The Big Site Move!

After a long and gruling process, the site has moved from its blogger beginnings to its new Wordpress home at http://www.thefinancejourney.com!

The RSS Feed will remain the same (http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheFinanceJourney) but check out the design and let me know what you think.

Under 30 Fest

The Festival of Under 30 Finances is up over at Pragmatic Finance. Some good reads in there including a post by yours truly.

How I Love Thee Yodlee

For anyone unaware, Yodlee Moneycenter is an online aggregation tool for checking all your banking, credit cards, investment, rewards programs, and pretty much anything else that has your information on a website. I login every day in the morning, update all my information, and can view all my balances and transactions in one easy to read screen.

The main negative is that if someone did hack my account, they would have access to all my financial login information. A valid concern, but a risk I am willing to live with for the convience it provides. Also since I do use Yodlee every day I am hopeful I would be able to catch any such intrusion immediatly.

With the recent rollout of their new version it was extremely buggy and virtually unusable for a week or so and thats when I learned how much I rely on it. A lot of people have moved to HSBC's Easyview or similar service which uses older versions of Yodlee because they like the old interface (or perhaps are afraid of change), but now that they have fixed the bugs I have learned to love the new interface as I did the old.

Another thing I love is that there is a Yodlee forum where you can post bugs or new site requests and usually get a response. You can usually find me on there harassing them to add local accounts that probably only about 10 other people would use. They also used to frequest the Fatwallet finance forum and respond to the thread in there as well, but seem to have ceased since the creation of their own forum unfortunatly.

Give it a try.

No Guts No Glory? Chasing higher rates...

Up for a slightly higher interest rate on your savings? Ford Interest Advantage is offering up to 6.10% APY on your money marketesque fund with free checks, check writing, and bill pay.

The catch? Its not FDIC insured, so if Ford goes belly up you can kiss your cash goodbye. Personally I'm sticking with my HSBC savings account for now.

Amount Invested
Up to $14,999 - 5.79% APY
$15,000 to $49,999 - 5.95% APY
$50,000 and Above - 6.10% APY

Example Home Improvement Savings

So I have a plan to finish my basement before the end of the year. Well, not really so much of a plan as an idea. I wasn't going to start until fall/winter but saw Lowes has 20% off ceiling tiles until this weekend so I decided to jump on those.

How I try to save money is by using my previously posted Dealpass gift cards as well as the readily accessable 10% off coupons. The coupons are pretty rampant on ebay - just search for 'home depot coupons' and you should get a slew of results with prices around $1.50 per coupon.

So, for tiles that are normally $30.74 a box it ended up as:

$30.74 - 20% sale = $24.59
$24.59 - 10% coupon = $22.13
$22.13 - 20% gift cards = $17.70

So that ends up being 43% off or $13.04 per box. 9 boxes purchased ends up being a $117.36 savings. Just an example of how I try to purchase things I know I will need.

Saving Money Using Dealpass

Dealpass is a unique program which for a monthy fee (usually around $20) you can join various clubs that allow you to purchase gift cards to your favorite stores at 20% off the face value. You may purchase them in $25 incriments... so a $25 gift card will end up costing you $20. How it works is that you pay the full amount for the gift card, then at the beginning of the next month they credit you back the 20% - so for instance you purchase $125 worth of cards from Target... you pay $125 then usually within the first few days of the following month they will refund your credit card $25.

In recent months the clubs have changed to only allow you to purchase 5 cards a month per store, or $125 worth. Not this is per store, not total - so if there are 5 stores you want to purchase cards for in your program then you can get $125 worth from each store during that month.

So for example I'm a member of Home Works Plus (abbreviated HW+). This includes 3 stores I shop at regularly - Target, Home Depot, and Lowes - so every month I am a member I buy $125 of each since I know I will eventually spend it, for a savings of $75. Then there are stores I occasionally shop at such as Sears, Amazon.com, and Bed Bath and Beyond that I purchase as needed so I typically save about $100 a month on cards for the $20 membership fee.

There are tons of different clubs offering different gift cards each. Today's Espapes offers gas cards from Shell and Sunoco which is nice if you have one or even better both near you. Passport to Fun has alot of restuarants like Olive Garden, T.G.I.Fridays, Wendys, and Panera. So depending on what you want to save on you should run down the list of cards available for each club.

What can even sweeten the deal is sometimes when you call to cancel you will be offered a years memebership for the cost of a month! I know this is very common with Passport to Fun+, kind of hit or miss with the others.

Click here for the HUGE thread over at Fatwallet. I hope you are ready for a good read because there are almost 5000 posts in it - if you just want the just of it read the first page for a great overview as well as a list of all the programs offered and the cards available for each.

Lessons Learned From Selling For Sale By Owner

With the outrageous price of hiring a full-service real estate agent to sell our home we decided to sell our townhouse for sale by owner. How hard can it be right?

I'll preface it by giving a little more information on the townhouse. It was 1480 sqft, 3 bedrooms, 1/2 baths in one of the more desirable townhome communities in the area. There are only 3 types of townhomes in the community so it was pretty easy to guage how much ours was worth based on the selling prices for identical units (ours was actually in the best condition of any we had seen so we decided to list it higher than any other). We bought it a little over 2 years ago, and the reason for selling was to upgrade to a bigger home. The only real estate experience I had was the purchase of this home.

So, at a selling price of approximately $195k, here is what I figured we had to save:

Full Service / Full Price Broker - 6% Commission - $11,700
Discount Broker - 3% Commission - $5850

Quite a chunk of change, so I decided to check into my options.

The first thing I knew I would like is advertise an open house in the local newspaper. That's where I did a lot of my browsing so I figured hey, other people must be doing it too. I found it a little expensive - $150 for a weekend ad (fri, sat, sun) - but figured it was worth the investment.

There is a local 'for sale by owner' website / magazine which for starting at $375 will post your house on the website and put it in their magazine for 6 weeks. I decided not to go this route as it did not get our house up on the MLS (or multiple listing service) which is where all the real estate sites link from.

So I then looked into a so called flat fee MLS listing service. After browsing the various sites, I decided on housepad.com. For $299 you got a 4 picture listing on the local MLS, as well as a for sale sign. Prices for these services vary by state, and even by county within states (there are some for $99 in Florida that I was very jealous of), so its important to make sure the site offers coverage in your area. One of the big catches with this service is that if a broker (buyers agent) refers someone to your property you have to pay them a commission which is recommended to be 2.5% - so in our case this would have been $4875.

I then purchased some for sale / open house signs from the local Home Depot for about $25 and was on my way.


Mistake #1:
I was hoping to get my MLS listing up about a week before my open house to build up some interest from anyone searching on those websites / getting automated emails from an agent. I thought once I purchased the MLS package my listing would be up and running that day or the next so I signed up about a week beforehand. Well, after filling out what seemed like 50 pages worth of paperwork, faxing it, refaxing it, fixing some things, and refaxing it, it was now Thursday and my open house was on Sunday. Then I wondered, when would my listing be posted? Well, in the fine print I neglected to read thoroughly it said it could take up to 3 business days to post which would be the Monday after my open house! I wrote a very nice email to them asking if they could speed up the process at all and received back a reply stating "We will do our very best to have you on the MLS by close of business tomorrow" but unfortunately they did not, and we had our open house with only the traffic from the ad in the paper and a free ad I posted on Craigslist.


Despite this the open house went very well. Preparing for the open house we did all the stuff we thought we were supposed to. Remove any clutter from the house, clean clean clean, put nice smelling candles around, yada yada yada. We had a considerable amount of traffic in and by the end of the day had 3 couples we thought were going to put offers in on the house. Anyone who I asked I gave generic offer sheets but told them they should consult an attorney since it was a legal document.

So after a few days we did get 3 offers in... one a complete lowball at over 20k under our asking price with a buyers agent! The other 2 were full price offers with no agents. After discussing it with our attorney we decided to go with one over the other as they were more flexible with their closing date, and were putting more money down.

I would add, definitely get a real estate attorney. Ours was $500, but I would have gotten one anyways even if we had listed with a full service agent. I figure with the amount of money involved it is a worthwhile investment, and they handled a lot of the paperwork.

So my next problem came trying to get the listing off the MLS, as agents were ringing the phone off the hook trying to setup appointments (also giving me nasty comments since the flat fee listing company had put their phone number on the MLS rather than ours and there was some automated hell they had to go through to get to me). I faxed, refaxed, fixed, and refaxed endless paperwork and finally about 5 days later the status was finally changed to indicate it was under contract and not being shown.

Mistake #2:
Everything else seemed to be going smoothly until we got close to closing, and the buyers lawyer brought up the fact that they had never received / signed a NY State Property Disclosure. I was aware of this form, and we had filled it out and had it available to anyone who requested it. What I was not aware of that it was New York State law that this form must be provided to the buyer and must be signed and returned to the seller prior to the offer being accepted otherwise the buyer was entitled to $500 at closing. Begrudgingly I had to give in to this, I partially blamed myself and partially my real estate attorney for not informing me of this. Yeah, I know I just went on ranting how I would recommend a real estate attorney, then blame mine for a mistake. I'm sure any real estate agent would have caught this.


So the total cost to sell our home was (not counting the lawyer as I would have gotten one regardless):

$150 - newspaper ad
$299 - flat fee MLS listing
$25 - signs
$500 - property disclosure mistake
= $974

For a savings of at least $4876.

Was it a lot of hassle? Yeah. I'm not sure if all flat fee MLS places are like that but I definitely did not have a great experience with them. What's funny is the offer we accepted actually came through our Craigslist ad which was free, so we could have sold the house for nothing had I not signed up for the other services. But also definitely would not have had the same traffic or number of offers and maybe that would have affected their offer - who knows. Would I do it again to save almost 5k? Yeah.

My Current Savings

Taxable Accounts:
$8,357.82 - Liquid Savings - 5.05% APY HSBC Savings Account
$12,620.13 - Stocks - Misc. Direct Investments
$4,399.20 - Stocks - Ameritrade Izone
$689.67 - Stocks - Scottrade
$2,505.82 - Bonds - TreasuryDirect

$28,572.64 TOTAL


Retirement Savings:
$11,415.22 - ROTH IRA - Vanguard
$2,967.76 - ROTH IRA - Scottrade
$28,337.33 - 401K - T. Rowe Price

$42,720.31 TOTAL


Short term goals:
Just purchased a new home a few weeks ago and the liquid "emergency" fund has taken a hit. I would like to get that up over $10k before the end of September, but that may be a stretch. I would like to also have $4k available on January 1st to invest in my Vanguard ROTH IRA (the limit for 2007).

About Me

Well, currently I am 25 years old living in upstate New York. I'm working as a computer analyst for a mid-size company (we broke off from an extremely large company about 4 years ago).

I graduated in 2002 from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) with a B.S. in Information Technology. Maybe someday I will go back to school for my MBA, but have no such plans in the near future.

I live with my fiance in a house we purchased together this year. This is actually our second real estate venture... we first lived together in a townhouse we purchased in 2004. This was probably my best financial investment ever with the townhouse appreciating about 50% from where we purchased it at over 2 years. Yay housing boom.

The goal of this blog is to post everything finance - both saving and spending. I am a notorious deal sleuth who scours the internet for good deals and uses coupons for everything. I like to play the stock market with mixed success.

Well, enjoy!