessen the energy demand from your dryer, and reducing your waste by starting a compost pile (also great for gardening!).

The problem is, if you are like me and were raised in the city, these skills were not acquired during your upbringing.  Fortunately, there are a number of books and magazines, such as Backwoods Home, that share tips and advice for living a self-sufficient lifestyle.

Here’s a small sampling of my favorite articles from past issues:

Canning 101.  Every summer we visit a local strawberry farm and pick a ton of fresh strawberries. We eat enough to make us sick, have strawberry shortcake for several nights in a row, and freeze a few with sugar and water to enjoy fresh strawberry shortcake later in the summer.  But I have always wanted to learn how to can them for homemade strawberry jellies and jams. I’d like to put up some of our tomatoes from the square foot garden and make some homemade salsa. Fortunately, Backwood Homes frequently runs articles explaining the canning process.

How Do You Live Without Electricity? Good advice, even if you are still on the grid. We lose power a couple times a year from thunderstorms in the area, and even have the occasional hurricane or tropical storm blow far enough inland to affect us. In 2004 we lost power for several days after a hurricane blew ashore and held together long enough to reach us as strong tropical storm. Could have used these tips back then!

Garden Spaces For Small Places. Anyone who has read Frugal Dad long enough knows that I am an amateur gardener, of sorts. I built a square foot garden box last year as a project to share with my kids, and it really took off. This year we plan to expand our raised bed layout, and try our hand at growing a few tomato plants in containers. I’m looking forward to reading more about gardening in Backwoods Home.

The magazine ties in well with my desire to live more frugally, and even if we never make it off the grid, I look forward to applying these lessons in our residential world. With spring just around the corner we are looking forward to starting our garden again, drying clothes outside, and turning off the heat and air for a few weeks (the power bill is such a dreaded drain on our wallet!).

You may order Backwoods Home magazine from Amazon.com.

What spring projects do you have in the works?

Over the last several months my family’s top two financial priorities have been to become credit card debt free, and establish an emergency fund of six months of expenses.  I’m proud to report that we have made a lot of progress, and should accomplish both goals by year end.

We rarely do things as prescribed, and our debt snowball plan was no exception.  Thanks to a combination of events – from the broader economic slowdown, to a life-threatening illness in my family – I have becomes less and less aggressive at paying off debt, and opted to rearrange our priorities a bit to accumulate savings faster.  But I did not want to completely abandon our goal of paying off credit card debt.

The Recession-Proof Debt Snowball

One of my biggest complaints about debt snowball plans is that they usually begin before an adequate cushion is saved.  After all, a $1,000 emergency fund does not last very long in a period of unemployment, or a long illness, or a string of visits from Murphy.  I consider $1,000 to be an absolute bare minimum amount for an emergency fund.  It’s a good start, but not a balance to rely on for months while working to pay off debt.  I’ve read from other bloggers who have modified their own debt snowball plan to address this lack of security, and I came up with a plan that would work for us.  Here’s what we decided to do.

1. Pay minimum payments on all credit card accounts. Making at least the minimum payment lessens the chances of credit card issuers jacking up interest rates for no reason, or lowering your credit limit.

2. Save $1,000 in an emergency fund. Continue to pay minimum payments on all debts, and use any additional money to save up $1,000 in a separate savings or checking account.  This did not take us very long, and after a few paychecks, a yard sale and putting up a few items on eBay, we had $1,000 in savings.

3. Save amount of lowest debt plus $1,000, and then pay off the debt.  In our case, we had an old $2,600 consolidation loan at our credit union.  Rather than making extra payments on the loan, we just continued to put any extra money in savings until we had accumulated $3,600 (it was actually a little lower because we had made a couple payments).  When we hit the pay off amount, we wrote a check for $2,450, taking the loan to zero, and our emergency fund back to $1,000.  Then we targeted the next highest debt balance.

It was not long before we were targeting a $4,000 credit card balance that I accumulated while finishing up school.  Over the next few months we watched our savings balance grow, and it was comforting to know we had a few thousand in savings. In an emergency, we knew we could have simply used some of the savings and avoided going back into credit card debt.  Under a traditional debt snowball plan we would have kept the $1,000 in place and used the extra money to make large debt payments, leaving with very little savings to cover an emergency.

This recession-proof debt snowball does not get you out of debt any faster.  In fact, you will pay a little more in interest for not paying down your debt balances sooner.  But it will allow you to keep more in savings for longer periods of time.  For us, this peace of mind was worth the additional interest.

In September, our plan was put to the test when my mom suffered a stroke at 53 and lost her income while hospitalized over 100 days. We were able to “circle the wagons,” and help her thanks to our savings.  Now that things have stabilized, we can again turn our attention to using the savings towards paying down our debt.

Photo courtesy of Southernpixel

When I was a freshman in college I worked a variety of retail jobs at the local mall.  I worked at GNC Nutrition for a while, and then a shoe store, and then an athletic apparel store.  At all three jobs I had to report the local weather back to the home office at closing.

At the time, it didn’t really occur to me that there was a correlation between the weather and sales.  Now I realize that weather does in fact have an effect on spending, both on a personal level and on a larger regional level.  Weather impacts both shopping patterns and the types of products that we buy.

Of course, businesses are well aware of these pattens and that is why home improvement stores push things like generators, batteries and flashlights in South Florida during the peak of the hurricane season. Stores in the northeast might carry similar items to prepare for winter storms.

How Does Weather Affect Our Personal Shopping Habits?

Are you a die hard shopper – the kind that would brave the elements to catch a great sale, or risk life and limb to pick up an iPhone the day it comes out?  I suspect many of you are not, but you probably know someone that fits the description. It doesn’t take much to discourage me shopping because I generally hate to shop. I don’t like crowds, I don’t like lines, and I especially don’t like wandering the aisles while falling prey to every well-placed, eye-catching display promoting a new product.

I have noticed that stores seem a little less crowded on both particularly nice days, and particularly bad days.  Maybe most people reserve shopping for those ho-hum days.  You know, overcast with a threat of sprinkles and an almost bothersome cool breeze.

Maybe our shopping patterns have more to do with our overall mood rather than the weather, but since the weather impacts our mood I guess there is still a correlation.   I know some people who are absolutely morose if the sun isn’t shining.  Me? I actually prefer cool, rainy days (should have been born in Seattle).  And when people feel gloomy they often go shopping to lift their spirits.  When they are happy they go shopping to celebrate. And when they are bored they go shopping to give them something to do to hopefully make them happy.  All symptoms of being an emotional shopper.

Not sure where I’m going with all this, but it started as a random thought on a recent lunch break when I watched people scurrying into a Target store, dodging heavy raindrops all the way.  Those same people reappeared in a few minutes with a tiny bag and soaked clothes, and spent the next several minutes adjusting their hair in the rear-view mirror.

I couldn’t help but wonder what they had purchased, and why it couldn’t wait until after the severe thunderstorm rolled through that day.  Hey, at least they were stimulating the economy!  Meanwhile, I was camped out in my truck listening to Dave Ramsey and eating a sack lunch.  Just the way I like it.

In a typical week I receive variations of this same question several times via email, comments and from followers on Twitter: “Should I Pay Off Mortgage Early?”  For the most part, my answer is, “It depends.”  But on a few occasions, when people share more details of their overall financial plan, I tell them to go for it.  Pay off your mortgage early and live in that home free and clear!

Having a mortgage is one of those culturally expected things, along with car payments and credit cards.  Most financial gurus fall backwards out of their chair when you mention paying off your mortgage early, instead of plowing more dough into their carefully selected portfolio of investments – most of which are not properly aligned with your risk tolerance, nor your overall investing strategy.

The market downturn, which apparently is still turning, seems to have more and more people reevaluating the question, “Should I Pay Off My Mortgage Early?” Up until now conventional wisdom said no. Invest that money in the market, and keep paying interest to the bank to get the tax deduction. Now I’m not so sure. Seems to me like we would have been better off to be sitting here with a paid-for house than a handful of worthless investments.

That is basically what Steve was alluding to in a post that caught my eye some time ago, “What If Saving Was Stupid?” One of the more profound statements was that “money in the market isn’t saved – it’s invested, and investment carries a risk that it won’t be there when you need it.”  So true; as many of us have had the recent misfortune of discovering.

But paying off debt, including your mortgage, is a sure thing.  Assuming you are not borrowing any new money, paying off $50,000 in debt means that $50,000 debt can never come back.  It doesn’t matter what the market does.  It doesn’t matter if we are at war or in peace time.  It doesn’t matter how strong or weak the U.S. dollar is – that debt is never returning to your personal balance sheet.  To me, that is a powerful incentive to use the $50,000 to pay off my mortgage early.

Sure, I could invest that same money in the down market and watch it go to $60,000 by next year.  But that is far from a sure thing.  Besides, without a mortgage I could easily start dropping $1,000 a month into investments.  It wouldn’t take very long at that pace to hit $60,000 in investments. And if you really liked having a house payment, you could always refinance your mortgage.

What this question really gets to is your tolerance for risk, and your dreams for the future.  I hope to “retire” from working for money earlier than most people, and I cannot do that with a mortgage payment.  So for me, thirty years of payments is not an option.  With a paid-for house, and very few expenses, retiring would be a much more viable option because it would not take much in the way of earnings to sustain a frugal living.

Talk about kicking people when they are down.  Recent news reports have shed light on several large banks charging bank fees to customers for the privilege of accessing their unemployment benefits.  Many states are partnering with banks to issue funds on a prepaid debit card, rather than cutting paper checks, in an effort to reduce costs.  The problem is banks are then turning around and hitting unemployed workers with fees for everything from accessing their money to calling for balance inquiries.

From a recent Yahoo story:

Arthur Santa-Maria, a laid-off engineer who lives just outside Albuquerque, N.M., said he didn’t pay any fees the first time he was laid off, for several months in 2007. His unemployment benefits were paid by paper checks. He found a new job last year but was laid off again last fall.

This time, he was issued a Bank of American debit card — a “prepaid” card in industry lingo — but he was surprised to learn he had to pay fees to get his money. He asked the bank to waive them. It said no. That’s when Santa-Maria called back to ask how to check his account online. He logged on and saw that the call cost him a half dollar. To avoid more fees, Santa-Maria found a Bank of America ATM at a strip mall and withdrew $80 at no charge. When he got back to his car, he decided to take out the rest of his money — $250 — and deposit it in his bank account.

Afterward, Santa-Maria logged on to his account and saw a charge of $1.50 for two withdrawals in one day.

To play devil’s advocate, most banks do offer a free alternative to withdrawing unemployment benefits.  Customers may walk up to a teller and ask for a cash advance for the full amount on the card, and they should not be charged a fee.  The problem is most people are using the card like a debit card (after all, that is what it is marketed as) and making small purchases and withdrawals all along.

I am not totally against the idea of banks charging fees, after all there are costs associated with operating ATMs such as maintenance, and reconciliation of the funds.  However, it seems that an exception could be made in this case, especially since many banks recently received a portion of the billion dollar bailout!

With passage of the recent stimulus bill, unemployment benefits will receive a boost, which means banks will likely see an increase in the number and volume of these types of transactions.  I would like to see state governments work with both banks and consumers to find an alternative method of transferring money to benefits recipients. 

One idea would be to simply direct deposit the unemployment benefits to existing checking accounts where consumers bank.  Most recently-employed workers are probably familiar with this format anyway as they likely received paychecks via direct deposit before they were laid off.  This would be a more cost-effective method of transferring benefits than paper checks, and would allow unemployed workers to maintain their previous banking relationships and use existing debit cards and ATMs to access funds.

When it comes to managing our personal finances with software, I am a real dinosaur.  I still use an Excel spreadsheet to create our budget each month, and record transactions there and categorize them on a daily basis.  Over the last few years I have tried different versions of Microsoft Money and Quicken personal financial software with some success, but I eventually gave up on it because I couldn’t customize things the way I wanted like I can with my Excel workbook.

Having recognized my limitations with Excel, and craving more reports and statistics, I have started a search for new personal financial software.  Rather than relying on ad copy from each product’s website, I decided to poll Twitter followers to get their take.  The majority of followers who responded suggested Mint.com, with Quicken a close second.  I also heard responses pointing me to places like PennyMinder.com, You Need A Budget, and the Dollar Store to pick up a notebook, pencil and a cheap calculator (that suggestion appealed to my frugal side!).

Going into this search for updated financial software I was only consider desktop products because that was what I was used to, but I recognize the benefits of using a site like Mint.com to aggregate all of my accounts in one view, and one package.  From the Mint website:

Mint immediately pulls in your balances, purchases, stock trades, etc. to give you a complete picture of your finances.  Mint connects securely with more than 7,000 US financial institutions, saving you hours of tedious data entry.

Saving time recording transactions definitely appeals to me, and I like the idea of being able to access my portfolio from anywhere with access to the web.  Of course, the paranoid side of me worries about things like password security from my online banking profile stored at Mint, etc.  At some point, I’ll need to get over that because this probably the direction all financial software is headed.

Quicken’s products also appeal to me because I can integrate my home blogging business finances.  For a limited time, Quicken is also offering deals on Quicken products (up to $50.00 off + free shipping).  So now I have a dilemma; should I go with Quicken’s product, should I give Mint, or another web-based utility a try, or should I simply stick with my Excel spreadsheet.  I’m hoping some of you can share with me how you manage the finances, and make some product recommendations in the comments.

Which personal financial software product do you use to manage household finances?