Monthly Archives: November 2018

Cutting Corners Without Blowing the Budget

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We have officially arrived at the most stressful point in the semester.  Classes are winding down or already completed.  Papers are coming due.  Exams loom near.  Sometimes it seems like there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.  It happens to everyone.  And, sadly, it doesn’t end when you finish school.  There will always be times in your life when you find yourself overextended.

I’m having one of those weeks right now.  I was traveling this weekend, so I didn’t have quite enough time to get all of my typical weekend adulting done.  I was able to complete my laundry, but I just didn’t have it in me to get to a grocery store last night.  Sometimes you have to cut corners when time is tight.  But the important thing is not to overextend your budget just because your time is stretched too thin.  It would be really easy to exist for the entire week on takeout food and Au Bon Pain.  But that would cause serious pain to my pocketbook.  The better alternative for me was to log into the Walmart grocery app this morning and put together a grocery order for pickup tonight.  Since I really don’t have anything resembling a dinner in my house right now, I’ll stop at Wegmans on my way home to grab something from the frozen case for tonight’s nourishment, and then by 8 tonight I’ll have my Walmart grocery order.  It could have been a whole week of restaurant food, which would have easily been $20 a day or more for my husband and me.  Instead, I took a short cut to really get some groceries.

We can’t always do things exactly the way we’d like, especially when time is tight.  But in this world of modern conveniences there are ways to less expensively work around time constraints.

Exam time is hard.  Sometimes corner must be cut.  But you’ve got this.  Use the tools available to you, and you will make it through!

Pivot!

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Sometimes in life you just need to pivot.  You are headed on a certain path and it becomes clear that it is not possible to continue on that path.  You have to pivot…you make a sharp left turn, quickly adjust the plan, and continue on in your new direction.

The whole “pivot” idea hit me full-force when I was traveling this past week.  I was in Arizona for a conference the early part of last week. (I promise—I learned a lot of great things that I’ll be utilizing with you!)  The conference ended Wednesday afternoon, and I was on a red-eye flight home at midnight Wednesday night.  (The red-eye—a great way to get an extra day at your location without paying for an extra night in a hotel!)  That first flight was not a problem.  I got some sleep, watched some Netflix (previously downloaded to my Kindle), and arrived in Detroit shortly before 6 AM.  On Thursday.  The day of the big storm.  The big storm that shut down Penn State for the better part of two days.

I had been watching the weather forecast.  I knew there was a decent chance I wouldn’t make it home on Thursday as planned.  Before I left Arizona I cozied up in the hotel lobby (because I had been checked out of my room for several hours by then) and did some unpacking and repacking.  I needed to make sure that everything I needed for an extra night in who-knows-where was in my carry-on bags.  I was anticipating the need to pivot.

As I sat through my breakfast layover in Detroit, I watched in anticipation as the flight cancellations started coming in.  Much to my surprise, my flight boarded pretty close to on-time.  And then the real adventure began.  As the snow was flying in Detroit, my plane waited in line for de-icing.  Then we waited for a runway to become available, as we were running behind.  All the while I was thinking about the snow that was about to pummel Pennsylvania.  But we got into the air about 45 minutes after scheduled.  Not bad considering the weather.  The flight to State College was a bit turbulent, but I breathed a sigh of relief as we descended and I saw Happy Valley below us.  And then we started climbing again.  Visibility was too poor to land.  So we started circling above State College, hoping for conditions to improve.  After twenty minutes or so, we descended again.  The visibility was better.  But the runway was too snowed in to land.  Back to circling.  The pilot announced that we had enough fuel for one more landing attempt, and if that failed we would have to divert to a different airport.  We continued to circle the skies as the crews attempted to plow the runway.  After about a half-hour we came in for landing attempt number three.  And we were able to reach the ground.  The passengers immediately broke into applause for the pilot and crew.

But the adventure didn’t stop there.  There is nothing quite like an airport in bad weather to bring out either the very best or the very worst in people.  The roads in State College were a mess and getting worse quickly.  The University had already dismissed for the day.  The taxis had stopped operating.  And the airport was full of people who were trying to get to anywhere other than the airport.  Some of us were my flight that miraculously arrived from Detroit.  But most of the folks in the airport were people whose outgoing flights had been canceled and they were trying to get back to wherever they came from.  The only real options to escape the airport (for those who hadn’t left a car there) were Uber, Lyft, and friends and family.  And, of course, there was an accident blocking the major path to and from the airport.  But that’s when the magic started happening.  People pivoted.  Cars arrived and picked up not just their stranded friends, but other stranded travelers heading similar directions.  Strangers were sharing Uber rides.  People in the parking lots were sharing snow brushes.  One of my fellow Detroit travelers and I taught a man how to use the Uber app.  That same fellow traveler caught a ride with me when my husband (after a long detour due to the accident) showed up with our Subaru.  Kindness was everywhere that snowy afternoon.

When faced with a situation that steers you in a different direction than you expected, you don’t really have much choice other than to go in that new direction.  This could something small, like a used textbook you planned to buy wasn’t available so you had to buy new.  Maybe you have to drink Pepsi products instead of Coke (or change your plan to something different).  Or it could be something bigger, like a major car repair, or an unexpected vacation in Detroit (which in retrospect I wish I’d had).  The important thing is that you pivot.  Pivot with grace, and keep moving on.

Procrastination Has a Price

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Sometimes procrastination can be expensive.  I discovered recently that I had become complacent about some things in my finances.

I told you last week that I had bought a new (to me) car and had used financing available through the dealership that was not my best deal.  I knew when I bought the car that I was going to refinance the loan at a lower rate with my credit union.  But I bought the car in May and didn’t get around to handling the refinance until November.  Now that it’s done, I’m paying $8 more per month, but for 6 months less than it would have been had I not refinanced.  Ultimately this is saving me more than $900 in interest.  If I had done it sooner it would have been a lot more.  But I procrastinated.

My husband used to drive for Uber.  If you’ve ever been picked up by a really big guy in a little black Prius, that was him.  But he decided to give up the driving business after spring semester.  I should have called my insurance company immediately to let them know that our vehicle usage had changed.  But I procrastinated.  I finally reached out to my insurance company last week, and now I’m going to be paying about $30 per month less for my car insurance.  Procrastination cost me $150.

I’ve long been a fan of online savings accounts.  The interest rates are always a lot higher because they don’t have the overhead expenses that bricks and mortar banks do.  I jumped onto the online banking train nearly 15 years ago with ING.  A couple of years ago ING folded and all of a sudden my accounts were with Capital One 360.  I’ve never loved Capital One, but I didn’t really think about it at the time.  No banks were paying much in interest at the time, so I just rolled with it.  But savings rates have been creeping up for the last year or so.  I decided to take a look to see where things were with Capital One 360 and was surprised to see things were not so great.  Their rates are comparable to other online banks, but only if you carry a balance of $10,000 or more.  Since I don’t have anywhere near that, I was only earning about half of what I could have been on my meager savings.  So I started shopping.  Now I have a brand new online savings account with Ally Bank (one of three options I decided were worthwhile—Discover and Amex also have great rates and good reviews).  I’ll be earning almost twice the interest I was before, and I no longer have to deal with a bank I never wanted to choose in the first place.

Finances are definitely a participation sport.  You have to put in some effort to get the best results. If you don’t….you end up missing out.  Procrastination can be expensive.  Have you been putting the necessary work into your money?  If not, it’s time to think about it!

Repair or Replace?

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This past summer I had to make a very difficult decision:  repair or replace.  It’s a decision we face all the time.  Sometimes it’s an easy decision to repair, such as when you lose a button off a shirt, or a screw falls out from your glasses.  These repairs are very easy and inexpensive.  Most people can do these repairs themselves.  Sometimes it’s an easy decision to replace, such as when your cell phone charging cord stops working or your toaster won’t toast any more.  These things would be difficult to repair but replacing them is very inexpensive.

Things get more challenging when a repair is very expensive and a replacement would be even more expensive.  Like when your refrigerator stops working, or your laptop gives you the black screen of death.  In my case it was my trusty Subaru.  It was a 2004 Forester with nearly 170,000 miles on it.  Repairs to get it through inspection would have cost about $1,000.  That’s just shy of the value of the car. And within the next two years, two more scheduled maintenance issues would be at least another $1,500.  If I just drove it around town, I may have made the decision to repair.  But that was my camping car—the one I use to tow my teardrop camper to music festivals near and far.  At the time I had a trip to Wisconsin only a few weeks away.  The thought of being stranded in some random part of the flatlands of the Midwest with no way to tow my camper because something else went wrong on my ailing Subaru was just too much for me.  I started shopping.

I was not financially prepared to buy a car.  All I had for a down payment was my ailing trade-in and a few hundred from my savings.  And I had very specific needs as the replacement needed to be towing my camper within a short time.  I knew immediately that I wanted a Subaru Outback, and my price range limited me to a used car between 4 and 8 years old.  I scoured both the local dealerships and the Internet.  I test drove a few Outbacks that would stretch my budget too far.  I made a list ranking the cars that were in play as possibilities.  I made a spreadsheet listing the pros and cons of each car in the running.  And I found perfection at a Honda dealership near Pittsburgh.  A 2012 Subaru Outback, with a trailer hitch already installed, in the color my husband preferred, with a moonroof as a bonus.  And it had less than 60,000 miles on it.  Smack dab in the middle of my price range.

I didn’t get the best deal on financing because I was pressed for time.  I had to rely on the dealership to help me get a loan on the spot.  I’m currently in the process of refinancing that loan with my credit union, which will lower my interest rate by more than 2%.  Yes…you can refinance car loans.  Keep that in mind if you ever feel like your car loan isn’t your best deal.

Am I happy about the fact that I now have a car payment?  No way.  Am I happy that I now have a reliable car in great condition that will likely carry me through the next 8 years?  Absolutely!  It’s sometimes a very difficult decision, whether to repair or replace.  But I’m feeling confident that I made the right choice.