Disneysteve's Common Cents Blog

Yes, I'm serious. Since we had the whole thread about picking up pennies, I think this fits right in. We went to the pet store to buy some stuff for our hermit crab. One item was a new shell. The shelf tag indicated that the shells were $2.49. But the individual bags with the shells were marked $2.79. I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't have even noticed the discrepancy, but we did. I took the item over to an employee and explained the problem. She walked over to the display and confirmed what I was saying. Then she found the manager who met me at the register and did a price adjustment.

A lot of people (though maybe not those around here) might think we went to a lot of trouble to save 30 cents (plus tax), but I think mindset is the key to financial success. Frugality is a state of mind as much as it is a lifestyle.

I use an accountant to do my taxes. I know some of you feel that's a waste, but it is something that I just don't feel comfortable tackling on my own. Our return is reasonably complex. Also, I do get a significantly discounted rate because my cousin is my accountant and my father and his father started the firm that he and his brother now run.

Anyway, I have an appointment with him for March 13th so I'm kind of in financial limbo right now. I've been letting some surplus money accumulate in the checking account because I know we will owe money but I don't know how much.

Last year, we got a $1,500 state refund but owed $3,000 to federal, so a net payment of $1,500. As usual, our situation changed during the year. My wife left her job in February and didn't work again until June or July when she took a part-time position. So our income was down about $15,000 for 2007 compared to 2006. My self-employment income (surveys and ebay) was up for 2007 as were some investment returns. So I'm waiting to see how it all plays out and what we end up owing.

I've started our 2008 Roth contributions, but until I know how much cash I need to come up with for taxes, I don't want to tie up too much in the Roth. As soon as taxes are settled, I can really start attacking the Roths. I like to have them fully funded by June 30th.

I've heard a lot of ebay-bashing lately on a couple of different forums due to the fee changes and feedback changes. People are saying they will stop selling on ebay and switch to Craigslist or have a yard sale or just give the stuff away and take a tax deduction.

I've been selling on ebay since 1997 so I've seen lots of changes over the years, but I still think they've got the best deal in town.

I had taken a break from ebay for a while, but started selling again at the end of December. Since then, I've listed 25 items. 22 have sold, so an 88% success rate. Last week, I was 5 for 5 with all items selling.

I listed another 5 items last nite. I had 1 watcher within 15 minutes. By this morning, I had 1 item with a bid and a total of 7 watchers on 4 of 5 items. By this afternoon, I had 3 bids on 2 items and still had 7 watchers. So odds are good that at least 4 items will sell this week.

I don't know of any other venue where I can get that kind of exposure and that type of response to selling my stuff. Yes, fees have gradually increased and it isn't as lucrative as it once was, but it still beats everything else out there.

As per my last post, my wife and I returned to my college this weekend to attend the dedication of the theater lobby in memory of my former theater professor and director.

A large contingent of my college theater friends were able to attend, about 16 of us all together. It was really wonderful to see everyone and spend some time together catching up on each other's lives. It has been way too long since we got together.

After the show last night, one couple set a date for a party at their house on July 5th, so we are all looking forward to that and more time to spend together with old friends. Keep in mind that we graduated college between 1984 and 1987 so we all go back quite a few years at this point.

Financially, the weekend wasn't too bad. The hotel last night was $105 and included breakfast this morning (7 of us met for breakfast since we were all staying in the same hotel). DW and I spent about $15 for lunch yesterday afternoon. We all went out last night after the show. That was another $20. Add in gas and tolls for about another $20. So I guess the whole weekend ran us about $160 and it was worth every penny to see everyone.

Ok, not a class reunion, but a friends reunion, which is far better. In college, I was active in the theater department. Almost all of my college friends are fellow theater people. For many years after college, we continued to get together socially a few times each year. In recent years, though, with jobs and kids, it hasn't happened. I haven't seen most of these people for a few years.

Anyway, tomorrow evening the school is dedicating the theater lobby in memory of our former director (who we all worked under). They are having a reception and ceremony, followed by a show. Almost the whole group of my friends will be there. I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone.

I just sent $570 to my wife's Roth. I send a certain amount of each paycheck to our Roths, alternating between mine and hers with each check. I like to have the Roths fully funded by June 30th each year. Actually, at the rate I'm going, I won't hit that, but I can already see some surplus building in our account so I'll probably make an extra contribution within the next couple of weeks to keep on track for that deadline.

My latest auctions ended last night and 5 of 5 sold for a total of $39.97. Not too shabby and that's 5 more things not taking up space in our home. That makes 22 sales so far since I started selling again at the end of December. Total sales have been $171.85. And, more importantly, 22 items are gone from the house.

I actually didn't list anything last night. We had been up since 3am to get my daughter to her ski trip and then we were in Atlantic City all day. I was exhausted and was in bed just after 9:00 which left no time for ebay stuff. I'll prepare auctions during the week and list again next Sunday.

I realized it has been a week since my last post. Not a whole lot has happened financially, though earlier tonight I transferred $1,000 from the money market in one of my Vanguard IRA accounts to purchase more shares of the international fund. I've been gradually doing that and had forgotten the past couple of months. I want to build up my international exposure which is much too low currently.

DW and I are going to Atlantic City tomorrow. DD is going on the youth group ski trip - her first time. She'll be snowboarding, not skiing. Hopefully, she'll let the instructor work with her and take instruction well (not always her best attribute). I'm looking forward to the day as I haven't been to the casino since the day after Thanksgiving. We're also meeting friends for lunch while we're there. They spend most weekends down there.

Our portfolio has recovered a bit from it's low point a couple of weeks ago. I'm hoping that the market will stabilize, though I'm still taking advantage of buying opportunities so staying flat isn't such a bad thing.

I'm still doing my doctor surveys - just did one tonight for $100 and got a check for $30 on Thursday from one I did last month.

Haven't done my taxes yet. I've pretty much got all the paperwork together. I just need to tally up my ebay sales for the year. Then I'll give my accountant/cousin a call to make an appointment.

Speaking of ebay, I have continued to list 5 items/week except for the week before and week of the Superbowl. Of my current auctions, 3 have bids and 1 other has 4 watchers so will probably sell. Only one looks like it may go unsold as it has no bids or watchers. They all end tomorrow evening.

I guess that's all for now.

I do most banking online, but for some reason, I have continued making our Roth contributions to Vanguard by mailing in checks with the little deposit slip things that you tear off the bottom of the statement.

It finally occurred to me that I could probably do it online. So I just logged in to my Vanguard account and, sure enough, I was able to make a purchase toward my 2008 Roth by a simple electronic transfer from my bank.

I usually add to our Roths every 2 weeks after depositing my paycheck. Last year, it took 8 deposits to fully fund both accounts. Since the max is higher this year, I figure it will take 10-12 deposits so I will have that many fewer checks to write and mail. Very simple and safer too.

Quick recap - I'm a physician and get frequent invites to do online, telephone or in-person surveys.

For January 2008, I collected $670 in survey income. So I will certainly keep plugging along and doing these surveys. I earned about $5,400 in 2007 this way. At the rate I'm going, 2008 will hopefully be even better.

I post monthly about how much I've made doing medical surveys. Well, I'm not the only one in the house doing surveys. DW is signed up with mysurvey.com and gets many invites, some for quite a few points at a time. A few weeks ago, one survey asked if she would be willing to participate in a telephone interview for a $100 check. Of course, she said yes, though she was a little skeptical if it was legit. They did call and do the interview and the check arrived today! She also redeemed her points about a month ago for a $20 check, so that's $120 she has made so far from them. Not bad at all. Thanks Ima for getting us the info to sign up.

I've always resisted opening new bank accounts just to snag bonuses, but I think I'm going to give it a try. I just got mail from a local bank offering me $50 for opening a no minimum, no fee checking account. I figure I've really got nothing to lose by sticking $100 in their bank for however long I'm required to have it there to claim the $50.

I may even do the ING thing for $25. I don't know how many of those offers I've passed up over the years.

Does anyone else do this?

It has been one month since I started selling on ebay again. I listed my first items on December 27 when they had a listing fee sale and my most recent auctions ended a short time ago. I figured that was a good time to tally up how I'm doing so far.

Just to review, I've been a collectibles dealer since 1986 and sold actively on ebay from 1997 until a few years ago. I even sold full-time back in 2000 when I was between jobs for a while. Then I got away from it but still have a basement full of stock to sell. So one goal for 2008 was to start selling again, mainly to get rid of stuff and free up space. Any money made will just be a bonus in the process.

So after one month, I have had 17 items sell and 6 items not sell. My sales have totaled $131.88. I haven't totaled up the net profit yet, but as I said, the main thing is that there are now 17 fewer items taking up space around here. I'd say that was a good month.

I normally do my listings on Sunday night, but I'm going to skip listing today because I don't want things ending next Sunday when everyone is tied up watching the Superbowl. I may list tomorrow night instead.

We were, unfortunately, awake about 5:30 this morning. I've had a cold and was all congested which got me up. That in turn woke DW. Just as we were lying there talking, we suddenly heard a loud CRACK. One pane of the window next to the bed had cracked. I got up and looked outside to see if anyone was out there and had thrown something, but it was deserted. Plus, it was the inside pane that had broken. The outside pane was still intact. So it couldn't have been a rock or bird or anything like that. It just broke on it's own. Now I have to track down somebody to replace the window. We actually have another pane downstairs that cracked a while back that we never repaired, so that's 2 windows that need replacing. $$$

In a previous post, I told of my great laser printer bargain last week. The printer sat untouched until last night when I finally hauled it up to the computer room to unpack it. I also went online and ordered toner cartridges on Amazon. I proceeded to rearrange the workspace to accomodate the new printer, carefully unpack it and set it up. Then I put the CD in to load the printer software only to discover that HP doesn't provide Macintosh support for this model. I checked their website and it said the same thing. So this weekend, the printer is getting repacked and returned to the store. So much for my bargain.

Even though I'm pretty good at giving financial advice and talking about what we all "should" be doing, I'm often as guilty as the next guy about not actually taking action and doing those things we talk about.

This has been on my mind a lot recently. DW isn't thrilled with her job and may decide to go back to SAHM status at some point. Even though most of her income goes to savings, some of it still comes home and gets spent. We already took a big cut when she went from her last job to this one without really changing much but losing the current income will eventually have some impact.

A year or so ago, I met with my insurance broker and he ran quotes for me and showed that we could lower our life insurance premiums by switching companies, but I never followed through so have maintained the more expensive policies.

Then a couple of months ago, I got an online quote from another auto insurance company that would have saved us about $36/month, but never did anything with that either.

Now, we've had the discussions in the forum about mortgage rates falling and we will probably benefit from refinancing again if rates fall a bit more in the coming months. Maybe by summertime, it will make sense and save us somewhere around $50/month.

Add to that the fact that the last payment on DD's braces is in May and we'll have an extra $150/month free from that.

So if I get off my butt and redo the life and auto insurance, refi the mortgage and add in the braces money, we could see over $200/month extra in our budget. So I guess that's my goal for this year.

We had a very nice weekend, got to relax some, had some good meals, discovered a great hotel (it's not new, but we've never stayed there before) and bought some needed and not-so-needed stuff.

I did get 3 pairs of pants and one dress shirt, which were the main items on my shopping list. DD and DW each got some clothes. At the new Disney outlet, we picked up a few items for our collection and DD got some clothes. We also picked up a nice Royal Doulton Winnie the Pooh piece. They had a lot of their Disney items on sale for 70% off which made normally pricey items much more reasonable.

We used our Isaac's restaurant gift card toward lunch on Saturday. And my mom treated us to a couple of meals and paid for some of our purchases. She's been enjoying her much lower cost of living since selling her house and moving into an apartment. She also has been not feeling well lately and is finally doing better so was really glad to be able to make the trip with us. We all got along very well this weekend with only a couple of minor issues. DD (our almost teenager) behaved herself very well which made the weekend much nicer for everyone.

We decided to do a weekend get-away tomorrow. We're heading to Lancaster, PA for 2 nights. We'll do some outlet shopping, eat at our favorite restaurant (one of my patients gave me a gift certificate for the holidays), go swimming (hotel has an indoor pool) and whatever else crops up. My mom and cousin are joining us, too. We'll leave tomorrow after we're all home from work and come back Sunday night.

Hopefully, I'll come back with a few new pairs of pants. That's the main thing on my shopping list.

Our daughter is having her Bat Mitzvah in September. My plan all along has been to print the invitations, the placecards, the thank you notes, etc. Rather than paying a professional to do that, I reasoned that I could spend about the same amount, or less, to buy a color laser printer, do the work myself, and be left with the printer when we're done.

So for about 2 years now, I've been scouting the color laser printer market. At first, they were running around $499 - out of my budget. Then they drifted down to $399 - better, but still too much. Finally, they started showing up for $299 and recently those have been going on sale for $249. Since we are nearing the time when I'll need the printer, I was getting ready to bite the bullet and buy one.

Last Sunday, one of the circulars in the paper had the model I've been looking at. They are selling a factory refurbished model for $69.99!! So off I went to the store last night, expecting to hear that they only got one and it was sold already. I was pleasantly surprised to see they had several on the shelf.

One is now sitting in our living room waiting to be installed. They were out of the cable I needed and I did not yet invest in the toner cartridges as I wanted to search the best price for those online - they are costly (over $330 for a set of genuine HP or about $260 for a set of compatibles). I also need to clear off the space where the printer will sit as they are fairly large.

The Best Way to Make Your Next Vacation Really Special

If I had to give one single tip for folks to consider when traveling, it would be to think “outside the box” and by box, in this case, I mean hotel. To the average traveler, hotels are the only accomodations they consider when planning a trip. Not that there is anything wrong with hotels - I spent at least 17 nights in hotels in 2007 personally - but there is a wide range of non-hotel options out there. You can rent condos, townhouses, single homes, timeshare units, ski chalets, cabins and even tree houses using the internet as your guide.

As many of you know, I go to Walt Disney World in Florida once a year. We haven’t stayed in a hotel during those trips for many years. We have stayed in a variety of spacious condos, townhouses, single homes and timeshares often spending a fraction of what a simple hotel room would have cost us and getting far more in the process.

In 2006, we traveled to Stowe, VT and spent a week in a wonderful ski chalet with all the amenities of home and more (we don’t have a deck and definitely don’t have a large hot tub on it).

So how does one find these non-hotel properties? As usual, the internet serves as the ultimate source of knowledge (that’s what my family calls it). Start your journey at http://www.vrbo.com. VRBO stands for Vacation Rentals By Owner. It is a site where owners list homes for rent all over the world.

Do you want a tree house in New Mexico? Here you go: http://www.vrbo.com/7184

How about a luxury ocean-view condo in Maui?
http://www.vrbo.com/7999

Perhaps you want to throw another shrimp on the barbie, mate.
http://www.vrbo.com/58496

And here’s that chalet we rented in Vermont.
http://www.vrbo.com/45484

You will often find that renting a home is no more expensive than staying in a decent hotel, or even cheaper, plus it gives you a whole different experience of the area. One Holiday Inn looks pretty much like the next, but no two homes are ever quite the same. Rental homes are often located right in the middle of town so you get to live like the locals live, shop in non-tourist locations and dine where the full-time residents dine. That can also help you save money on your travels.

So the next time you are planning a trip to a new locale, or even one you have visited before, check out vrbo.com and choose to stay in a memorable place with some character and history and ambiance rather than some generic hotel where you might need to check the brochure at the front desk to remember what city you are in.

I currently have 6 items listed on ebay. Between them, they have 14 watchers but only 2 bids. Folks, if you are interested in the item, place a darn bid. Don't wait to see what everyone else is going to do. Be bold. Take action. Make the first move.

We have 2 light fixtures at our front door, 1 on either side. 1 bulb burned out a month or so ago and the other died this week, so it was time to replace them. I've tried various bulbs in those fixtures and found the Phillips Halogen bulbs seemed to last the longest. I went over to Home Depot today to buy a pair of those. After I found them, I looked at the CFLs to see how they compared. For the same price, I was able to get 2 CFLs instead. The Phillips bulbs are rated for 2 years of life at 4 hours/day. The CFLs are rated for 9 years of life at 3 hours/day. So assuming those estimates are accurate, the CFLs should last more than 3 times as long and use far less electricity. All for the exact same cost as the traditional bulbs. Sounds good to me.

The last payment on my daughter's braces will be in May. That means that starting in June, we'll have an extra $150 month available. I'm trying to decide if I should put all of it towards savings or if I'll "splurge" a little and just put $100/month to savings and leave the other $50 out for whatever comes along. I'm kind of flip-flopping back and forth on that decision. Obviously, we aren't missing the money now, so putting in all in savings makes perfect sense. I'm working on getting our home equity loan paid off by the end of 2009, so I'll probably put it toward that, which will then free up another $218/month. At that point, I will probably start making some extra payments on the mortgage. I'd like to get that paid off by age 60, which means I need to shave about 3 years off the current repayment schedule.

My latest auctions just ended a short time ago. So far, in my efforts to get back into doing the ebay thing on a regular basis, I have listed 11 items and sold 7, so about a 64% success rate thus far.

As per my plan, I also just listed 5 more items. I also opted to relist one of the items that didn't sell today with a lower starting price. It is a very nice piece, but happens to weigh about 4 pounds so postage is costly. I'm hoping the lower price attracts a buyer.

My wife has been bugging me for a few months about rearranging our family room to put in a computer desk so that we could have a computer set up on the first floor. There were a few reasons for this. One, we use the internet constantly for all kinds of information, recipes, shopping, games, etc. and it is often a pain to have to run upstairs for every little thing. Two, our daughter is 12 now and spending more time online and we'd like her doing that in a common area so we can keep an eye on what she's doing. Also, when she is doing school work, we can be there to help her without running up and down the steps every time she has a question.

We finally found a desk we liked the other day and got it at staples.com. It was $30 cheaper online than in the store and shipping was free. It came yesterday and we assembled it this afternoon. I'm sitting at that desk typing this entry on our laptop which is now set up on the new desk.

This is only vaguely a financial topic, though I did post about how we saved that $30 by shopping online instead of in the store. Also, we often use the internet to save money in other ways and having even easier access to it can only help with that.

Now, we just need to buy a printer and a little desk lamp and we'll be all set.

My first batch of 6 auctions ended today. 4 of 6 items sold for a total of $13.31. It isn't much, but 3 of the 4 items that sold are things that cost me nothing, so that's not so bad. Also, I do add a small handling fee to my shipping charge to help cover materials and auction/Paypal fees.

I did screw up one of the auction listings, though, and didn't discover my error until today. I somehow listed the wrong postage amount, undercharging by a few dollars. I'm going to try and repackage the item more compactly so it won't cost as much to ship. It will still be more than what I charged, but hopefully not too much over.

I have 5 remaining active auctions that end on Sunday. As of right now, 1 has a bid, 1 has 2 watchers and 1 has 3 watchers, so they'll probably sell. I plan to list 5 more items every Sunday.

I also used ebay to purchase some shipping supplies today. A lot of my items get shipped in 6x9 bubble mailer envelopes. I bought 12 at Staples a while ago but I'm going to need more. I checked Staples.com and they charge 13.98 for 25. I searched ebay and was able to get 25 for $10.10. For all you ebayers out there, anytime you need supplies - envelopes, bubble wrap, tape, etc., check ebay first. The prices can't be beat.

As I posted earlier, one goal for 2008 is to start selling on ebay again, something I used to do a lot and have gotten away from.

On 12/27, I took advantage of the 10-cent listing sale and posted 6 items. Then on Sunday, 12/30, the day I traditionally do my ebay listings, I added 5 more items. So I now have 11 auctions going - 6 end on the 3rd and 5 end on the 6th.

As of right now, 3 items have bids. A couple more have watchers. So I'm up and running and on my way. I haven't really set any monetary goal for my sales. I'm really more interested in decluttering and freeing up some space in our basement. The money will be a nice bonus, though.

For the new folks... I'm a family practice physician. I have the opportunity to do various surveys, both online and in person, on medical topics. These are not available to the general public. I also do Pinecone, Harris Polls and AOL Opinion Place.

My survey income for December set a new personal record (not counting the $1,500 focus group in November). I earned $668.75 for the month.

That brings the total since 6/1 to $3,240 and for the year, just over $5,400! I didn't get serious about doing the surveys until June, so I'm looking forward to seeing what I can do in 2008.

Happy New Year to all.

As per my earlier post, one goal for 2008 is to start selling on ebay again, partly to make a few bucks and partly to declutter the house.

I was going to wait until after the first of the year to start, but then I saw on one of the boards that ebay had a 10-cent listing fee sale today, so I figured I should take advantage of that. I listed 6 items. Normally, the listing fee would be $.40. Today it was $.10. So I saved $1.80 by listing those items today.

Now I just have to sit back and watch and hope they sell. Anything that doesn't sell will either go in the yard sale pile or to Goodwill. No matter what, it will be gone soon.

As I start doing the year-end financial stuff, one thing I always do is tally up the credit card charges.

Marriott Visa: $36,068.81
AOL Visa: $3,206.25
Discover: $1,176.39
----------------------
Total: $40,451.45

As far as rewards earned, we got 41,384 Marriott points. That's enough for up to 7 free nights with some points left over. At $80/night, that's about $560. We got $40 cashback from Discover. We haven't redeemed our AOL reward points yet but they're worth a few more dollars, so total rewards are a little over $600 for the year. We also got one free hotel night from Marriott that we get every year on our account anniversary. That saved us over $200. We used that when we went to New York for our anniversary in July. So really, our rewards were over $800.

I was a little surprised to see the total is nearly $9,000 more than last year. Looking back, I can explain most of that. My wife had surgery in 2006 that I didn't pay for until 1/07. That was a couple thousand. She then had surgery again in 07 that cost another $800 and some. We also started planning my daughter's Bat Mitzvah which is in September and gave deposits to the caterer, the DJ and the photographer totalling a few thousand dollars. Add in a couple of costly car repairs on our two 100,000-plus mile cars and that accounts for almost the whole $9,000.

All in all, not so bad. No late payments. Every bill paid in full each month. Zero interest charges. And only the Marriott card has an annual fee ($65) but as you can see, it is well worth paying for what we get in return (over $760 in free stays earned this year).

I realized last night that I started this blog a year ago. I registered it in October but didn't actually post until December.

Thanks to all who have read it (nearly 42,000 site visits) and commented on my postings. I enjoy doing it and it is nice to know folks enjoy reading it.

Happy holidays to all. Have a wonderful, safe, healthy and prosperous New Year!!