Money Green Life

Nowadays, people are moving less frequently. Instead, they are choosing to remodel their current home. Since it’s becoming harder to sell their homes, they can’t buy larger homes. I think it’s a smarter option, especially if you have some extra cash saved up to be able to afford it. There are actually couple things I want to do to improve my home as well. First, I want to finish my garage walls. right now, it’s barely a drywall that’s up. Also, I don’t even have a garage door opener set up either. I also want to add a deck. Everything would be just so much more convenient with a deck. Finally, I have a rough-in set up in the basement for a full bath. It’s pain and annoying to go upstairs to take care of my business when I’m already comfortable in the basement. But for me, I just don’t have enough cash saved up to justify these upgrades. But for you, it might be a different story.

But before you begin to start coughing up money for these upgrades, there are things you should consider.

1. Consider what renovations you want to improve first. Then figure out which items would provide the biggest bang for your money. For instance, if you plan on living at your current house for more than 5 more years, then kitchen remodeling usually provides the biggest return on your investment. If you’re planning to stay less than that, smaller improvements may make more sense, such as refinishing floors and upgrading your lighting.
2. If you are planning a big remodeling, figure out how you will pay for it. Will you need to borrow money? Will you need to open a HELOC account? If it’s something small and less costly, will you tap into your savings? Or did you already have some savings alotted already for this very reason?
3. Make sure you contact your home owners insurance after your upgrades and remodeling. You want to make sure you’re adequately covered. If you’re adding another bedroom, it might not be covered if you don’t inform your insurance company. Same goes for deck and other additions to the house. They might charge you more for extra coverage, but if you can afford the upgrade, you can afford the insurance.
4. Don’t upgrade for present needs, but upgrade for future needs. They may as well be identical in 5 years but most often, people tend to overlook how their priorities may change in the future. For example, if you’re planning to have more children, that may affect some of your key decisions.
5. Plan on stressing out. All projects will come with problems along the way. Rarely do any project go perfectly as planned. So, plan ahead of the potential problems and always have a backup plan. If you understand the risks of calling an audible in the middle of your project, then your stress level may be less.

I am excited about my future home upgrade projects. Unfortunately for me, I don’t currently have the resources or money to take on any of these projects. But when it finally becomes a possibility, I will definitely reflect back to this post and take my own advice.

Have you upgraded or remodeled your home lately? How did it go? I’d love to read about your experiences and the lessons you’ve learned from them.

My roommate used to work at a liquor store. He worked there for about a year before he quit for a more professional position. But there was one thing about the liquor store business that intrigued me for a long time. He told me that one of the most profitable areas of that particular location was check cashing. Yep, check cashing, not alcohol. Well, don’t get me wrong, that store probably made the bulk of the sales from alcohol but their check cashing business propelled them higher in profits than they probably ever imagined.

Check cashing, just like payday loans, work almost the same way. Vendors such as this liquor store would provide their customers with cash in advance but with very high interest or transaction fees. I never understood why people would even consider using such services. Cash advances, check cashing and payday loans are something I would never suggest to anyone for any occasion. There are so many other alternatives to get cash without breaking the bank with fees and interest rates.

1. Ask a friend or a family member for a personal loan. You can pay them back with small nominal interest as opposed to paying 20-30% interest with cash advances and payday loans.
2. Have a garage sale or put some of your old items you don’t use up for sale on craigslist or ebay. Save up this cash and use it for emergency purposes only.
3. Sell your car and buy a cheaper one with the money. You’ll have instant cash available without having to pay any fees or interest.
4. Build up cash availability by saving money. I know that’s obvious, but try to save up cash little by little every day, even if the rate is very low, it’s a start. Save up loose coins and put them in a piggy bank of some sort. Eat smaller meals and portions. Avoid drinking sodas and drink more water. Once you have some cash saved up, you can use place them in a high-yield online savings account to accrue interest of your own.

Once you have some cash available, you won’t ever have to use a check cashing or cash advance vendor.

The recession is still hanging around and with it comes the opportunists. While the government regulations can provide some oversight for payday loans, mortgages, or credit cards, it’s not just the financial sector that can end up taking your money. You can end up being scammed in the most unlikely places these days, from social networks sites to your business and most is due to too much information exposure.

Your Friends Want To Know Your Every Step

Twitter and Facebook are great ways to stay in touch and let your friends know what you’re up to. Unfortunately, it’s also a great place for thieves to find out when your home and when you’re not or any other ways to take advantage of your need to share. Even if you just want to rent a room in your home, if you provide too many pictures and an address, you are begging to be ripped off. Keep your messages short, and don’t let people know where you live, when you’re there, or when you plan on going on vacation.

Your Romantic Profile

Unfortunately, dating sites are another place where scammers abound these days. If it’s not the scam artist from Nigeria trying to get air fare so they can meet you, it’s a recession romeo who wants to know how much you make (all included in the profile) and if you own a home, a boat, or some other property they hope to get either use or ownership of by the time they’re through. Fill out your profile, but keep your financial data and assets off the Internet.

Your Business

It’s a place of business, right? If you’re not careful it can be a place for fraud and embezzlement, too. Make sure to run credit checks on employees. Keep track of your financials even if someone else is handling the details. Keep track of who has access to company credit cards and don’t let that information get out. Don’t rent out space in your business as you can open yourself to credit card fraud hen your leassee fills out an application with your business name, their privae name, and your address, takes receipt of the cards in their subletted space, and then runs up a huge charge. Keep your voicemail and computer passwords secure and don’t use anything that can easily be hacked. You never know when you’re going to come back from a long weekend to find out that you were charged thousands of dollars for calls to Nigeria on your phone accounts because someone hacked into your phone system.

Do you save all your receipts? I have a friend who saves all his receipts and logs all his expenses to keep track of where and how his money is being spent. What he does I think is a great idea, but when I saw how he did it, it seemed very inefficient and time consuming. It was very easy to forget to input a transaction here and there. I told him that there are many iPhone apps out there that help maintain your spending budget. I told him about Mint and Budgettracker and how everything is automated. He liked the idea but didn’t like the idea of the need to link all of his personal accounts together.

I recently discovered Shoeboxed. It’s an online service where they help you keep track of all your spending by organizing all your receipts into a sortable database. All you have to do is send in the receipts. You can send them all together in a prepaid envelope or just take a picture of them with your iPhone and email it to them. That’s probably more convenient than sending them in through first class mail. The process is very simple. I took the following information from the website and pasted them directly below.

1. Shoeboxed is easy to use! Simply mail your receipts, business cards, and other documents to us using our postage paid envelopes. Or you can send in photos of receipts and cards with your mobile phone or our iPhone app. And for all those pesky email receipts from vendors like Amazon.com, just forward them directly into your account via email.
2. When Shoeboxed receives a document from you, we scan it, OCR extract and human-verify the data that it contains, then categorize and organize the document online in your secure account. You just log-in, and all the work has already been done for you.
3. After your documents are processed into your Shoeboxed account, just relax! Everything is ready to be viewed, printed, emailed, downloaded, or exported from your account in a wide variety of formats including PDF, Excel, CSV, QuickBooks, and Quicken file types. You can also integrate your Shoeboxed data with our growing number of partners including FreshBooks, Outright, Evernote, Bill.com, BatchBook, Constant Contact, and many more.

Sounds very simple to me. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, so I can’t provide a complete review. But it really does seem like it’s something worth trying out, especially for free for 30 days. The price seems a little steep for me, but for someone who has a lot of transactions, it could be useful, especially for those who run their own businesses.

They have three different levels of subscription service: Business, Classic, and Lite, at $49.95, $19.95, and $9.95 per month respectively. If you opt for an annual service, you will receive 2 months for free. Also, right now, you can get $10 off any mail-in plan with SAVE10.

If you have experience with Shoeboxed, I’d love to hear your thoughts on their service.

I was catching up on my daily finance news today and it appears that Americans are doing pretty well for themselves in terms of eliminating their credit card debt. According to the news, the average such debt fell to $4,951 from %5,719 from a year ago. It means that more people are aware of their debt and making their payments on time! Perhaps, financial blogging sites, such as Money Green Life, have contributed to the success of helping people eliminate their debt. I believe that decreasing debt is virtually the same equivalence to saving money. They both will ultimately help you increase your overall net worth. When you save money or decrease your debt, your net worth naturally goes up, the outlining motto for Money Green Life.

So, what have Americans done right to help themselves decrease their credit card debt? The answer to this question is obvious and simple.

1. More borrowers made their payments on time. This is key. If you don’t make your payments on time, late payment fees on top of the interest fees are accrued and add on to your overall debt. By paying on time, you avoid such late payment fee.
2. People are spending less and borrowing less. With the current economic condition, people are becoming aware that they need to be more frugal in their spending to survive. They’re also borrowing less money because of the same reasons. On top of that, banks aren’t really lending as much as before, such as home equity line of credit loans.
3. Home foreclosures, ironically have also contributed. When people don’t make their home mortgage payments, they have a sudden cash boost, allowing them to make extra payments on their credit cards instead. Sounds pretty silly, but for short-term solution, this has been the case for many Americans.
4. If you have fewer overall credit available by carrying less cards, then the likely outcome of that is to spend less. Credit card applications have decreased drastically over the past year, forcing Americans to depend more on their cash than credit.

Personally, I have never carried a balance on any of my three credit cards. Carrying a balance implies that you’re spending more money than you can afford. When you spend more money than you can afford, it usually leads to debt. Some people just can’t help it and they will be in debt no matter what they do for the rest of their lives.  So, if you carry credit card debt now, transfer your balance to a new 0% balance transfer credit card, and try spending less money. Then you’ll be on your way to having a positive overall net worth.