As I was warned might happen WaMu canceled my credit card due to inactivity. I hadn’t used the card in over a year and utilized the account only for checking on my credit score. Although I was warned the card might be canceled for inactivity I decided to not use the card and let WaMu close it if they wanted to. I wasn’t going to use the card just to keep getting the free credit score. As it turns out this decision was irrelevant because my account had already been closed. I didn’t know it yet because I get all my correspondence for that card at my mom’s address. It was my newest card so the closing shouldn’t hurt my credit score much and I won’t know how it affects my credit score because I don’t have access to my free credit score anymore.
Andy Hough
Some Ways I'll Cut Expenses in 2009
The big expense I’ll be cutting is transportation because I won’t have a car. I’ll still have some transportation expenses but I think I should be able to cut this expense by up to $1000. Another expense I’ll cut is my cell phone. When my contract expires at the end of June I am not going to renew it. This will save me $35 a month. The savings will be less if I decide to add a line to my GF’s cell plan. I most likely won’t though and will just use a public phone if I need to make a call away from home. I’m also enrolling in an HSA eligible health insurance plan. This will save me about $10 a month plus any tax savings from contributing to the HSA. The biggest way I plan to cut expenses is by hiking the Appalachian trail for five months. I intend to hike on $200 a month. I’ll still have some non-hiking expenses but this will greatly reduce my overall expenses. These aren’t all the ways I’ll cut expenses but it should be all the major ones. What are your plans for cutting expenses in 2009?
Excuses
It seems lately that whenever I read a personal finance article dispensing financial advice people are quick to leave comments as to why the advice won’t work for them. Since I don’t know the people leaving the comments I don’t know if they are legitimate excuses or not. Financial advice is not one size fits all and you can’t expect what works for one to work for everybody. That being said I still think there are a lot of people just making excuses for why they can’t improve their finances. It appears when they read financial advice they think of why that wouldn’t work for them rather than how to make it work for them. They may want to improve their finances but they don’t really want to make any changes in their life.
I am guilty of this myself. I have done a poor job of meeting goals I have set for myself this year. Making excuses to yourself doesn’t work very well since you know they are BS. With that in mind I’ll be making some more goals for next year that I’ll post soon. And next year there will be no excuses.
Sold My Car – I’m Now Car Free
It had been my intention to sell or donate my car before the end of the year. I finally got around to putting my car on Craigslist today. Within an hour of listing it I had five calls from people interested in purchasing it. Maybe I underpriced it? It seemed like a reasonable price based on other listings. I’m not going to worry about whether I could have sold it for more.
The first guy to look at it bought it and paid for it with cash. He had a Toyota dealership mechanic with him so the car must not have been in too bad of shape mechanically. It worked out very well. I had my car sold and cash in my hand within three hours of listing my car. Now I need to call my insurance agent and cancel my insurance.
Eating on $1 a Day
There has been a lot of press lately about a couple who ate on $1 a day for a month. This is an interesting project that has been done by several people before. I’m not sure why this one has been getting so much attention. I did a similar project last May and spent $31.60 on food for a month. I got the idea to do so from Hungry for a Month that did the $1 diet in November 2006.
The results of both projects were similar. They were able to eat for that amount but it wasn’t easy. They also remarked that they weren’t able to eat very healthy. Looking at their menus though I think they probably ate healthier than the average American. It definitely isn’t easy to eat on $1 a day and I’m glad I don’t have to. Next year I’m going to try to spend $0 on food for a month if I can get it planned out.