M is for Money

Monday morning I walked into work and opened my bag to fetch my building pass. I work in one of those high rise office towers with a bevy of security where passes are needed to get into the building and to get onto the floor where you work. Unfortunately, my pass was nowhere to be seen and if I didn’t find it soon, it was going to cost me money.

The problem with being overworked and overstressed is that it makes me forgetful. The last time I remember having my pass was Friday and it was in my jacket pocket. That is not where it belongs. I searched my bag inside and out, no pass. When I got home that evening I searched the house, to no avail. I checked the center console of the car, still no pass. It was now Thursday morning and if I didn’t find my pass soon, I was going to have to suck it up and pay to have it replaced. I decided to check the car a bit more thoroughly.

My side project has me spending a lot of time in the car and I admit it’s gotten a bit cluttered with stray coffee cups, food wrappers and the odd paper and pencils. As I sifted through the stuff on the floor of the passenger side, out pops my pass. It was hiding in the mounds of junk in the car, maybe it’s time I cleaned it out. This is just another case of how clutter, could end up costing you money.


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I have a little bit of money invested with Lending Club, it seemed a great way to earn a better return than the stock market. But if you think Wall St is fickle, you should see borrowers when it comes to paying back your money.

Last year I had two loans go into default, one skipped town immediately after taking out the loan. It still hasn’t been written off by Lending Club, though I already wrote it off in my books. The other got behind but then turned it around and paid off the entire balance immediately. After that, all was quiet for several months. My confidence was once again growing in Lending Club and its model, month after month borrowers were making their payments on time. That is until last month, when yet another borrower fell behind.

Like the other unpaid loan, this was a good borrower. They earned a “B” ranking from Lending Club, which means they had decent credit and qualified for a lower rate. Unfortunately there is no way to know what is going on in this borrower’s life and whether they will turn things around. I had been planning to inject new money into Lending Club, but not now. As much as I distrust Wall St, individuals seem to be worse. As someone who always paid their debts on time, I can’t imagine skipping out on my obligations. Borrowers at Lending Club know that their “investors” are individuals, not some faceless corporation. But that doesn’t stop them from stiffing everyday people like myself. I won’t be pulling my money out of Lending Club, but I won’t be adding new money either.


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If idle hands do the devil’s work, what does idle money do?

I believe in putting every dollar to work, either as spending or savings. If you allow money to sit in your bank account without a clear purpose it is likely to get lost. No it won’t pull a vanishing act, but rather it will walk out the door a few dollars at a time in the form of coffee or a new pair of shoes. You probably won’t even notice the money is missing since it happens in bits and pieces and the money didn’t have another home to go to anyway. I prefer to have a plan in place, a use for each dollar. I’ve already starting strategizing what to do with the extra cash I am earning on the side.

Honeymoon - $3500

My first goal for this side project is to earn enough for our honeymoon. I’ve done an estimate of what we’ll need to enjoy ourselves, $3500 should cover our food, fun and transportation costs in Hawaii.

Expense Fund - $500

We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel with our irregular expense fund for months now, I want to use this opportunity to boost our balance.

Roth IRA - $1100

With the wedding I had to scale back some of our early retirement plans, namely the amount I am contributing to my Roth IRA. This side job will help me top off the account for the year.

If the project drags on beyond its February 12th deadline, which may happen, I’ll have even more money to play with. Don’t worry, I have plenty of ways to put that extra cash to work!


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It seems like the only wedding planning I’m getting done right now is honeymoon planning. After hearing many opinions and doing some more research of my own, I too am leaning towards Kauai for our second honeymoon stop. I happen to like both nature and night life, but I think a few days in Waikiki will satisfy my need for the bright lights. But this leads me to the next decision, where to stay on Kauai? It turns out we have more choices than I thought.

There are actually three Starwood hotels on the island, although the St Regis is most definitely out of our price range! That leaves two hotels to chose from, the Sheraton on the south side of the island and a Westin on the north side. The Westin is a higher category hotel, meaning it will require more points for our stay. But it has one advantage, all of the accommodations include kitchens. That means we could prepare meals and not have to eat out every day. As a vegetarian, dining out every day can be a drag and often restaurants will have absolutely nothing I can eat. On the other hand, do I really want to spend my honeymoon cooking and cleaning! If this were any other trip I’d definitely go for the option with the kitchen, it’s healthier and cheaper. But I want to be pampered and lazy this time around, so I’m leaning towards the traditional hotel. Any opinions?


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I don’t have time to do my usual detailed recap of the month and our financial progress/setbacks. This is good news actually, it means I am busy making money. Unfortunately the blog is bearing the brunt of my busyness, poor thing is feeling neglected. The last month was a bit painful with hints of January 2009. Again the stock market is feeling cranky even with all the money I keep feeding it. The only reason our net worth creeped up this month is because I finally received my employer’s 2009 401(k) match. Instead of matching our contributions throughout the year, they wait until January of the next year and dump it all in at once. I guess they’ve never heard of dollar cost averaging. Sadly we still haven’t topped 2009’s high, maybe next month. Here is my usual spreadsheet to reveal the pain and promise.

What did people do before the internet? It’s made searching for information easier and faster than ever before. Often, the information you gather can also help you save money. Here’s a little story about how a car enthusiast’s forum saved us several hundred dollars.

Recently Mr. M joined a car enthusiast’s online forum. I have no interest in these things, so this group fills his need to talk engines and wheels. Lately we had an issue with the subie, the wheels were making an excessive amount of noise. Mr. M was complaining about the tires on the car when I pointed out that there are more to wheels than just tires. It could be the wheel bearings for example. A light bulb went off in his head, he had seen something on the forum about wheel bearings. It turns out that our particular model car has issues with the rear wheel bearings going bad prematurely. So not only was he able to diagnose the problem with help online, he also learned that Subaru issued a bulletin about the wheel bearings. They wouldn’t recall the cars, but to preserve customer satisfaction they extended the warranty on the bearings to 100,000 miles. Armed with this information, we took the car in to our local dealer. They weren’t familiar with this particular service bulletin and were skeptical at first. But at the end of the day the car was fixed and it cost us nothing. I’m not sure we’d have the same result if we simply brought in the car for a bad wheel bearing since the dealer was not aware of the problem. But the internet and this forum gave us the information we needed to save some serious dough. What did people do before now, get screwed?

Do people get into debt a few dollars at a time or do they dive into the deep end with a few high end purchases? Each theory has its own proponents, fans of the latte factor would say that many small expenses add up to big trouble. But many people reject this thinking, after all how many lattes can you possibly drink in a year. It has to be the big purchases, the new house and the new car, that causes the ultimate downfall. But in looking at my own debt history, it was a bit of both.

Living beyond your means is living beyond your means, whether it’s $5 a day or $500 once a month. In my opinion, debt often stems from a spending problem. When you have a problem controlling your spending, it extends to all aspects of your life. You spend more than you should on your daily expenses, things like eating out and buying new clothes. But you also spend too much on the big ticket items too, like new furniture or a nice vacation.

Most of my credit card debt came from the small things, gas and groceries, maybe the occasional shopping spree at Nordstroms. There were a few bigger ticket items in there as well, emergency surgery for one of the dogs and travel for a destination wedding for example. However most of that debt was made up of many little things, to the tune of $20,000! Of course that wasn’t the only debt I had, there were the big purchases as well. I also had a $28,000 car loan and a $340,000 mortgage. I had debts both large and small.

People get into debt in big ways and little ways. It may be a latte a day or one blowout vacation a year. Or for a lot of people like me, a bit of both!


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