Dustin Kidd

Some of my favorite personal finance tools: 1. Suze Orman's The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke : great book that is easy read but full of useful information. Read it with a notepad or journal handy. It also gives you access to a set of tools on Orman's website. 2. The Suze Orman show podcast. Free podcast of Orman's weekly show. A great way to learn more about money and making good financial decisions. 3. Mint.com . A website that can track all of your financial accounts. Other sites claim to do the same thing but I've found that only Mint can actually track all of them (some sites couldn't access by ING savings, others couldn't access my retirement accounts). It has tools for building a budget and tracking your expenses. Use the categories tool on the Transactions page to label and track your spending. Also be sure to download the iPhone app. 4. Get Rich Slowly . A great blog about saving money and making good financial decisions. 5. Wal...

dustinkidd.blogspot.com What is it? Readily available funds that you can use to pay for unexpected needs in life. One of the biggest things to plan for now is the possibility of being unemployed. When to do it? Right away, if you don't have any emergency funds at all. Once you have $1000 set aside, go back to working on your high interest debts (esp. credit cards). After those are paid off, then built the fund up. How much do I need? Advice ranges from $1000 to 8 months of expenses. I'd aim for 6 months. How do I calculate 6 months of expenses? It's not half of your annual salary. Don't calculate your emergency needs based on your salary, calculate them based on your expenses. If you have a budget, you can do this quickly (and if you don't have a budget, you'll be able to make one quickly after planning for your emergency fund). Start with your fixed expenses like rent, cell phone bill, loan payments, etc. Then, estimate your variable expenses like f...

dustinkidd.blogspot.com The New York Times has a nice front page article today, September 9th, on the dangers of debit cards. The problem? Overdrafts. I got into this problem a few years with Wachovia. A deposit that I made didn't clear for a few days, even though the deposit was recorded. In the meantime, I made 4 small purchases, each for less than $3. But because the bank argued that the money wasn't available, I incurred FOUR overdraft fees of $34 each. I was mortified. I called to complain and the bank refused to help. On a graduate student budget, it took me a long time to recover. To prevent that from happening again, I signed up for overdraft protection. Under this service, any overdrafts would come from my Wachovia credit card. What wasn't explained to me was that there was a $30 service charge every time this kicks in. In addition, the bank then collected finance charges as well, unless I paid if off by the end of the month. Since I was carrying a lar...

In order to keep my finances on the up and up, and to make sure I can save what I need to save, I set a monthly budget and I adhere to it by tracking every penny I spend.  To do this, I developed an excel spreadsheet with multiple worksheets.  I have 7 tabs in my spreadsheet: Checking, Cash, Savings, Fidelity, TIAA-Cref, Budget, and Income. At the start of the month, I outline my anticipated spending in the budget, and my anticipated income in the income tab.  Whenever possible I get very specific in my budget.  For instance, I don't know how much I will spend on groceries, so I estimate, but I do know that I spend $4.95 every Monday at the bakery for my loaf of bread.  So Bread has it's own budget line ($4.95 X # of Mondays in the month). Then, I open this document every day to record every purchase made with my checking account, or with cash.  ATM transactions are debits in the "Checking" tab that align with credits in the "Cash" tab.  The tally in the cas...

Need a plan for getting out of debt and onto the financial high ground? Follow this plan, in this order , and be patient. Participate in your company's matching 401K or 403B. Put $1000 in a savings account and don't touch it unless there is an emergency. Pay off your credit cards, personal loans and car loans, highest interest to lowest. Go back to the $1000 and start building it up to an emergency fund that you could live off of for 8 months. I'll blog more about this in the future. Keep this in a savings account where you can get to it easily. Contribute the maximum amount to a Roth IRA. For most of us, that means $5000/year. Save for and buy a house, preferably without a mortgage or with 20% down to get the best rate. Pay off your student loans. Increase your contributions to your 401K or 403B up to the maximum. Pay off your mortgage. Simply ignore the steps that don't apply to you. Obviously, if you have no job or your employer doesn't match funds, then s...

We didn't really talk about money in my family when I was growing up and the lesson I learned is that money is a private thing that should not be discussed. It seemed a great social faux pas to discuss things like salary, savings, etc. Being silent on money is completely wrong. We need to learn from Lilly Ledbetter , who spent years unwittingly getting paid less than her male counterparts at Goodyear Tire & Rubber, and then lost her discrimination suit because she didn't sue within 180 days of the pay decision. Of course, she didn't know about the discrimination during those 180 days. She assumed she made the same as everyone else. It was years later before she discovered the discrepancy. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act helps to fix the problem by resetting the 180 day statute of limitations with every unfair paycheck. But even that won't matter if we don't talk about pay. How can you know that you're making less than your colleagues if no one will ...

I'm in the process of tidying up my finances. Suze Orman's The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke has been a fantastic resource because it gives clear, straightforward advice in language I can understand. Orman's first rule, and she is very insistent on this, is that you have to know your FICO score, also known as your credit rating. You probably know that this score is used to determine your eligibility for mortgages and car loans. According to the New York Times it is also often used by employers to decide if you are a good job candidate. So even if you're not shopping for a loan, it is a good idea to know your score. BUT, before you check your score, you should check the information your score is based on--your credit reports. You actually need to look at 3 credit reports, one from each of the major agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But you only need to go to one website to get started. AnnualCreditReport.com allows you to obtain one fr...