Various Money Findings for the Week

I've had a few money-related things in my head for the past week, but none of them were enough to make separate posts for. So I figured I would just make a hodge-podge list of it all right here:

Things I've Thought Of
I've come up with two more ways to build up savings.

The first isn't my idea, it has been done by TONS of people. It's just that I thought of it again a week ago. Set up a reoccurring transfer from checking to savings. I used to do $100 a month, but when things got tighter I didn't think we could do that anymore. Now, I have it set to transfer $20 every Monday. That's almost $100 anyways, but it seems much less painful to transfer a $20 chunk instead of a $100 one. My thinking was that we can spend $20 on random crap, why can't we save it? Even $5 a week will get you $260 + interest in one year. You have to stop making excuses as to why you can't save money and just do it.

When you read or hear anything about saving money on groceries (or anything), why don't you actually save it? Figure out the regular price for your groceries, then deduct the amount you paid for it on sale. Take the difference and put that in savings. It might be as little as the $1 off coupon for the cereal you bought. But after awhile it will add up.

Things I've Found
One of my new favorite blogs is Get Rich Slowly. I've always been really good with money, but I love reading how other people do things and learning new tips and tricks. While browsing around on GRS last night I found some really good articles and a few extra links.

How to Get Out of Debt - A list of things that need to be done, and how to do them. We accomplished #1 awhile ago, are working on #2 and talked about #3 last night and thought it was a really good idea that we will most likely be putting into practice.

How I Cut 16 Years From My Mortgage in Just One Hour - A good article about how paying extra pays off. Our mortgage payment is $698.34/mo - this includes property taxes, and home and mortgage insurance. So our actual principal and interest house payment comes out to $481.80/mo. Every month we just round up to $700 and pay that. I was playing around in Quicken with the debt repayment tool and found that by paying this extra $1.66 we will pay off our mortgage 2 months sooner. If we pay $35 more, it'll be 4 YEARS sooner. $70 more, 7 years and $100 more will get 9 years knocked off. I was pretty stoked about that and can't wait til we have enough extra to throw at it. (For anyone looking to buy a house: She mentions a good suggestion about putting away the amount of a mortgage payment into savings each month. If you can't put it away, then you can't afford a house.)

How To Create Your Own Family Balance Sheet - I found the link to this somewhere on GRS. I've been doing this my whole bill paying life, but I liked the way she did it so I made up a sheet using her version. Now it's great for when we pay bills so we have a quick way of seeing balances and how much extra to pay toward our debt or savings. (Don't have a spreadsheet program? Google Docs gives you everything you need). I haven't had a chance to really go through it yet, but the rest of her site looks like good reading as well.

How My Family and I Paid Off $90,415 of Consumer Debt In Two Years: A REALLY awesome story at Trees Full of Money. In it I found a link to a spreadsheet he made to calculate how soon you could be out of debt with the snowball method. You can find it here. I've messed around with it and have been having a lot of fun trying different scenarios.