Not So Mighty Merch

Well, next week my one month free trial period for Mvelopes expires, and I thought it would be a good time to review things in general.

Money in the Bank:

The first thing I noticed was that I have money in the bank. My old system was to grab all the bills due in the next two weeks and figure out how to pay them all, always under the shadow of that dastardly mortgage payment lurking around the corner.

This month is different. I get a paycheck and fund my priority items first and discretionary items last. Needless to say I have money spent on paper that I haven’t spent yet (200 in an auto maintenance just sitting in the bank waiting for my car to breakdown). So yes, technically the money is spent on paper, but really this has led to having money sitting in bank accounts earning interest waiting for future expenses to show up.

Less Anxiety:

I no longer look at what I have to pay this week and where am I going to find the money. I already funded these expenses in the budget. I know I have the money. So, now it’s a bill comes in, the bill gets paid. No waiting around for my next paycheck or the paycheck after that if it’s mortgage week.

This has led to less stress in my life. Just knowing that there’s money set aside for that bill is a liberating feeling.

Communication:

A funny thing happened this month: I talked and listened to my wife. Every talk about money before this month was “you have to cut down, you can’t spend this much, what did you do with all that money I gave you this week…” Her response was usually “bite me!!”

The conversation around money now is “what is this $34 charge”. “Oh, I had to buy more formula. We have enough money in the grocery budget for that”. I look and say “Yep it’s funded and you have XX left. Is that enough for the rest of the month or do we need to move some money around?”

Sometimes not that nice but my point is that it’s a lot better. She stopped throwing frying pans at my head.

This has also led to more respect. Maybe it’s the openness (we can see every inflow and outflow).

Team Merch!!!

It’s no longer my money, her money, and our money. When I first got married, we were both working. I paid a couple of the bills and she paid a couple of the bills. Money was pouring in. It wasn’t uncommon for us to blow $200 on a dinner.

Then HE came… Not that I would change that. My first son changed my life so much. I had to buy a house with a yard and leave condo living. No more $200 dinners that was replaced by diaper and formula. My wife’s income … *POOF*

But we didn’t change are finances. We still had my money, her money, and our money.

Well, that changed with the budget this month. We still have 3 physical banks, but we can see everything and now we’re a team.

I’m the worker doing the day to day stuff. Damn management never understands our plight.

My wife’s management. Reviewing the budgeting reports, asking for us workers to tweak things.

Then, once a month the executive committee (both of us) sits down to discuss next month’s budget and any big items coming up (like a weekend getaway in February, my second son’s baptism in March).

Now, some of these changes are just starting and we need sometime to change our mindset, but I can see the changes taking place. So, I think I’ll try this budgeting thing for another month.

Why am I the poorest one in the neighborhood? Why am I the only one struggling? These are questions I used to have.

I live in a new neighborhood where the houses are 2 – 5 years old. So everyone in the neighborhood is about the same age with 2 young kids. There are a couple of kids in the 6-12 range but most of the kids are less then 5 and most houses have 2 kids and of course 2 cars. Besides our occupation, we are probably the same statistically.

So why do I feel like the poor one in the neighborhood? I have a push mower; my neighbors have a lawn service or riding mower. I shovel the snow my hand, I don’t have a snow blower or someone snow plow my driveway. I don’t have a nanny or maid service like others in the neighborhood. My TV and stereo are from college (my wife is embarrassed by both).

Is everyone in the neighborhood that much more financially responsible then me? Am I not the norm; am I the statistical out layer? Or the black sheep of the neighborhood – GASP!

Everyone in the neighborhood has the nice granite in the kitchen; a lot of houses have finished basements. Not mine. When I was building the house, I was very careful on adding things that would go over budget. My philosophy, if it adds square feet it will cost less now. Kitchens and such become outdated no need for a 30-year loan for that.

Well, I kind of like looking at real estate. I even dream of flipping to being a landlord. I don’t have the money to embark on this (or knowledge). So, I’m kind of in the education phase. Well, looking at some websites I came across one my county has for public records on a property, so I put in my address to see what would come up.

It listed my mortgage, the price I paid for the house, and some liens that were discharged between the town and builder – all public records. Amazing what is out there… and for free…

Of course you know, I had to try other addresses around me. All but one had a higher mortgage than me (on ave 30% higher principal) and most also had second and one had a third mortgage.

What’s my point? From a distance, the grass always looks green. It only when you get up close and walk around that you see all the imperfections.

So this holiday season I’ll look at my Charlie Brown Christmas tree and the few gifts under it, and feel content. My fondest memories of Christmas don’t revolve around the gifts I got but the family together and enjoying each other.

So I’ll gleefully wish my rich neighbors health and happiness and “oh” and “ah” at their latest gadgets, but please don’t have pity on me I’m doing just fine.

So I built my first budget at the end of November for this month. So I’m all set right? I can just spend now right?

Not so fast. You have to fund these categories.

Why? I mean I spent some serious time putting this together. I know what I’ll make this month and what I should spend. Done and done.

What about cashflows?

I have to match my inflows with my outflows. In other words I get paid weekly, but I have bills that are paid through out the month. For instance, my mortgage payment is due the first of the month. During that week, I still need to buy groceries, parking for work, gas for my car, a credit card payment… Needless to say, for that fist week my outflows are greater than my inflows. Later in the month, it switches and my inflows are greater than my outflows.

So what do you do? Well, with each paycheck I get, I divide the money into different categories. I also list the categories as mandatory and discretionary. Mortgage, electricity, car payments are all mandatory. Clothing, vacation, are discretionary. I fund the mandatory ones first and the discretionary ones last.

For my mortgage, I might put some of my second, third, and forth paychecks of the month towards that expense. That way when I write the check, the money has been already allocated.

Why fund Categories?

1) Managing cashflow is the name of the game – The other half of cashflow is your income.

2) Easy to tweak the budget – Budgets to me are constantly evolving. Some times are inflows or outflows don’t match our perceptions. By funding the budget through out the month, you can make small changes before they become big changes.

3) Helps prioritize items on the budget – I have to fund mandatory categories first.

4) Helps keep you out of the red – Instead of not spending more than you budgeted, don’t spend more then you funded.

5) Forecast versus Actual – Lastly, a budget is a forecast. This is what the month should be. By funding the categories, you are moving from forcasting what should happen to what is happening.

I believe most people mange their expenses. Keep track of everything spent and categories it. Shouldn’t you do the same thing with your income?

Everyone has a different take on credit cards.

Some people here do interest rate arbitrage. In other words take the 0% and park the money in a savings or money market account earning 4% - 5%. They pocket the interest minus any transfer fees.

Other people here declare credit cards as pure evil and say the first thing is to get rid of them. Melt them, chop them, dip them in liquid nitrogen and shatter them, let the dog chew them up, or all of the above.

My take is some where in the middle. In today’s society, I think that it’s impractical to make every purchase in cash. Do you pay your electric bill in cash or your mortgage?

So for example, my cable, phone, internet is about $160 a month. I have it as a line item in my budget. When I get my first paycheck of the month, I fund that item. Does it really matter how I pay for it? Cash, check, debit card, credit card? The item is already funded. For all purposes, that money is already sent.

What advantage do I get? I get to float the payment for a few weeks (a few pennies). I build up my credit score, using credit responsibly. I also get points or cash back.

The argument is that it’s easy to charge more than you budgeted. Isn’t also easy to write checks when there is no money in your account. You say no? Why? Is it because you have a different mindset around credit cards. In other words, it’s ok to overspend credit cards but not your bank account.

My point. Change your mindset, follow your budget, and enjoy the perks. Never spend more then you funded and the payment option won’t matter.

But after saying all this, there are some people who can’t control their spending. And maybe cash only is the way to go. But I think this population is pretty small and if you budget and are mindful of the budget, you should have no problems. And maybe turn those points into gift cards you can sell on Ebay or Craigslist for the $20 challenge.

How does a lazy guy set up? Let’s start with the obvious. I didn’t have a budget. I had not budgeted in the past. I knew my first pass I was going to miss something. So, let’s quickly google the internet and see what other budgets people use look like. As a lazy man says, why start from scratch when I can steal from others, I mean “borrow’.

So now I have some categories. Everyone knows the big items: mortgage, car payments, electricity, cable, groceries… It’s the small stuff that will get you and those pesky seasonal variable expenses. Did you know I pay more in December than November for gas to heat my house? Did you know in December that I have to (yes have to) by a Christmas tree? Well, according to my budget I didn’t know.

So this is what I did. I budgeted about 75% of my income for the month of December on what I thought. I used last month’s expenses to project December’s, knowing I would forget some and total guess wrong on others. But I felt comfortable that the 25% of my income would handle these bumps. So far so good.

Now for those of you that are married, you know that nothing is set in stone until the wife signs off on it. So I sat down with the wife and we went over it and I got sign off from her. Now the question is: Can we stick to this? Or more of can I stick to it for more than a month?

As I said before, I am lazy. So I need a system to track all these expense. Now, I am not going to put every expense into Excel and go to all my banks and CCs everyday to see if transactions posted. I need a lazy man’s solution. Back to the internet…

Well, I found a solution that would work for me. Mvelopes.com allows be to hook up all of my institutions and they will bring in all the transactions. Excellent!!! A little expensive (10-13 a month), but it takes less than 5 minutes a day to do the assign expenses. I also like that I can see all the balances across all my accounts.

Now the secret to budgeting: Before you spend any money you need to start funding the different categories. In other words, I have a budget of $500 for groceries every month. Each week I put $125 into that category. If there is no money in the category, I am not suppose to spend. Therefore, every paycheck I get, I divide into the different categories.

If my envelope goes red, I got to explain it to the wife. She keeps me honest.

One of the side effects of a budget like this is that there is a total honesty about finances. My wife and I can see where every dollar goes. Just log on to the net, and there’s everything. It’s not me verse her on finance. It’s more of us.

One last thing. I have 2 furnaces in my house and one broke on Friday. I need to get someone out there to take a look. Bay Stat Gas said they could be out there on the 24th. Yea, that’s not going to work. So I called a local guy. He came out (it was a loose wire) and fixed it. $185, my wife was like “there goes the budget”. I quickly looked at the budget and had set up a category called house maintance and it was already funded for $200. A pleasant surprise!!! Budget 1, Cynicism 0.

So what is a budget? Such a stupid question, right? You list your expenses for the month subtract your income, tweak it until the resultant equals zero. Sound familiar?

Sounds like a diet I was one that failed. To lose weight, take the number of calories you burn in a day and eat less calories. 3,500 calories equal a pound. So if I want to lose 10 pounds I need to eat what I burn in a day – 35,000 calories. Hmmm….. That’s huge!!! And everything I eat is like 1,500 calories. Now I have to eat celery sticks and drink water. No more doughnuts or cream in my coffee. Well may be if I didn’t want to lose 10 pounds in 2 days I could have the occasional bad meal.

So I thought ok let’s give it a try. Everything I ate, I wrote in a notebook. I used a website and looked up everything I was eating. When I ate my calories for the day, that was it. I was losing weight. Life was good.

Then I started to forget to write everything down and just guessed what I was eating and the calories. I stopped losing weight.

Then, the holidays came. Can you see where I’m going with this? Yes, I ate everything cookies, pie, turkey, ham, etc. Needless to say, I gained weight and declared the diet a failure and stopped.

So, what went wrong:

1) Unrealistic expectations – I’ll lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks and then I’ll go back to my old ways. WRONG!!! This is life style change not a temporary thing.
2) Lazy – I got lazy. I didn’t plan what I was eating ahead of time. The stuff I was eating, I couldn’t find what the calories were (a lot of eating out because I was a consultant)
3) Eliminating the things I enjoy – Up until the holidays, I hadn’t had a cookie or cake and I love both. When the food came my way, I had a craving and went way overboard.

I think there are a lot of parallels between dieting and budgeting. We have tried each a couple of times and failed miserably. Budgeting is a lifestyle change and a commitment.

Budgeting is a process of tweaking and refining. For example, I guessed that heating my house in December would be equal to what I have been paying the months before. Well I got my December bill and it was 4 times higher. I forgot to budget a Christmas tree in December. The old me (fat, lazy, and undisciplined) would have declared the budget broken and tossed it out.

The newer me (still lazy and overweight, but a little more disciplined) decided to rework the budget.

Also I have items in the budgeted called entertainment, vacation, and money to blow on stupid stuff. Yes, stupid stuff like a Starbuck’s $4 coffee twice a week. How can I put these items into a budget? A budget is suppose to be bare bones, only the essentials. Think of that money could be put towards bills and credit cards.

Yea, that’s true. But I just don’t live that way. It would be too constricting right now and I would crave those few luxuries too much. Maybe even resent the stupid budget. I think I need to have some fun in my budget a few luxuries so I can keep doing a budget. Just thinking about that vacation fund grow, I might even like the budget.

Basically, budgeting is more of a tool, a management tool. It should be able to tell you what is budgeted, what is funded, what was spent, and the differences. With a process to tweak and revise it what worked and what didn’t. After all, you are changing your lifestyle.

Like diet and exercise, it’s all good for you.

I think my next posts will be how I put the budget together, how to fund the budget, how a lazy man tracks everything, and how my wife puts up with me.

Let’s be serious. Budgeting to me equates to exercise. There are those freaks out there that talk about getting a “runner’s high”, how they can’t miss going to the gym for one day. I am not one of them. Honestly, most of us aren’t.

We only get serious about exercising when our doctor calls us a fat pig or it’s January 1st and “more exercise” is our resolution. 2008, I am going to me a more moral, caring person and take care of my self mentally and physically. How long does that last? Until the first snowstorm? Not even?

Well budgeting is the same. It sounds like a good idea and we know we should do it. But there’s all that work. I have to write done every penny and what I bought, I have to set a budget knowing that I’ll miss half the expenses, I have to live my it, and then I have to do it next month. Oh joy!!! I can see this working out.

So what’s a lazy non-freak like me going to do? Have my wife do the budgeting. That didn’t work very good last time. She was very good at tracking expenses and nagging me for my expenses but we never know how much we could spend on certain items. Also I wasn’t good at keeping track of things.

Well, I started searching on the web for budgeting tools. Excel ones – too much work. Paper ones – way too much work. And then I discovered Mvelopes.com.

Mvelopes takes the envelope system and modernizes it. The envelope system is when you take your paycheck and put the money in actual envelopes that are labeled (like food, gas, car, insurance). Once the money is spent, it’s spent. The issue in today’s world is that we don’t pay cash for things. We use credit cards, debit cards, checks, and cash. Some of us have more then one bank (we have three) and multiple credit cars.

That’s were Mvelopes comes in. My banks, credit cards, loans (auto and mortgage) all hook into Mvelopes. Any transaction that appears get uploaded to my view. Then I just drag and drop the expense in the proper folder, much like dropping emails into folders in Outlook.

The hard part is setting up the budget and funding the folders. I’ll talk about this in my next post.