What to do with salary increase?

J and I get our salary increases in winter. I don't remember what month he gets his, but I should have mine in August. But I'm not. I'm still getting one of course but the organization is currently implementing a new process for performance development, introducing grading and some other bits I don't know about yet. All we know so far is that we'll get our raises in September backdated all the way to July 1st.

Windfall!

Well, it's not necessarily windfall but it will feel like it. J and I have agreed that our backdated increases will go directly to debt. I just want to get rid of debt as fast as I can. It's just not pleasant every time I sit down with the budget staring me at the face. We have tab in the budget spreadsheet called Debt Monitor, and I'm telling you that it's not going below $8K despite attempts. Urgh.

We even have new additions to our debt. I'm not going to put away the usual amount in savings so that I can add more into our debt snowball. I usually save 15% or more every fornight but the next fortnight we'll make do with 10%.

So the August goal is to get debt close to $8K. I choose the word "close" because I'm not certain that we can get it down to $8.5K you see. Let's just try and see.

ISP exposure

I chanced upon this website but can't use their free service because they don't have a Mac version yet.

Isposure is a freeware to monitor your internet connection and compare it to other ISPs nationwide. It's supposed to reveal to you whether you're getting the connection promised to you by your ISP. I can't wait to use this!

My own opinions on my banks

J thinks it's nuts that we have accounts (savings and checking/current accounts) in almost all banks in NZ. Not all, excuse me! My original reason for opening multiple accounts of the same types is to put our eggs in different baskets. I must admit that it does make a difference in seeing that we don't have much in one account because it prevents us from spending the money. Later on, I found the want to experience banking with my banks. It's not the same just reading information on their websites or asking people around. Opinions help but they are not mine, so there.

PSIS
When I first moved to NZ, I opened a current account with them in addition to the joint savings account with J. I still don't use them as my primary bank but our car loan is with them and we religiously save a fixed amount in our Online Account with them, which happens to be the highest at the moment! We want to keep them because it is NZ-owned bank. J's salary goes to this bank but I transfer the remaining pay (insurance and car loan payments already deducted) to my Electronic because they have transaction fees and I don't want that.

Westpac
A few months later, Westpac introduced their Elect (now Electronic) Account that has zero transaction fees. I immediately opened one and decided to use them as my primary bank. So my salary goes into my Electronic account and all bills are paid through them.

Raboplus
It's just not funny not to have an account with them. We only have savings and managed funds with them because they don't have current accounts and can't really offer that type. I like them because we can't easily take our money out because they don't have any branch and don't issue cards (EFTPOS or credit cards) at all, hence no current accounts. They are just a simple online bank. When I first got interested in diversifying, I used this bank for my training arena because I can sell and purchase managed funds online.

Kiwibank
I opened a savings account with them to serve as our Emergency Fund. Now that they have Free Up, I'm seriously considering transferring from Westpac to them. Gotta support local banks, you know! I had already moved our insurance direct debits to them and once we pay off our car loan, I will have J's salary credited to either this bank or to his Westpac Electronic.

ASB
I was curious about them due to the consistent TV adverts. For experience's sake, I opened current and savings accounts. I was not impressed from the first day. They couldn't open my account that time I walked in because they didn't have any staff available. I finally got my account created 2 days later! That's a long time! I was ready to pull out my application when they told me that they had already set them up and that I can walk into a branch to pick up my EFTPOS card. They do credit checks on you before they can approve your application, but still! To set up payees with them online, you will need to pay $2 for each payee! Not all that, in my opinion. So I tossed out the idea of making them my primary bank.

Disclaimer: This post is just my opinion based on my own experience. If you had better, good on you. If you had it worse then change banks.

What's your grocery budget?

I want to know because I just might learn from you.

I budget $200 for grocery for 2 weeks. We have NEVER met that budget. I'm guilty of stock-buying sometimes. Over the weekend, I went inside Pak 'n Save alone while my family waited in the car. I noticed that they didn't have small trolleys! All they have is this giant trolley that can fit 3 or 4 toddlers in it.

Anyway, I got what was on my list but I took more than I should for baby formula. We keep a 900g can at baby's daycare centre and another at home in addition to maybe 1 or 2 cans standing by. Obviously when I went shopping last weekend we didn't have any stock anymore so I took 3 cans of $22 each. Those 3 cans already made up half of my purchase that day. I almost took 4 but guilt got the better of me. I thought that was already hoarding.

I used to just get 1 as our stand-by supply but there was one weekend when our formula went on sale and they all disappeared before we got there. I asked the staff but they said they didn't have any stock. Pak 'n Save is a WYSIWYG supermarket apparently. They usually sell for $25 at New World. My baby being nearly 6 months old now, he can still finish that off in more or less 5 days.

Back to my question - if I buy baby formula for $66 and diapers for $30, maybe it's not realistic to only budget $200, right? I'm not keen on upping that to, say, $250 because we might lax on budgeting.

What do you think?

The sky is clearing...

The small car is officially sold last night. I have the rest of the payment in a check and $400 in cash waiting for me to deposit. I was planning on doing that today but my husband and child went into diarrhea mode in the middle of the night! My poor sick boys! :(

The sky of debt is starting to clear! That's what I'm sayin'!

Less car, more money
I called AA about removing it from our policy and our new fortnightly payments are down by $22. Our car payments are down by $35. That's not a lot in the grand scheme of things but the car loan dropping from $11,000+ to $3,400 is!!!

We are power savers
Our electricity bill is also down by $100+! Apart from the fact that J has been back to work, hence less use of power, we have conscious efforts to turn power sockets off when unused. A decrease of $100+ in the middle of winter??? Yeah!!!

I'm just very pleased that things are working out as planned. Can't wait to get rid of all debts!

Bye, bye, our wee car

We got an offer close to our selling price. We took it but J and I had a misunderstanding somewhere when we were talking about how much we could negotiate for. We could've gotten it for the actual selling price or maybe even more, but oh well, it's sold now. We have $400 cash deposit sitting on our desktop table awaiting deposit to the bank next week. We had this hour-long disagreement about it. We had an earlier offer of $7750, they negotiated twice for less. Then this afternoon this couple just showed up to check the car out and made an offer after taking it for a spin. However, J told them about the $7750 offer instead of the selling price of $7900. It only makes sense to say that somebody offered it, if not more than the selling price at least the exact selling price, right? I don't know why J assumed he could mention the lower offer. So they made an offer of $7800, just $100 short of the actual selling price! Ugh.

In a few days our net worth would go down by a couple thousands because the car was accounted for at our purchase price in 2006, but we sold it for $2200 less. Our liability will go down and so will the asset. But that's ok! Less debt, less insurance payment, and more money towards debt snowball.

However, I'm getting a bit emotional about bidding goodbye to our wee car. I told J that I want our picture taken with it tomorrow as keepsake. I will miss that economical and cute car! I said that at this time when petrol prices are high it doesn't make sense to sell that car but it doesn't make sense to have 2 cars either. Once my bus passes are used up I'm going to buy me a snapper card as my commitment to public transportation.

I feel bad for the couple who made the first offer because they paid for an AA inspection report yesterday worth $125. Oh well, such is life.

3 hourly diet

J and I have officially been on our 3-hourly diet this week. We eat every 3 hours and introducing more healthy food into our diet.

What we eat
We eat some of the usual stuff we eat but we are now eating vegetables everyday. I must say that I look forward to preparing our meals because I'm looking at varieties of cooking food nowadays. J is a sugar addict and it's not realistic to motivate him to diet by going cold turkey on yummy chocolates so I bought a bag of bite-size chocs that I include in his lunch box.

How we eat
Every 3 hours we eat portioned food that I prepare the night before. We eat our breakfasts at work, cornflakes with trimmed milk for me and muesli with yogurt for him. Lunch is a portioned salad of something and the afternoon snack is fruit. I've not figured out the drinks yet but we're pretty good about sticking to water so that's that. Dinners are just as light as lunch but we try to have a bit of meat in them. We have not eaten red meat in a week! We're going to try having chicken and seafood only for a long while.

Monitor progress
I created a table whose data feeds into a chart. I've not weighed myself in yet. I know I should have before I started with this diet but I don't expect to have lost already, but I do feel a bit of difference in my body now. I get hungry every 3 hours now! It's working!

Budget effect
So far we've spent $40 on food that isn't finished yet. It was a surprise to us that being conscious of eating is going to save us money too. We still have 3/4 of the half-kilo chicken strips I bought yesterday. I really think this diet is going to positively affect our budget and I'm super glad about that! Hitting 2 birds with one stone! I don't even need to buy my breakfast milk because it's free at work. :)

Compared to my previous post, my mood today is good. I love everything about life, except for debt. Living this frugal lifestyle made me realize that there is so much more to discover about channeling resources to live my life. I still look twice at a nice bag, nice shoes, nice clothes and have the urge to buy, but I have different goals now. I love this frugal thing. :)

I want money, a lot of it.

Last night I was getting really annoyed at our financial situation. I really want to get rid of our plastic debt! Compared to others who struggle with a lot of it, ours isn't so bad but still!

Today is pay day and I tend to "close the books" fortnightly (every other Wednesday). I got to review how much we had spent unplanned in the last 2 weeks. My word, including our weekend trip to Ruapehu, we used the plastic for $1,000+! WTF.

Trying to be good about not incurring more debt, I paid for the unplanned spends using our savings. It didn't take more than 10 minutes before I started feeling bad about paying debt. I checked the projected savings by December and it's $2K lower than forecasted a few months ago. I was just disappointed and disheartened.

I told J that I had started regretting getting the big car because compared to the small one, it costs more on petrol. I just got so used with the small car's petrol usage that the big car's usage is just so alarming to me. However, the small car isn't really adequate for us anymore.

I decided to move my butt to focus my mind on something else, but folding clothes isn't exactly mind-juggling so I ended with more frown on my face than when I started. I told J that it isn't acceptable that we are using savings to pay debt because we earn a good deal between us. We are in much better condition than those with more than 1 child and mortgage and more expenses, that's why I just have high standards for us to live better.

We are not living horribly beyond our means. In fact, we do slip from time to time but we're okay. I don't want to struggle for money. I don't want to ever live from paycheck to paycheck. I just don't want to be poor. I don't know how it is to be poor that's why I'm scared of it. I want a lot of money because I want to live comfortably knowing my future is set. I want a lot of money so that I can do anything on a whim without worrying about where to get the cash from. I want to get rid of our debt so that I can start channeling all that money towards buying a house.

Can I just give you my weight?

Weight giving
I'm really tired of the baby weight that I still have. Over the weekend, I was contemplating on the effort of losing the extra bulge. It's a lot. 30 pounds of stored energy everywhere. To lose that might just take a long while unless I become physically active, which I have not figured out yet. I don't have plans of buying clothes in my current size because I have TONS of clothes in my pre-pregnant size. I just never imagined to be in this weight for a long time. So, yesterday I have started with the effort. Slowly introducing a different eating habit. I bought a boring Special K Advantage cornflakes box for my breakfast at work. I started with a cup of cornflakes with a cup of trimmed milk today. I also plan not to store food in the fridge and just buy fresh food daily. This effort will obviously encompass J's journey towards having a healthy weight as well. Last night we had salad and tonight we'll have greek salad. This new eating habit will change our grocery buying. I'm getting good at buying just what I intended to buy when I'm in the supermarket so I'm not as reluctant as I used to be about this way of food shopping.

J and I agreed on our upcoming birthday presents for each other. He will "give" me 10 pounds off of his current weight, and I will give him at least 7 pounds off of mine. Our birthdays are 2 weeks apart and so I don't have much time coz his comes first at end of the month.

I plan to adopt the snowball concept in losing weight. I will begin with setting a realistic target weight loss of 5 pounds and work my way in increments of 5 once I achieve that. I only need to lose 30 pounds. I'm not sure what I'll look like less than that at 31, but definitely not like when I was a 105-pound college student at 17.

Good on me, mate
Because I did a great job in my previous project, my manager gave me at $100-on-them dinner :) I don't know when to use it yet, but that would be fairly easy to do.

Expensive friggin' bolt
Remember I said that installing that anchor bolt in the car for the car seat was around $22? Hah! I was sooo wrong! It was $56!!! J paid for it using our highest-interest-but-with-nicest-points-system credit card. I didn't really care at that time because it should not really cost us a lot, right? I'm thinking that the price of the bolt itself was significant. The guy who installed didn't even bother looking that the car seat came with the bolt. It would not be so good for the drilled hole to replace the bolt he put in so we just let it be. Now that I know how much it is, I'm going to sell our unused anchor bolt on Trademe this week.

The cost of preparation

Planning ahead, especially for travels, can be costly but I know that it could be more costly unplanned. Catch 22 eh?

On Friday we bought the 2nd stage convertible car seat. Our rented Plunket baby capsule is due on 15 July. I made computed projections of renting with them again but found out that it wasn't cost effective at all for car seats. Funny how getting an opinion can also save you money. I suggested to J that we talk to a staff at Baby Factory about car seats but he thought that they would just sell us the most expensive item. To our surprise she actually saved us $20 because what we had wanted did not have the highest safety standard. Australia and NZ have the highest child safety standard on car seats by the way. This new one will be good for until he's 18kg (4 years plus). He's now nearly 8kg. I don't know how fast he will grow but hopefully we can maximize the money spent for it. Cost was $280.

In addition to the car seat, we got him a pair of gloves ($3), a long-sleeved shirt ($5), and a teether-con-toy ($9) because I stupidly sterilized his old one.

After buying that we proceeded to get the anchor bolt installed for tethering the car seat. Yes, apart from the sash-lap seat belt, the car seat is tethered to a bolt on the back panel. I don't remember how much that cost us to get that done, but I think around $22.

Because I did not have a pair of shoes that could be worn in the snow, I got me a pair of gumboots at the Warehouse that was on sale for 50%! I didn't know that until we paid for it. Cost: $15.

The next trip is in December. While we don't need to plan for clothing and accommodation, just the idea of Christmas is costly and to top that with baby's christening and a 3-day layover in HK will be crazy! Need to plan ahead!

Winter wonderland

I mentioned last post that we were thinking of going up north to have some snow fun and that I changed my mind. I changed my mind again! Ok, it wasn't only my decision but if I didn't want to go it would not have happened. But it's ok because my family had fun and it was not an expensive trip. We went to Ruapehu.

Petrol
Spent $50+ to fill it up Friday night. Spent $105 on the way back Sunday morning.

Accomodation
Paid $160 for an overnight stay.

Food
$35 for Saturday lunch
$33 for Saturday dinner; J bought us really yummy dessert that he paid for using his allowance. Very sweet.
$41.5 for Sunday breakfast; well worth it because we didn't need to have lunch after that.

Overall the weekend getaway was nice and fun. Total spend was $424.50. I wonder how much it would have cost us if we rented out snow gears and stayed in chalets. Holidays with children are not cheap! I of course understand my mother now, why she was a tight-wad back in the days. My baby is not even walking yet so imagine if he were already older and wanted more play fun.

Anyway, I had a webcam chat with my mom and she told me that the city is starting to be less congested with cars. Petrol prices have changed the way people commute now. That's good to know! By the way, you should check out powersavers. NZ is strongly advocating saving power!

Running errands to clear my mind

Getting rid of stuff

Various PF blogs have advocated the value of getting rid of unnecessary stuff by selling them. I'm doing just that for 2 things - our small car and my breast pump with various accessories. They are not sold yet! I'm getting antsy!

The plan was to sell the small car, use the sale money to pay off its loan balance and pay (almost half of) the big car loan. That would leave us with more or less $3K of car loan left to pay, which I'm confident that we can achieve in less than 8 months given our current financial status. We are currently paying both loans ($180 fortnightly) and higher insurance (now at $66 fortnightly) and it's just annoying. We have been getting interests but we aren't willing to sell the small car short. It's in very good condition with very low mileage and only 4 years old. If we were in a hurry to get rid of it, we'd probably have sold it for $6500 but we just can't! I still have love for that car and I'm not entirely happy to let it go but it's the wisest thing to do. Sigh.

Hopefully somebody out there who needs to express her overflowing milk finds her way to my breast pump auction. I only used it for a few times (read: less than 10 times) and wish I didn't get it. Hmpf.

Trying to save

I ran errands today and passed by a few stores. I'm thinking of getting new boots as my current pair is starting to disintegrate. I don't know yet whether it's wiser to wait til it struggles or to buy a new one now. Maybe it's better to wait until next year (I only wear boots in winter), I don't know. While I don't know, I'm not buying.

I went inside Jay Jay's to look for a nice postie bag but I kept looking at jackets instead. I was close to getting either a wool hooded vest or a cardi, but I didn't. It wasn't hard to do that, I just want to sometimes get myself something.

The joy of public library

My baby's still young but he seems to listen to story telling and likes looking at colorful picture books. After running all errands, I borrowed 3 picture books today. I'm excited to read him those short stories and, at the same time, glad that I don't have to buy all those books for him!

Snow holiday

I suggested to J today that we take a weekend getaway to Ruapehu and catch some snow, but during my errands I started to back off from that idea. It just means unplanned cash outflow and we're working on being smart about not doing any of that anymore. So, like my new pair of boots, maybe next winter?

First July entry

Indeed it's July! To me that means 5 months left until Christmas - my favorite holiday - and spending it with family back in my hometown. I'm excited! The baby finally got his passport and I booked us our flights straightaway.

Holiday plans
I'm lucky to know someone who owns a travel agency that allows an upfront deposit ($400) and the rest to be paid in October. That gives us plenty of time to save some more and pay the rest in mostly cash. Of course we'll pay by plastic first just to earn Fly Buy points, but we've been good about paying our purchases so as not to incur more cc debt. We are also doing a 3-day layover in Hong Kong. I'm looking forward to that because, although I went there 11 years ago, things are definitely much more different now.

Work
It has been busy and has just recently started to slow down. Winter does that but I'm eager to take on a new project to practice the knowledge I earned from a training I attended in May. If I can be a subject matter expert of it, that would be great so for now I'm working towards that. My last stressful project got implemented smoothly - unexpectedly - and so everyone's pleased. My manager today told me that I'm getting a treat - movie tickets or dinner. I think I'll choose dinner because J and I have not dined out in so long.

Tax refund
I planned on snow flaking my tax refund towards car loan payments but I changed my mind as soon as I saw it in my account. I don't know why. Now that we have more car loan to pay you'd think the wise thing to do is just carry out the original plan. Yet, I've no plans to. It's in our savings account though. Maybe once we sell our small car I'd do it. 

New old car
We bought an old car on loan. It's a '98 Audi A4 Quattro and today we already paid $500+ to have it serviced. We experienced 3 times of it stalling as we were slowly turning into a curve. The second time the car behind bumped into us. Luckily, the bumper didn't get dented. It's an old car, what can I say. We got it for cheap and we are more comfortable now in a bigger car. After filling the tank to the rim, we have been refilling petrol every week. We found out that it's more economical when the fuel tank is full, or nearly full, to prevent the petrol from evaporating. According to my calculation, this weekly refill practice is cheaper than filling an empty tank.

Electricity bill
Looks like the winter has really kicked in says our power bill. Last year we paid roughly $320/month for 3 or 4 months. I'm hoping that last month's $340 bill includes a big forecast so that this month's will not be as bad. J went back to work so we're not using a lot of power in the day time anymore.

Tomorrow's pay day and it doesn't bring about excitement anymore. It's not because we're living from paycheck to paycheck because we're not. I think because we've settled into a financial lifestyle that's starting to dull me. Our budget spreadsheet is for the entire year and so I already know what's gonna happen with our money until December. I don't expect any surprises next year either as I'll just continue the spreadsheet into another year.