4 Reasons you DON'T need a new computer

If you're in a similar position to where Mrs. Corn Fed and I are, you're probably recently removed from college (say, in the last 10 years) and have been chugging along with the computer you bought during college. If you're a little bit better off, maybe you're chugging along with the computer you bought when you got your first job and your "big" adult paychecks.

Which brings me to my next point: your computer is getting old. Isn't it?

Our was. It was definitely getting long in the tooth.

Most people's reaction to this situation would be to make due with what you have, or to buy a new computer. These were totally our first thoughts. But, they weren't what we decided.

So, why don't you need a new computer?

Reason 1: Your smartphone.

How often do you use your home computer these days? Not often, most likely. Email? Phone. Facebook? Phone. Youtube? Phone.

You might even have a tablet in the house. Now you can watch your Netflix, have a bigger screen for email or other word processing. You don't need to pay for Office on any device, anyway!

Reason 2: You can upgrade. (More than likely.)

Do what we did and spend only 1/10th the cost of a new computer and upgrade your old one! You can make your computer like new without hitting your wallet too hard.

Reason 3: Clean up your computer.

If you've had your computer as long as we did, there is probably a lot of photos, resumes, programs, and other files clogging the hard drive. Back up your files. Then clean your computer up, start from scratch. Erase your hard drives, reinstall your Operating System, and load your files back on the computer.

Now, all that is obviously easier said than done, especially since this is a finance blog and not a tech blog. So, I took the liberty of compiling the best resources on "starting over" for both Windows and Mac computers.

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MAC:
OS X: How to erase and install (Apple Support)

Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard: How to Erase and Install (Apple Support)

OS X Yosemite: Erase and reinstall OS X (Apple Support)

OS X Mavericks: Erase and reinstall OS X (Apple Support)

OS X Mountain Lion: Erase and reinstall OS X (Apple Support)

OS X Lion: Erase and reinstall Mac OS X (Apple Support)

WINDOWS:
Stop Trying to Clean Your Infected Computer! Just Nuke it and Reinstall Windows (How-to Geek)
Installing and reinstalling Windows 7 (Microsoft Support)

How to perform a clean installation of Windows 8 (Microsoft Support)
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Reason 4: This is the more drastic route, but it's possible. The library.

Most libraries these days are the technological battle fronts in our communities. They offer Internet access, free computers to use, and our local library even offers tablets to families to borrow!

Yes, it stinks if the library is not convenient for your family, and even more, it stinks that you would need to make a family trip any time you need to use the computer.

But, if you are in a place where you absolutely can't afford a new computer, your local library is probably a good bet.

Make the choice that's right for you and your family.

I'm certainly not advocating NOT getting a new computer if you need/want a new computer. These are merely the same roads that Mrs. Corn Fed and I traveled down when we had to make this decision recently. By not buying a new computer, we saved ourselves over $2000 and a bunch of headaches. Not buying a new computer focused our energies and attention on what truly mattered in our computing lives, and not "wanting" the latest and greatest that we didn't need, or more importantly, couldn't afford.

Is your computer slowing down? What's your family plan on when your computer bites the dust?

Create a Money Date in 5 Simple Steps

Maybe you've heard of a "money date" before, and maybe not. I'd like to set the stage for you and show a little bit of what our world looked like before we discovered the incredible money date.

Our world before "money dates" meant our date nights - and I mean real dates, dinner, movie, romance - usually had some money component to the date. By that, I mean that at some point during the date, I'm sure one of us would bring up one version of the following statements:

"Where does the checking account stand?" 

"Hey, how much can we afford for our honeymoon?" 

"Could we do this excursion?" 

"I was thinking about our next vacation, do we have the money?"

And then our romantic date becomes a heated conversation about what each of us are doing wrong with money, getting frustrated that the other person doesn't understand us.

We're not exactly sure how we learned or heard about the idea of "money dates," but the basic idea is pretty simple.

Set aside time in your schedule to talk about money. A money date.

Now, the best result you can get from this is pretty wonderful. Not only do you get a better understanding of your finances, but you get your date nights back! Double huzzah!

So, how do you go about starting money dates?

It's pretty simple.

Set a time.

Originally, we tried to do our money dates once a month. It would work okay for a couple months, then we would let it slide until something bad happened. Then we would have money dates again, let it slide. You get the idea.

Our money dates work a lot better now that both of us regularly (semi-weekly, if not daily) check our bank accounts and see what we've spent. We've gone to a semi-monthly schedule for our money dates, meeting around the times we get paid, the middle and end of each month.

Gather any resources.

Like in our work lives, we all hate meetings where people aren't prepared! Money dates are the same. Make sure you come to the table (or couch, coffee shop) with the information you need to have a good conversation. Is this a list of transactions for the time in-between money dates? Maybe it's the amount of money in each of your accounts, including any debt. Do you have a calendar of when bills are due or scheduled to be paid? These are all things you can bring to your money date.

Stick to the plan.

Respect each other and the money date. If you say that you're going to talk about only one or two items, focus on finishing your discussion on those first before moving to other potential items. We've had one-too-many money dates derailed by heading down a different road than what we planned. Likewise, if you've both agreed to talk for an hour, respect that decision. If you can get done quicker, that's better!

Review.

At the end of the money date, quickly go over any decisions made during your meeting. Did you decide to change your automatic savings plan? Change it. Did you change your budget around for next month? Change it. Need to put a new bill in the calendar? Put it on the calendar. The worst part of this journey is getting to the next money date realizing you didn't do what you, or your partner, said you were going to do.

Change for the better.

Money dates have made the financial part of our lives infinitely better. It's a safe place where we discuss money. We don't judge each other for decisions made during the in-between time. We realize that we are two partners on this journey together and these meetings are meant to help us succeed in that journey.

What say you? Do you have money dates? Do you have fun names for them?

To buy a new computer or upgrade?

Back when Mrs. Corn Fed and I were engaged, we jumped into the deep end of making big purchases.

Not our computer, but you get the idea!

We decided to purchase a brand new MacBook Pro, which cost us about $2500. Using that new computer, we designed a lot of materials for our wedding.

• Save the Date Invites
• Dinner Menus
• Wedding Programs
• Reception Highlight Video

Our thought at the time was we would be paying people do these things, but we already had the training and acumen to accomplish these on our own.

Fast forward almost 5 years later

We were now faced with a growing conundrum: an aging computer. It was no longer easy to edit video, use Photoshop, and edit complex HTML. In fact, even simple web browsing and Word documents took forever and were exercises in dealing with frustration. 

So, what were our needs?

Replace existing functionality

We soon realized that the functionality we needed was for three main areas:

• web surfing, 
• email, and 
• word processing. 

With those three items in mind, we realized that we didn't need a new +$2500 MacBook Pro to meet those "99% of the time" needs.

Our buying options came down to three areas:

1. Buy an iPad (with possibly a keyboard)
2. Upgrade our existing computer. Possibly new hard drives, etc.
3. Buy a cheaper Windows laptop.

Off the bat, #3 was never really an option. Our existing software is all Mac-based. On top of that, we have two Apple TVs, one 1st Generation iPad, and two iPhones already in the house; staying in the same ecosystem was preferable. This isn't to say we were against Windows computers. We only wanted something that would work with the software and hardware we already had at home.

Is upgrading a possibility?

I started looking at what it would take to upgrade our computer, and the best bang for our buck came in two places: upgrade to a solid state drive, and upgrade the RAM. We ended up purchasing two SSDs from OWC and installing those in our 2010 MacBook Pro. After the installation of the drives, I then installed the newest operating system, Yosemite, on the laptop. 

What a difference those two items made! And at such a low cost compared to the cost of a new computer. We ended up spending about 1/10th of what a new MacBook Pro would cost, and it feels like we have a brand new computer. And this didn't affect our personal finances as we paid for the upgrade from our separate business account. Double score!

Alright, so what happened to option #1?

Well, we couldn't join my family in England for Christmas because of our finances, so we got another present from my parents, a new iPad for Mrs. Corn Fed. We researched and tested keyboard cases and ended up with a wonderful ZAGG Folio case.

Where do we stand several months after these purchases and upgrades?

Oh, we stand on pretty good ground!

Mrs. Corn Fed loves the new iPad for work and pleasure, having taken it on both vacation and work trips.

Me? I love the upgraded computer, its speed, and increased functionality brought by the upgrade to Yosemite and newer software.

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What about you? How have you approached replacing an aging computer? Is your phone the main computer in your family now?

Losing your debit card

The other night, I left my debit card behind at a restaurant.

What to do when you leave your debit card at a restaurant?

Continue to drive home, of course.

Park in the driveway, stew, get upset.

Listen to Mrs. Corn Fed tell you, "Call the restaurant, tell them you left it, and see if you can still pick it up tonight."

Watch Mrs. Corn Fed walk into the house.

Sit in the driveway, continue to be upset.

Call Restaurant.

Tell Mrs. CF restaurant has debit card.

Leave to go pick up debit card.

Arrive at restaurant, park right at door, no care of actual parking spots.

Get debit card from restaurant.

Text Mrs. CF, "got it".

Drive home. Calm down.

Get home.

Go to sleep.

Wake up.

Be grateful.

Write blog post about whole situation.

---

Have you left your debit card behind? What did you do? Do you plan or panic?

January 2015 Expenditures

The start of our new journey.

As I wrote in our first post, January was the first month that we started our budget and started keeping  track of our expenses. I've been reading Frugalwoods and was inspired to write our January 2015 Expenditure report because of them!

Goals.

Our immediate goals are simple:

1. Pay down our $12,000 in credit card debt.
2. Increase our Emergency Savings from $100 to $1000. Longer term, we'd like to increase this to 6 months of our salaries.
3. Save for our vacation in November ($1000-$1500).
4. Save for a possible down payment on a new car ($2000-$2500). I'd like to push this out further, but Mrs. Corn Fed prefers newer, lower maintenance vehicles.

Keeping track and staying positive.

The important thing for us to remember this month is that we are only beginning this journey. We aren't going to pay everything off at once. Our focus is to learn where we are spending our money, and to adhere to the budget that we set.

So, let's see how we did this month!

Heat/Gas/Electricity/Utilities: $97.79

Pretty good month for this. Except. When we got our February bill, we hadn't paid our electricity bill. Since we're on budget billing, we were forgiven the one month, so no extra fees. But that will make our February bill twice as much, and obviously lowered this month's total. Good news is that we recently got new windows and we're already seeing lower heating bills compared to the previous winter. Bad news is that we got new windows.

Internet/Netflix/Cable: $137.08

Internet and Netflix are the small part of this. Combined they make about $60 of this line item. We switched from our local cable provider to DirecTv about a year ago, so our rates recently rose to a bit over $100 a month. We're in a two year contract, so we're "stuck" for now with this cost. Things are obviously moving towards a future where we could get the majority of our shows without cable/satellite, but we're not there (or ready) yet.

Cell Phones: $146.46

This is for our two iPhones and our 4GB/month data plan. Because we started to track our expenses this month, we were looking for places to save money and this was one area that we were able to make a quick and immediate change. Verizon recently dropped their prices $10/month. We took advantage of that, plus I looked at our average data usage. For the past six months, we've averaged less than 2GB/month by a decent amount. (see below)

Because of this, I switched our plan to 2GB per month. Combined these two changes will save us about $25 a month starting in February.

Auto: $132.31

Our normal line item for this includes our auto payment, but we don't have to pay that for January and February — we got an extra Christmas present that took care of this for two months. My wife had to tow her car and get a new battery around New Years Day, so that's what this amount is for this month.

Car Insurance: $114.78

Like our utility bill, we were a little late on our car insurance bill for December, so we ended up having two car insurance payments go through in January. I did go in and adjust the mileage for our insurance, but that will only lower the monthly bill about $3-4 starting in February.

Window Loan: $281.40

In October, we needed to replace the windows of our house. Total bill was over $11,000, so we needed to take out a home equity loan. This is our monthly payment for the next 56 months or so. Ugh.

Cleaning Lady: $0.00

Last year, Mrs. Corn Fed hurt her back, so to keep up with chores we hired someone to come clean our house every two weeks. We had her come two times in January, but she didn't cash the checks until February. Double ugh.

Web Hosting / Adobe: $49.24

We have a couple of other websites (that I won't list for privacy reasons, right now), and also our Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I moved one of our sites to cheaper hosting, saving us roughly $20/month starting in February. As part of our side hustle, we'll keep the Adobe CC for now.

Fitness: $11.00

This included my monthly subscription to DailyBurn, which I dropped during January as part of our budgeting process. The other dollar was for Mrs. Corn Fed to rent cycle shoes at her spin class.

Petsitter: $170.00

We recently got a new puppy. Since she can't stay in the kennel all day, and we both work about 30 minutes away from home, we hired a petsitter to let the puppy out during lunch. We got a good deal and this will cost $10/day, which is much cheaper than our previous petsitter. We're already cutting back on this in February, so we should see lower expenses here next month.

Medicine / Therapist: $52.98

This is mainly for me, Mr. Corn Fed. I've been seeing a therapist for clinical depression and I'm also on medication for that. Thankfully, both are fully covered by insurance, so these are just copays for my medicine and therapy visits. This will continue for the foreseeable future, so not much we can do for expenses here.

Groceries: $717.30

Really have no idea how this happened. That's probably why we're doing the expense tracking! We set our original budget for $300, adjusted to $400 about halfway through the month, and still blew past that by a long shot. Need to fix this for February — big time.

Takeout: $133.99

This is our budget for work lunches, happy hour, things like that. We had been doing multiple lunches out during the week and it was probably adding up to a good bit. This will help us keep track of it and see if we, or how we can cut back and adjust.

Date Nights: $130.27

Mrs. Corn Fed loves date nights! Dinners, movies, movies, and more movies! We did a lot more nights in this month, so a few delivery pizzas and rental movies rather than nice dinners out. We'll see how we adjust our date nights to fit our budgeting and our goals of eliminating our debt.

Clothing / Makeup: $194.46

We adjusted this category in February to better reflect how we were spending the money. In January, this category actually consisted of one massage (for Mrs. Corn Fed's continued back issues) and two hair cuts (one for each of us).

Dog Expenses: $316.49

Like I mentioned above, there's a new Corn Fed Hound in the family! We've had normal puppy vet check ups and shots in January. Additionally, we had one visit for our older Corn Fed Hound Senior. We have a few more visits on the schedule for February, March, and then May. So, we'll make sure to keep this category budgeted well to account for those foreseen expenses.

Gas: $192.75

We did some traveling to Mr. Corn Fed's parents this month, and to Mrs. Corn Fed's extended family. But other than that, this mainly includes our normal commuting gas.

Other: $115.35

Now that I've been reading up on other people's expense reports, I don't like the "other" category that much! I understand Mrs. Corn Fed's angst towards the "other" designation! Hard to budget for something you don't know about! Looking back, this included Overdraft Fees, parking fees, and a coffee for Mr. Corn Fed's mom.

A main focus of ours in our budgeting is increasing our savings, and paying down our debt. We've made sure to include these in our monthly budget so we don't use the "we'll use whatever is leftover" method, which doesn't work for us.

As you can see, we did good for both our "Car and Travel" account and paying down more than we budgeted for the credit card. We weren't able to contribute anything to our emergency savings, and only $50 to our Home account (to pay for long-term budgeted house expenses, like a fence).

While our travel fund is highly important, I wonder if we could lower our budget for the emergency fund to more quickly pay off our credit card. Even if we only did $100/month in our emergency fund, at the end of year, we'd have over $1200 in that account, which is a lot better than we have now.

So how did we do overall?

We were pretty close! 

The biggest area where can improve from January was our grocery bill. We were over twice our original estimate, and about 40% over our revised estimate. Yikes!

We've made some small adjustments in our Stationary Bills. This will allow us to focus more on those "flexible" areas like groceries and entertainment. Once we lower the Stationary Bills, we can "set it and forget it!" 

Frugalwoods Method of Non-Mortgage Spending.

$3,538.65.

That was our non-mortgage spending for the month of January. Crazy to see that number! Seems small for us, but large in comparison to the awesome Frugalwoods! It'll be fun to see that go down, hopefully, in February!

So that's our January! How did yours go? Were you happy or surprised by the first month of 2015?

Our Journey Has Begun

Long story.

We don't know how we got here.

Over the Christmas holidays, Mrs. Corn Fed and I sat down to look at our bank accounts. We were quite surprised by what we saw. We had over $12,000 on our bank credit card!

Now to explain a bit about how we got here.

Right or wrong, I've only been paying bills using the iOS app for my bank. Bill comes in the mail, or email, I log in, type the amount owed, and pay the bill. For the credit card, I think that I had set up autopay for the minimum payment so that we were never late.

Credit Card Debt: $12,325.80

Mrs. Corn Fed decided that we'll set up a budget and keep track of our expenses. So, she used Numbers on the iPad and there was a built-in budget template! We spent a couple hours putting in our regular expenses and felt that we were in a good place to get started.

January went fairly well budget-wise. We ended up over by about $159 on our expense budget of $4460. This already did include money to our Emergency Fund and the Credit Card Debt (i.e. we are budgeting savings and debt as expenses.)

For February, we looked where we could make some changes.

Verizon changed their pricing, reducing their prices $10 per month. I also looked at how much data we were using and adjusted our plans accordingly.

Savings: $24 per month

We cut our cleaning lady. We had originally picked her up because Mrs. Corn Fed hurt her back last year and we needed help around the house. We got better, but still kept the help for our sanity. We went one month with just one visit, but decided to cut the expense entirely in February.

Savings: $70 per month

I also changed some of our existing web hosting to less expensive options. GoDaddy had a $1/month sale on Managed Wordpress, so I migrated my blog/website to that hosting.

Savings: $19 per month

Mrs. Corn Fed canceled her subscription to People. I canceled my subscription to Sports Illustrated.

Savings: $170~ per year.

In addition, we changed the payment dates for our mortgage in order to better coincide with when we got paid. We were running out of money in our checking account and were getting overdraft fees several times a month.

Savings: $15 per month.

Total Savings: Roughly $140 per month.

So right there, without even changing any of our spending habits, we almost made up the spending difference from January. We're expecting March to be a much better month than January!

Where does our Credit Card Debt stand today?

Credit Card Debt: $12,305.17 (-$20.63)

It would have been nice to make a bigger dent in our credit card bill, but we were only able to pay a little bit more than the minimum in January. Therefore, the interest charges ate up most of our payments! Ugh!

I'll try to write a post about our net worth next. Because we're really not struggling over all. We made this mistake and now we need to fix it. We're not in danger of losing anything, but it'd be nice to not have this much debt hanging over our heads!