It seems like a basic thing, but I can see how easy it would be to think,

“Oh, well, my wife doesn’t need to know about this expense, I’ll just put that on my old checking account from before we were married”

For me this is a big deal.

As someone who struggled to hide investment losses for years from family and friends, I’m trying to be as open as possible with my wife about our financial situation.

We use Mint.com and all of our accounts are linked to it (savings, lending club, etc). We both have the app on our phones to check balances and we can both login to the website.

I actually like having a second pair of eyes on my spending habits, I’ve noticed myself getting less and less little silly things and sticking to our budget better.

Maybe we are strange though…we also like to compare credit scores (she wins every time we check! 800+ for her…I’m creeping to 700 finally). We might be a bit financially weird.

Anyway, back to the hiding money thing. I totally realized that I forgot to run my $250 betterment.com deposit by my wife, usually we have a soft-rule that anything over $100 we discuss. Sorry hon, I’ll tell you about that tonight. To be fair, I usually think about my blog as business related, and that we do keep separate (of course, my wife hears way too much of my business talk!) for her sanity sake.

So yeah, hiding money. It’s a sore subject for me because I did it in the past. Luckily my wife is great about keeping me in the loop about our accounts and handles all the bill-paying for the most part. It’s nice when you’re a team, ya know?

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Sigh, I’m still not a fan of the stock market. I guess being out of the market the last few years has probably cost me financially, but I still don’t think I could take the stress of the ups/downs. The funny thing is that I still watch quite a few stocks, daily even, but I don’t own any of them.

Betterment.com contacted me recently and wanted me to take a look at their new site. I’d usually just ignore the email, but their site looked so pretty I decided, what the heck, I’ll take their call.

So, they set me up with a sweet referral site of my own, and I setup my account last week. The registration was pretty easy, but they do require a deposit verification, which I just completed this morning. So, you can setup an account in about 3 days or so. Pretty painless for an online financial account.

must verify your bank account with two small deposits

One things I immediately like about Betterment is how easy on the eyes the site is. I don’t know if I’m just used to be blinded on most financial websites, but everything about their site is very muted, and I really like it. It makes it easy to focus on the data and not be distracted. But I’m a design nut (not that you’d know it from my site…).

Once you’ve verified your account, you can setup your asset allocation. Betterment lets you choose between two main buckets: stocks / bonds. Simple. If you’re looking to invest but don’t want to get into the nitty gritty details, and just want things to go on automatic…well, Betterment is probably a good fit for you.

I'm still avoiding stocks for now

For me, I’m still avoiding stocks, so I decided to invest my initial $250 deposit into all bonds. Yeah, I know it’s not recommended, but bite me, this is my account and it’s called “personal” finance for a reason. Plus, I’m a former trading addict…so yeah, it’s all bonds for me.

No stocks for you!

The neat thing with Betterment is you can compare your allocation and returns to others in your age and income range. Here’s something interesting I found….for my age group, the higher income demographic has been doing much better at investing on betterment than the lower income group:

Rich get richer last year?

Hmmm...why is this? Why underperformance last year?

Any guess on that stat? Very interesting.

Anywho, once you get all setup, there is a nice overview page, although since my $250 hasn’t deposited yet, you don’t see much, but you get the idea:

The "Overview" Screen. Nice.

The Fees

So, how exactly does Betterment make money? I mean, all these fancy pants graphs cost money to build and manage right? Well, of course, nothing in life is totally free. It depends on your account balance but for most of my audience here (and myself) it’s going to cost you 0.9%/year.

So why pay that fee? Well, part of the appeal is that you get access to some nice index funds that normally have like 100K account minimums. Also, Betterment will automatically rebalance your allocation if it falls outside some set guidelines.

So if you’re like, “I just want to invest, and know it’s going to rebalance correctly, and not have to worry about picking individual stocks/bonds (with say, Sharebuilder)…then Betterment might be a good fit for you.

I’ll keep you updated on the status of my 100% bond account of course.

To sign up for your own account: Click HERE

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Whew.

It’s been a whirlwind of a past year or so (moved, got married, tons of other crazy stuff), but it’s time I got back to writing about my life, cause it’s still pretty darn interesting.

Which isn’t good.

I really want a boring life sometimes. I mean it’s great that I love my work and business, and I absolutely adore being married, but it’s been too much change the past 18 months. My business has been up and down, and back down again, but with potential to be back up again soon (hopefully).

I’ve been able to keep paying down my mom debt slowly (I send her $1,000 every month). I don’t plan on increasing that paydown at the moment, but I’ve told her at any time she can ask for a big chunk back (up to 30K or so). She seems OK with the 1K/month for now, which is good. The graph is looking good (from 145K to 69K current):

The next few months are going to be very telling to how the next stage of my debt repayment journey goes. I’ve done well to pay down alot the past few years, but now it’s time to totally be debt free AND start to grow my savings into a number that really lets me sleep well at night.

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~ By Nolan

This one is inevitable.  Your wife backs into a tree.  You back into a concrete wall in your usual garage at work.  Some kid on a passing bike takes a key to your fender.

Your car bears the incidental scars of an unforgiving world.

It makes you crazy.  Every time you go into the garage you notice it before your hand hits the door handle.  With that moment comes resentment.  You resent your wife for not stepping up to get it fixed (she hit the tree, after all), like this is your responsibility.  You resent that concrete wall because, well, you just do.  And you want to knock that kid on the bike into next week.

And yet… it isn’t that bad.  It’s cosmetic.  You have a busy life, and getting down to the local body shop isn’t topping your agenda these days. 

Maybe you got a quote.  And maybe that’s why the dent is still there – they want two grand to patch and paint a ding the size of a deck of cards.  They want the car for two full days, and you have to share your other ride during that time.
Two grand.  If that isn’t bending over and saying “ah,” I don’t know what is.

But there’s a solution.  A quick, affordable one that takes just a few hours, and you don’t have to leave your driveway to make it happen.  It’s so simple, you’ll wonder why you haven’t thought of it.

Or if you have, why you haven’t picked up the phone.

Call a mobile, independent dent repair guy. 

He’ll show up with a van and the exact same expertise as the dude at the dealership or body shop.  He’ll have seen much worse than your little metal gash, and he’ll be glad he’s there because he can whip this one out before lunch.

And it’ll cost you about three hundred bucks.  A little more if, as long as he’s there, you want a few scratches buffed out, too, which you will.

And, if you ever intend to trade your car in, it’s an investment that will return to you in spades.

It’s twenty cents on the dollar, you don’ have to leave home, and the quality of the repair will easily match that of the body shop who wants you to dig into your kid’s college fund to make your beloved car whole again.

In a world full of trees, concrete walls, vandals and greedy body shops, this is a gift worth giving yourself.  It’s a google and then a phone call away, and you’ll never have to set eyes on that lousy paint gash again.

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Dear IRS, (You read Debtkid, right? If not, you totally should. Good stuff here.)

I’d like to know, why it is unacceptable for me to withhold paying my taxes beyond the due date, however, the IRS is at liberty to delay payment of a refund due indefinitely and without interest.  What’s up with that?

We’ve got a whomping refund due this year as a result of the outstanding adoption tax credit. This will pay off our only remaining debt—an adoption loan, plus fund our emergency fund, and maybe even get us started on our savings for our trip to Sudan.

But alas, no news.

Actually, we’ve had news a couple of times. “Where’s my Refund” told us that the check would be here by June 7^th, and then a few weeks later was changed to say we’d be receiving a letter asking for more information (apparently the 300 page return and documentation that we sent them was insufficient?).

The letter arrived, but said our return was under review and we would receive either our refund or a request for more documentation by July 7, at the earliest.
July! ::whine::

I want to be debt free! Now!

Looking at the bright side, I suppose if they keep dragging their feet on this, I might have it paid off the old fashioned way by the time the refund check gets here.

Sincerely,

A Very Impatient Taxpayer

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I picked a heck of a time to give up caffeine again.

I tried this a few years back for Lent, and the headaches were just insane. I’ve stayed on top of it better this time (thank goodness for advil), but I’m not so sure I can make it.

I’ve noticed the past few months that my as-needed coffee had turned into just my daily routine. And I wasn’t getting going at work until I had my coffee. It used to be that I used coffee as a special boost, and I want to get back to that vs. the daily crutch it had become.

But jeez…I’m 5 days without caffeine and don’t feel super hot. Day 3 was the worst headache day, but I’ve been lethargic, unmotivated, and all-around blah now for 5 days. I was hoping today might be the day I turned the corner but so far nothing.

My entire family is a mess right now. My wife is recovering from surgery, my grandmother is dying, my Mom isn’t doing well at all, my Dad is scheduled for surgery this week….Sigh, it’s just a mess right now. Just needed a place to vent.

But back to coffee.

I was noticing that my mood swings were so closely related to my coffee it just wasn’t OK anymore. So, I’m going to stick it out, but man, I really want some coffee right now. Maybe I could try decaf? I just haven’t even wanted to temp myself. Plus, I put a ton of sugar in my coffee, so I thought it would be good to cut that out as well (like 6+ sugar packets).

Any more tips for dealing with caffeine withdrawal?

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A few weeks ago I took a vacation with my wife. For the first time since our honeymoon, we got away and I didn’t think about money for like 4 days.

It was awesome.

It’s been years now since I first started documenting my journey out of debt, and my situation has so dramatically changed for the better, I’m surprised at how many of my old anxieties about money still visit me daily.

Grocery store shopping. Still hate it. Something just makes my stomach tighten every time I think about spending money on food. It’s gotten so much better, but still not a normal level considering my financial situation now. Plus, the more we grocery shop, the less we eat out. Doesn’t make sense rationally, but what money problem does?

Splitting bills. Every group setting I’m already thinking about the check before we even eat the bread. And it’s not that I am worried about having the money…I think it stems from a few years back when I wasn’t always sure that the card would go through. I dunno. I think sometimes I’m more worried about looking like I don’t have any cash now (that I do) than when I didn’t.

The psychology of money is so interesting to me. I thought for sure once I had X amount saved up in a savings account that I wouldn’t ever stress about money again! How stupid!

Now I worry, well what if something happened to me? (solution: get some life insurance dummy!). What if we start spending too much? (really? My wife and I are both pretty frugal). What if my business has a bad year (So…it’s had good and bad years…it happens!).

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