Aug 30, 2010

LA Times teacher database released


I'll probably have more on this later, but for locals, I just wanted to provide a link to the LA Times' value-added teacher ratings. You can search by teacher or school, and some of the data appears incomplete - for example, the most recent data for a teacher at our local school was from 2006. The database only includes LAUSD teachers for grades 3 through 5.

Aug 17, 2010

Ways to Make & Save Money Update: I'm still enjoying ICS

A few months ago, I recommended Instant Cash Sweepstakes as a way to make free money online. It's a very simple site to use - you just answer a few multiple choice surveys, and every few surveys, you earn a few cents. I've won anywhere from 1 cent to 9 cents. You can withdraw your cash winnings as soon as you hit the $2 mark, which has been taking me about three weeks. When you don't win cash, you win tickets and tokens, which can be used to buy more tickets. The tickets go into a pot for a daily $50 drawing. I haven't won the $50 yet, but I'm holding out hope because My Good Cents has won it multiple times.

It's taking me less time to earn money via ICS than through other methods like MySurvey, and I like that I can earn it consistently, even if it's just a few cents at a time. I'm not waiting for surveys to become available, like I am with MySurvey or Pinecone.

No, I'm not going to become rich through ICS, but it's a worthwhile investment for a few minutes of time a few times a day.

Aug 13, 2010

Creating (And Paying For) An Estate Plan

So, suppose you agree with my post yesterday that death without a will is worse than death with a will, but you don’t know how to get started.

Estate planning is not my specialty, so nothing I write here should be considered legal advice, but I have a few suggestions.

Personally, I worked with an attorney who does specialize in estate planning because I felt it would be the best way to ensure it was done correctly. Also, we have an attorney whom we trust and work well with, so it was easy.

The best way to find an attorney is through word of mouth, and lawyers have a pretty good network so even if your lawyer friend doesn't specialize in estate planning, chances are good he or she knows someone who does. Alternatively, your state bar should be able to refer you to an attorney as well. An attorney’s services will likely be the most expensive way of creating your estate plan, but most attorneys will negotiate fees with you. I’ve found that here in Los Angeles, a comprehensive estate plan – including wills, durable powers of attorney (also known as living wills), and a revocable living trust – can cost about $2000. That’s a lot of money, but again, you should be able to negotiate the fee. And my guess is that in many parts of the country, the going rate for these services is quite a bit less.

Another way to create a will is to use a service like LegalZoom or even pick up a fill-in-the-blank will form or software. FindLaw has a list of the minimum requirements to create a legal will in all fifty states plus the District of Columbia. The more complicated your situation, the more difficult it will be to do everything right according to your state’s law, and the more you will want to consider going through an attorney.

No matter what, though, don’t put off creating your will, especially if you have children and you want to decide who will take care of them if something happens to you. Even if you would choose your parents and a court is most likely to choose your parents also, a will naming them as guardians will facilitate the process. You can never predict what might happen otherwise – for example, the two sets of grandparents could each sue for custody, so that a court will have to decide which set gets primary custody, and then your children will have to go to court to testify about their relationship with each set of grandparents. That could be traumatizing for your children, who will already be traumatized enough by grief over losing you.

It’s in everyone’s best interest if you do everything you can while you’re alive to make things easy if you’re no longer around.

Aug 12, 2010

Why don’t you have a will?

I couldn’t believe my ears the other day when a colleague – also an attorney – admitted that he doesn’t have a will. Because he doesn’t like to think about dying. When he said matter-of-factly that he wasn’t going to worry about dying for another twenty years, it was all I could do not to point out that his own father had died when he was seven years old.

Death is not a pleasant subject. But the fact is, we are all going to die and we don’t know when it’s going to happen.

A will isn’t something you create for yourself, to ensure that your grandmother’s necklace goes to your favorite cousin and not her sister whom you’ve always despised.

A will is for the loved ones you leave behind, the people who are going to be grieving. The last thing they need is to worry about who is getting what, and whether they are legally entitled to those possessions, and what laws they have to follow, and what taxes have to be paid. Perhaps most important, a will can ensure that your children are taken care of by the people you choose, rather than a judge who doesn’t know your family. A properly drafted will – and even better, an estate plan – can avoid probate, taxes, and delay, as well as ensure that your wishes are carried out.

So yes, death is unpleasant to think about. But isn’t death without a will even worse?

Aug 11, 2010

How We Budget

As I mentioned earlier this week, Theresa asked me to share more details about how we budget. She correctly deduced that we do not have a zero-sum budget – in other words, I do not account for every penny that comes in and goes out, leading to a difference of zero. I could do that, but it would take up so much effort that I probably wouldn’t do it at all.

What works for me is to set up categories and establish amounts for them – for example, some of our current categories are:

Mortgage
Homeowners Association
Utilities
Groceries/Household
Preschool
Extracurricular Activities
Charity

I also establish categories for savings, including:

Infrequent Bills Account (IBA)
Car Savings
Investing

The IBA is how I budget for regular but infrequent expenses, like insurance premiums and property taxes. I add up one year’s worth of expenses, divide by twelve, and save that amount each month. If I have an expense that month, then I deduct that amount from the monthly amount before transferring it to savings. About twice a year, our expenses are more than the monthly amount and I take money out of the IBA instead of putting it in.

The Car Savings is a subaccount at ING that will be used to pay cash for our next new vehicle. Investing is an amount automatically transferred into investment accounts each month – we hardly see that money at all.

Note that these categories don’t take into account expenses like taxes and retirement savings, which are automatically deducted from our paychecks. When I budget, I’m only concerned with the money that’s actually making it into our bank account.

With all of these numbers in place for each category, I can look at our take-home pay and see what's left over. From that amount, I come up with an amount that should go into savings each month. I make that number reasonable – it’s not the entire difference between our take-home pay and our expenses. For example, if our take-home pay is $4000 and the expenses I’ve calculated are $3000, I might allot $600 for savings every month and leave $400 for discretionary expenses.

That might seem like a lot to some and not a lot to others. It works for us in large part because neither of us is going to go out and spend the money just because it’s there. Some months we spend more than the amount allotted for discretionary expenses and some months we spend less - for us, it generally balances out.

We could probably save more on a zero-sum budget, but we are at a point where the lack of stress of accounting for every penny is worth a little extra spending. It’s the price we pay for sanity right now.

The nice thing about the way I budget is that income from sources other than our day jobs can be snowflaked straight into savings. I’m talking about things like rebate checks, gifts, tax refunds, blog income, etc. This is how we have been able to regularly save more than the amount I’ve budgeted for each month.

This is the budget that works for me. What works for you?

Aug 10, 2010

Works for Me: Use Visa and Mastercard gift cards to buy Amazon gift certificates

There are quite a few rebates that give money back in the form of a Visa or Mastercard gift card. I discovered the hard way that I couldn't use the card if my amount due was more than the amount on the card - in other words, I was having trouble using up the balance on the card. I got it down to a few cents after using it on my low out of pocket amounts in The Drugstore Game, but then I found myself stuck. If this happens, it turns out that you must pay most of the amount due and leave only the amount equal to what's left on the card.

For example, if you have 5 cents left on the card and the amount you owe the cashier is $2, you must pay the cashier $1.95 in cash or some other way, and then you can use the card to pay the last 5 cents. Obviously, this is quite the hassle.

I read a suggestion somewhere to use the gift cards to buy Amazon gift certificatesinstead. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time, so Amazon gift certificates are almost as good as cash. It solves my gift card problem by exhausting the balance in one fell swoop, and I can use the gift certificate as slowly or quickly as I want to.

Aug 9, 2010

Update on my New Year's Resolution: End of July

Back in January, I shared my financial resolution for this year, which is to save a crazy amount of money to create a large cash cushion. I promised a monthly update, and I'm happy to report that we've now saved 49% of our total goal for the year. While we're still short of reaching our goal, I continue to be pleased, because we've consistently saved more than the minimum I've budgeted for each month.

As always, the key to our success has been continuing to do the things I've written about before, like paying ourselves first, snowflaking extra income, and spending wisely.

Theresa asked me to write about budgeting, and specifically, how we budget without accounting for every penny and yet manage to save extra. So I'll have a post on that soon.

I'm hopeful that we'll be able to curb spending even more in the coming months (the switch from preschool to public school should help), so that just maybe we'll be able to still achieve our goal by the end of the year.

Aug 2, 2010

Works for me: Seam Ripper

I had to sew a button back on last weekend, and I didn't have an exact color match on the thread. I did, however, have two spools that were close. So I picked the lighter color, which seemed to be the closest match, and sewed the button back on.

Um, apparently the colors weren't close enough. I stared at it, and then decided I'd have to try the darker color.

In the past, I've used a pair of scissors to remove buttons, but I'd sewed this one on really well. I was afraid I'd damage the shirt if I used scissors.

And then I remembered that I have a seam ripperfrom when I took a sewing class almost ten years ago. The only thing I learned in that class is that I can't sew, but at least something good came of it. The seam ripper worked like a charm, and since I have one and almost forgot about it, I thought there'd be a good chance that others who don't sew have never even heard of one.

The great thing is that seam rippers are really inexpensive. The one picturedis $2.38 at Amazon, and that's probably about how much I paid at the craft store for mine.

Disclosure: I'm an Amazon affiliate, so any purchase you make after entering Amazon through a link on Chief Family Officer supports this site at no additional cost to you. Thank you!