Well today I took my own advice and transferred about $6,000 that I had laying around in my ING Direct account and used it to pay down my HELOC. Some of this money is spoken for (2007 Roth IRAs), but either way I am better off putting any money that isn’t immediately needed towards my HELOC and then when Jan 1 comes around next year I will simply just write the checks from my HELOC for the IRA contributions.
I’m cheap or well frugal and I’m sort of proud of it. It’s not so much that I mind spending money, but if I know I can use my own ingenuity to find the same item for less I’m all for it. Besides not spending money on crap I don’t need, I often find ways to get the items I do need for less. I actually find it kind of fun and this is just one example of where I’ve used a little thought and effort on my part to save myself a few bucks.
Soon after I got my first job I got my first credit card. Because I traveled a lot for work and ended up putting a lot of company expenses on my credit card, I decided to get an airline miles card so that I could rack up the points. I put absolutely every possible expense that I can on my credit card and its amazing how fast the miles add up. …
Well after technically only having my blog up for about a week, I noticed getting a bunch of traffic coming from PfBlogs.org. I went to check out their site and they have a pretty awesome collection of personal finance blogs out there all consolidated into once nice website with an RSS aggregator. Anyway besides that extra traffic boost to my site, the site itself is a pretty cool concept and it looks like it is not for profit so you don’t have to be worried about getting blasted with ads in order to get access to the content.
Very cool idea and thanks to PFBlogs.org for linking to my site without me even having to request it.
Check it out http://www.PfBlogs.org
Well you might have noticed I put a little progress bar on the right hand side of my blog to track my goal of having $100,000 put away in retirement accounts by the time I reach age 30. Well by putting that stupid little chart over on the side of my blog really got me to thinking about this goal, more as in – can I actually achieve that goal. Up till this point I just thought it would be a nice goal to achieve but by having it staring me in the face every time I look at my blog it makes me wonder if I’m going to make a fool out of myself by trying to achieve what appears to be a lofty goal.
Well I have only had 2 months worth of paycheck deductions at the new higher deduction level due to my switching over to the Roth 401K from a traditional IRA (see my posts here and here), but I am pretty sure I am not going to run out of money losing the extra $67 out of each paycheck. In fact I am even contemplating bumping it up a few percentage points more starting next quarter(earliest I can adjust the percentage).
My wife and I bought a house this last summer, and we opted not to put 20% down because well I’m not sure we had exactly 20% to put down and the interest rates we so low that I figured I would be better off investing the extra money rather than putting more money down on the house. Well this discussion (paying off mortgage vs. investing) gets debated all the time. Some people argue you should pay off the mortgage as fast as you can because it’s a guaranteed return on your money and you have that sense of security when your house is paid off and you don’t have that payment hanging over your head every month. Other people say your mortgage rate is probably only 5-8% and those payments are tax deductible so you’re likely really only paying in 3-6% and you can certainly do better than 3-6% in the stock market, so you are better off investing the money. Really in many cases its personal preference, and me being the young optimistic investor that I am decided that I was going to go the investing route vs. paying off the mortgage.