Financial stuff

My wife and I are a one car family. When I met my wife last year she didn’t have a car and it was easy for us to stick with just one car after we got married. Since I mainly made my money from blogging I didn’t usually need to be anywhere at a particular time and could take my wife to and from work. Since then we have started working together which makes it even easier for us to be a one car family. There are both benefits and drawbacks to being a one car family though.

The main benefit to being a one car family is saving money. We only have to pay car insurance, registration, licensing, and personal property tax for one car rather than two. We are able to avoid taking out any car loans that might be needed to purchase a second car. Having just one car keeps our automotive expenses at roughly half what they would be if we had two cars. You don’t have to have an aat qualification to see that this is a good deal.

The main drawback to only having one car is when we need to be different places at the same time. This doesn’t happen too often though and we’ve always been able to plan ahead so that we can both be where we need to be. Another drawback is when we need to take the car in for repairs. Then we need to either borrow a car or hang out at the repair shop. The repair shop we usually go to has wi-fi and has pretty quick service so this hasn’t been too much of a problem either.

Most families don’t have as ideal of a situation as ours when it comes to being a one car family. It is worth examining whether your situation would allow you to be a one car family. The large savings are worth the few drawbacks.

A few years ago you could easily make a few bucks by getting a 0% credit card deal and putting the money in the bank at 5% but those days are gone. You are lucky to get 1% on your money now. And the credit card companies seemed to catch on to this trick and now have uncapped transfer fees of 3% to 5% to get your 0% money. I recently received a deal for 0% money for one year with only a 2% fee and decided that was good enough for me to make some money. Please note that I’m not recommending that anyone else do this.

The cost of the credit was $160 for $8000. My plan is to use about $3000 of this money to take advantage of bank bonus offers. I’ve already made $115 from a local bank bonus offer. I’ve also received the $25 Betterment.com bonus. A US Bank $50 bonus should be arriving shortly and I’ll receive another $50 bonus in one year. A $100 Sharebuilder bonus and $25 Discover Bank bonus are in the process of being earned. I still have about $1000 left to take advantage of other bonus offers. The bonus offers by themselves will cover the cost of borrowing the money.

Another $3000 of this money went into the stock market. I’m not a market timer but with the stock market dropping so much Thursday it looked to me that I could get some dividend stocks cheap. I put about $3000 in three stocks today and the stocks are already up. My plan it to keep the stocks and pay off this portion of the money from my monthly cash flow. If that doesn’t work out I’ll just sell one of my losing stocks for tax loss harvesting.

I’d like to use the remaining $2000 to buy another website. That might be a little crazy since I’m having trouble keeping up with the blogs I already own. Websites can be one of the best investments. When I bought MyRetirementBlog.com I was nervous about the amount of money I spent on it but I made about 75% of the purchase price back in the first year. The earnings have gone up since then and I’ve probably made more than the purchase price this year alone. If I can’t find a reasonably priced site I’ll just pay down the credit card loan or look for other investment opportunities.

If you have a personal finance blog or related website for sale or know someone who does please contact me.

Those who have been reading this blog for a while may remember that I loaned a friend money last year. I am happy to report that the loan was paid off this week. This was quite a bit later than the original schedule. I could have received the loan payoff this spring but I knew that my friend was struggling financially so I let the payment slide until he was better able to pay it. As a financial transaction the loan wasn’t a success but as a favor to a friend it worked well. He has done plenty of favors for me over the years so I was happy to give him a loan. The funny thing about this loan is that my friend probably makes about three times as much money as me and is single and yet I’m the one loaning him money.

One of my favorite shows on cable right now is Storage Wars. The show makes bidding and buying storage units look pretty interesting so I decided to check out some storage auctions myself. The first auction I went to was during a weekday and in a lower-income part of town. I would guess there were about 25-30 people there but only about five people who actually bid on anything. Most of the units didn’t look to be worth much. It made me wonder why people would pay to store trash. I’d guess in most cases just a few months rent on the unit would be more than the items stored were worth. Most of these units went for less than $100 and there were a couple that nobody wanted. There was one unit that went for about $1000 but I didn’t see the value. I mainly wanted to spectate at this auction and didn’t buy anything but if there had been a super bargain I would have bid.

The second auction was on a Saturday and fairly close to where we live which is basically a suburb. There were at least a 100 people there. I heard one of the people comment that he had never seen more than twenty people show up to an auction before. It seems that the TV shows are making a lot more people interested in self storage auctions. This auction had much nicer units but they also sold for a lot more. One of the units was packed with Hot Wheels, old metal toy cars, Nascar collectibles, and other collectibles. It went for $2000 and I’m sure the stuff in it was worth more than that but it was more money than I was willing to risk. The only units that were in my price range didn’t look to be worth what people were bidding so I once again didn’t buy anything.

I think there is some money to be made buying self storage units at auction but their recent popularity is probably going to make it harder to find good deals. There are several things that kept me from bidding on any of the units. Many of the units had a lot of stuff that would just need to be thrown in the trash. You can’t just dump it in the storage facility’s trash bin, you have to haul it off. I don’t think my apartment manager would like me throwing a truck load of trash in the dumpster. Also most of the units have big items in them. I’d have to find someone to help me move them and I would need to borrow a truck. And once I had the stuff on the truck I’d have to find somewhere to store them because the stuff wouldn’t fit in our apartment. After I had the stuff moved I would still have to sort through it, figure out which stuff is valuable and where it can be sold. All of that would take a lot of time and effort and I’m doubtful the return would be worth the investment.

I might check out some more auctions just out of curiosity but unless there is a small unit with really valuable stuff going for really cheap I won’t be buying.