Monthly Financial Check Up: May 2011
May was a welcome relief to my cash flow after the madness of my April Financial Checkup and I was able to come out $605.24 in the black!!!! I still have a lot to do to make up for the massive shortfall last month but I am sure that I will be able to make it up by spending less over the summer, even with taking some time off to do fun things.
Areas where I remained under budget are
-Home
-Utilities
-Car
Areas where I went over budget are
-Entertainment
-Shopping
Tracking My Finances In 2011: January Week 3
I have decided to post my weekly spending for the previous week on Fridays so you know how my cash has been flowing for the week. Please note that I get paid on the last day of the month so my cash flow net effect will usually be negative until the last day of the month.
This does not mean that I am adding to my debt, it just means that the money coming in is less than the money going out because bills are due starting on the first but I don’t get paid until the last day.
Moving On To A New Goal
When I started this blog my goal was to get out of debt. I figured I could do this by finding various ways to save money in my life and then using the money to pay off debt. It took me a little while but I finally managed to get out of debt so it is time to move on to a new goal for the blog.
I will still continue to save money but now I am focusing on building wealth of some kind…while maintaining my debt free status.
So now onwards to building wealth!!!!!!
Added An Ally Checking Account
So after I received the letter from Chase about increasing the direct deposit to $500 to maintain the free checking account a friend told me about Ally bank and its free checking. I already have a savings account and a CD with Ally so I thought why not go ahead and try it out.
I was really impressed with the list of features on the account so I decided to list them here from the website:
According to Ally they offer “The convenience of a checking account—the interest rate of a savings account”.
- $0 monthly fee
Tracking My Finances In 2010: December Week 5
I have decided to post my weekly spending for the previous week on Fridays so you know how my cash has been flowing for the week. Please note that I get paid on the last day of the month so my cash flow net effect will usually be negative until the last day of the month.
This does not mean that I am adding to my debt, it just means that the money coming in is less than the money going out because bills are due starting on the first but I don’t get paid until the last day.
How Did I Do On My 2010 Goals?
It is time again to look at goals and resolutions from this year and focus on those for next year. For 2010 I decided to have Three Simple Goals and I just wanted to take a look at how I did.
My three goals for the year were
- Reduce
- Leave
- Magnetize
and I think I did pretty well on them.
Reduce meant that I wanted to reduce the amount of debt that I was carrying and I not only did I reduce my debt but I completely eliminated it and I am currently debt free. I paid off my car after a long time of making regular payments and throwing snowflake payments at when I got extra money.
Monthly Financial Update: October 2010
I was able to come out of October 2010 at $278.07 in the black despite spending some extra money on things that were a bit more expensive than I had planned. This was partly due to having a big amount in the splurge fund that I used for some fun stuff for myself, along with getting some more advertising on the blog.
I only bought $25.28 in gas, which left me with $49.72 in my gas budget for the month. I might end up spending a lot on gas in the next month, depending on where I will be celebrating Thanksgiving this year.
Thanks For Nothing Chase!
So I have a Chase Freedom card that offered cash back and the most exciting part of that was I was able to redeem 200 cash rewards for a $250 check. I used to get:
3% cash back on my top five spending categories and
1% cash back on all purchases.
That meant I was getting a BONUS $50 because all the other redemption points were at a rate of 1 to 1 as follows:
redeem 10 cash rewards for a $10 check
redeem 50 cash rewards for a $50 check OR
redeem 200 cash rewards for $250 check
