Recap for the newbies - I'm a physician and get to do various online surveys for doctors only. These are not surveys available to the general public. They pay very well and can sometimes be technically difficult to complete.

April was a REALLY slow month for survey income. I collected a total of $165. I don't know why it was so low. To compare, as of yesterday, May 5, I had already collected $195 for May with most of the month still to come. April was a good month for doing surveys. I did ones totaling $615, but there is always a lag between when the survey is done and when the payment gets sent. Some of that came in during April. Most will come in during May.

So an off month for collecting income, but a good month for generating income which should show up this month.

March was kind of slow for medical surveys. I took in $300 for the month which is quite a bit below what I had been averaging. Part of the reason is I only did one of those phone-in surveys that I get the Amazon gift certificates for. I've just been really busy in the office and haven't had time to do them. Maybe April will be better.

As I posted earlier, we ended up getting a tax refund this year when I fully expected to owe a couple thousand dollars. The state refund came in this week. We owe about $900 to federal which will come out on 4/15. The net gain is $1,230.00 so I just transferred that amount to my Roth account. I figure it is $1,230 I didn't expect to have so I'd put it all into savings and help get the Roths maxed out sooner. Now I only need another $1,840 to max mine and $3,000 for my wife's.

This time to my wife's (I alternate between our accounts). Her account is in a bond fund and is one of the few bright spots in our portfolio this year, up over 7%.

Based on my usual investment breakdown, I was actually only due to put $575 in this week. Due to knowing that we don't owe anything for taxes and will be getting $1,200 back, I upped the contribution. I picked $855 because that makes the YTD total an even $2,000.

Between the 2 accounts, I've now put in $3,930 of the $10,000 limit. Next check, or possibly sooner, I'll probably put $1,070 into my Roth to bring it to an even $3,000 YTD for the account and $5,000 overall.

The numbers I posted yesterday were wrong. I had only quickly glanced at the forms from the accountant. I took them out this morning to review them and sign them and saw my error.

We are getting a state refund but we owe on the federal. We're still netting a refund but it is for $1,230, not $3,036.

That's not quite as bad, though it is still $100/month that we've overpaid.

I posted this on the forums but it belongs here, too. We have owed taxes in each of the past few years. That's fine with us as we don't believe in loaning money to the IRS all year. Due to some large capital gains and some extra side income in 2007, I fully expected to owe again. I was expecting to owe in the neighborhood of $2,000 and had set aside money for that purpose.

We went to the accountant on Thursday and got everything back today. Between state and federal, we are getting a refund of $3,036! I'm not sure how - my accountant isn't in today. I'll call him on Monday to see what happened and adjust so it doesn't happen again next year.

So I'm not glad that we overpaid our taxes by that much, but I can't complain about an unexpected $3,000 windfall.

I see so many posts about no-spend days, and I think it is great if you are reforming your shopping and spending habits. It just never occurred to me to post about my own NS days because most days are NS days. I work Monday-Friday and rarely spend money during the week. Yes, I pay household bills and things that I can't avoid, but actually going out somewhere and spending money rarely happens M-F.

I pack my lunch for work, so no spending there. My office is only 8 miles from home so I only get gas about once every 3 weeks unless we use my car a lot on the weekend. I rarely go anywhere in the evening after work - just go home.

My spending days are Saturday and Sunday. That's when we go out, eat out, do our food shopping and other shopping, take day trips, etc. So I probably average 15 no-spend days per month.

Every 2 weeks, I send money to the Roths, alternating between mine and my wife's. This week was my turn. I just sent $680 to my account. That makes $3,075 total for the year out of $10,000, so only $6,925 to go.

February was slightly light on the survey income. Thanks to flu season, the office has been very busy and I didn't have time to do some of the call-in surveys that I do. I did all of the online ones, though, except for those that I didn't qualify for. There were a couple this month on topics that I really no nothing about so I couldn't do those or qualify for them.

Anyway, my total for February was $475 which is still just fine by me. I'm certainly not complaining. I'd be very happy to average that amount monthly.

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 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.

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?

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 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.

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 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 was one of the early folks to get involved with ebay. I registered and started selling in May 1997, just 20 months after ebay came into existence. It was a natural next step for me as I had been selling collectibles since 1986 through a mail-order catalog and at antique and collectible shows in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Virginia.

Ebay was great from day one. It lowered my overhead tremendously and gave me a worldwide audience for my items. At my peak, in early 2000 when I was between jobs, I was running 100 auctions at all times. That year, I grossed nearly $14,000 in sales. My best month I took in over $2,600.

After getting back to work, I gradually drifted away from ebay. I've gone through spurts where I've gotten back into it for a couple of weeks, made some money and then stopped again. Not for any particular reason. Mostly just because I'm busy with other things. My total ebay sales in 2007 were under $1,000 and some of that was things I sold for my mom when she sold her house.

The problem is that I still have a TON of stuff that was bought for resale. Thousands of dollars of merchandise that is dead money sitting in my basement or garage. At this point, I'd be quite happy to regain the space and get whatever I can get for the stuff, even if some things sell for less than I paid for them. I'd rather have some money that I can spend or invest than have a bunch of unwanted stuff sitting around.

So with that in mind, my goal is to start listing on ebay again after the first of the year. I don't want to go nuts because I know that ebay can be time consuming. I figure if I can list a minimum of 5 items/week, that would be good. Anything that doesn't sell, goes either in the yard sale pile or the give-away pile. I'd like to have a yard sale in the spring, maybe late April or May. Then if it doesn't sell, it goes to Goodwill and I take the tax deduction for the stuff. At least we'll be rid of it in the house.

Once I get started, I'll be sure and post about how things are going and what kind of progress I'm making.

I haven't posted this month (except the survey income) so thought I'd try and come up with something to report.

I bought a new microwave (see prior report). I spoke to my friend who fixes appliances and he said don't bother. It is 16 years old and not worth repairing. We'll probably save more in electricity conservation than it would cost to repair. So I went to Wal-Mart and got a GE unit for $55. The first one was damaged when I got it home, but I exchanged it yesterday and the new one works fine. I used it to cook grits this morning. We lost a chunk of counter space, but we'll manage.

I took my wife's van in for service last week. With a coupon, that came to less than $200 which wasn't too bad at all. It recently turned 100,000 miles and is doing fine.

Some guys at my synagogue play in a weekly poker game and have been inviting me to join them for years. I finally did 2 nights ago. Everybody buys in for $20 - it is more about having fun and socializing than making big bucks. We played for close to 4 hours (way past my bedtime) and I lost a total of $7.00 which was just fine by me as I had a fun time. I can't see myself playing weekly, but I will join them from time to time.

My wife's birthday is on Monday. I'll give her her gift on Sunday, probably, since I work late on Monday. I know she doesn't read my blog, so I can share what I got her. We tend to buy each other practical gifts, but good quality/luxury versions. She is always complaining about her bed pillow but doesn't want to spend the money to get a better one and isn't sure which to get. Anytime we travel and stay at a Marriott, she always loves the pillow, so I ordered one from Marriott's website. It was $65 which is extravagant for us, but if she likes it as much at home as she does at the hotels, it will be well worth it.

My wife has been stressed out this week because they have been doing a special project at work and she has had to work lots of extra hours. She normally works part-time, a few hours a week, but this week has worked every day and a few days were 9am to 6pm which she hated, but at least we know it was just for this week. After today, it is back to the usual. The only good thing, which I appreciate more than her, is the extra money those hours will bring in. 50% of her pay goes to her 401K, so this week will give that account a nice boost.

Nothing else comes to mind right now, so I'll stop here. I hope everyone has a great weekend.

My online survey income for November was off a bit because I was out of town from the 2nd to the 12th and didn't do any surveys during that time. There is some lag time between when I do the survey and when the payment comes in, so I still collected plenty from surveys done in October and some done in November came in before the end of the month.

Anyway, total for the month was $472. Certainly nothing to complain about. That brings the total since 6/1/07 to $2,571.25.

Also, my Chicago trip was in November and that was basically an extended in-person survey/focus group. I was paid $1,500 for that.

Earlier today, someone was in the office and one of the girls asked him what he does. He said he works for XYZ collection agency (not the actual name). Two of the 3 people in the office beside me said they have accounts in collections with that company and went on to discuss it like it was perfectly normal.

If I had any accounts in collections, I certainly wouldn't be bragging about it and discussing it openly like that. I'd be ashamed of myself for allowing that to happen and not being able to pay my bills. Back when I had student loans, due to accounting problems, I had accounts get turned over to collections by mistake a couple of times and I spent hours on the phone getting those accounts straightened out as soon as possible.

Maybe I'm the strange one.

I'm not sure if it will be more trouble than it is worth, but my partner got invited to a medical conference in Chicago and doesn't want to go. We contacted them and I am able to go in his place.

The deal is they pay for airfare, ground transportation, hotel and meals. PLUS, they pay me $1,500 for attending.

So I'll be leaving a week from Monday and coming home on Tuesday. Like I said, it is a bit of a hassle, but for $1,500 I'll suffer.

What I'm really hoping is that this company does programs like this regularly and this will get me on their list for future programs. I wouldn't mind doing that a couple of times each year.

Quick recap for anyone new - I'm a family practice doctor and I regularly have the opportunity to do online medical surveys. These can take anywhere from 10 or 15 minutes to an hour to complete. Some are fairly simple. Others are pretty involved and tedious. But they do pay well. I used to ignore most of the invitations I got and several months ago, decided to start doing every one I possibly could.

For the month of October, I earned $585.00 doing these surveys. That beat last month by $5 and brings the total since June first to $2,099.25.

I got my bank statement yesterday and sat down last night to balance the checkbook. I got 2 nice surprises when I did.

First, on 9/17, our NJ Homestead Rebate (or whatever they call it now) was direct deposited. That was $956.93.

Second, I neglected to record my wife's 9/27 paycheck. That was $427.19.

So a total of $1,384.12 turned up that wasn't previously accounted for. What a nice way to start the weekend.

My wife started working in July. We filled out the 401K forms to have 50% of her salary deducted and go into the plan. The first couple of paychecks only had 3% taken out, so we figured they hadn't processed her paperwork yet. They do 3% automatically for everyone. Then we went out of town for a couple of weeks and I didn't get a chance to question it. Finally, in September, it still wasn't right, so I went online and downloaded the form again and resent it.

She got her paycheck yesterday and it is finally correct. 50% going to the 401K plus a 3% match. She only works part-time but still, 50% is a whole lot more than 3%. That should add up nicely assuming she stays at the job for a good long time.

I always say, half-joking, that every dollar she puts away for retirement is one less dollar I have to put away and that much sooner we can both call it quits.