Frugality

Tight Fisted Miser Turns 10

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I published my first blog post on Tight Fisted Miser way back on January 28,2007. It is hard to believe I’ve been writing this blog for over ten years now. I’ve been blogging even longer than that. My mostly abandoned Bank Bonuses blog was started back in December 2005. That makes me one of the longest running personal finance bloggers around.

This blog got off to a pretty good start when I first published it. I was able to attract a small amount of readers right away and my audience slowly and steadily grew for the first few years of this blog’s existence. Part of that was probably due to there being a lot fewer blogs around back then. I also wrote better and more frequent blog posts back then. I never kept track of site stats, but I think this blog’s reach peaked sometime in 2011. That was also my most profitable blogging year. I made about $20,000 from my blogs that year. I made just a little over $1000 from my blogs last year. My audience and income have both diminished considerably in the last few years.

The blog is still alive though. One of these days I will get back to blogging regularly and hopefully build the blog back up to where it used to be. It won’t be too soon since I’m working now, and then I’ll be in Europe, and then I’ll be hiking. But after I’m done with all of that I just might get the blog going again. In the meantime I will at least have my monthly income and expenses reports. I started this blog to show that being frugal allows you to have a decent life without earning a lot of money. And I feel like I’m still living proof of that. I hope to keep this blog going for another 10 years. To all who are still reading this blog, thank you for reading.

November 2016 Net Worth Update

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penniesIn order to keep track of my financial progress or lack of progress I have decided to calculate my net worth each month.

My net worth as of 11/1/2016 is as follows.

Assets
Cash – $3263 (-$447)
IRA – $23,212 (-$665)
Roth IRA – $10,281(-$169)
Solo 401k – 969 (-$19)
Car/Stuff – $4400 (-$100)

Liabilities
Student Loan – $130,775 ($594)

Net Worth = $-88,651

My net worth decreased by $1997 since the last update. That was the worst decline since I’ve started tracking my net worth. The decline was mostly due to a downturn in the stock market. My student loan interest continued to accumulate as well. I am making a large payment towards my student loan this month which will almost cover the monthly interest. If the market recovers a bit I should be able to reverse the net worth decline this month. If the market declines or stays flat then my net worth will likely decline since I’m not making enough money right now to add to my investments or pay much extra on my student loan.

I’ve been using Personal Capital (affiliate link) to help track my net worth. It keeps track of all of my financial accounts and my student loan making it pretty easy to calculate my net worth each month. It is free to sign up. If you would like to sign up I’d appreciate you using my link. All blog income, including affiliate income, goes to paying down my student loan.

Personal Capital

Free Fast Food For a Year For the Third Time

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wendysLast Saturday I won free fast food for a year for the third time. If you’ve been reading the blog a long time you might remember that I also won free fast food for a year from McDonald’s way back in 2007 and 2008. As if that wasn’t enough free fast food, a friend who also won free fast food with me moved away and gave me his free fast food pass. I was eating two free fast food meals a week back in 2008.

Before I stumbled upon this latest deal it had been a long time since I had discovered an opportunity for free fast food for a year. Last week I visited a Wendy’s that had recently opened after a complete remodel and they had a flyer advertising free fast food for a year to the first 100 customers the following day. I showed up the next day and after waiting in line for about an hour and a half I received my pass for free fast food for a year. This deal wasn’t quite as good as the McDonald’s deals. This deal from Wendy’s was only for a premium sandwich or salad while the Mcd’s deals were for an extra value meal.  Considering I like Wendy’s burgers a lot better than Mcd’s the Wendy’s deal is almost as good as the Mcd’s deal.

I know I shouldn’t be eating fast food since it isn’t healthy, but I still eat it frequently.  Since I’m going to be eating it anyway I might as well get it for free. If I get a $5 sandwich each week I will have saved $260 over the course of the year. I think it is worth standing in line for an hour and a half to receive $260 worth of food.

Have you ever received any similar free food types of deals?

Saving with Spare Change Apps

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spare change appsThere have been a number of spare change apps come out in the last couple of years. Apps such as Acorns, Digit, and Qapital all have the goal of automatically saving your spare change. You have probably read a review of some of these apps on other personal finance blogs. Almost all of the reviews I’ve read seem to think these apps are a great idea. I’m going to give the other bloggers the benefit of the doubt and assume they are not just giving  the apps a good review due to being an affiliate of the apps.  To be clear, I don’t have any problem with bloggers being affiliates for the apps. I’m an affiliate myself, I just think in some cases it might keep the bloggers from mentioning the cons of the apps. I do think  there are positives to the spare change apps, but there are some significant negatives as well.

One of the main things I didn’t like about these apps when I first learned about them is that they took random amounts of money out of your account and put it into savings. I like to have more control over my money and want to know exactly how much is going from my checking account to the app account. The Acorns app has a $1 monthly fee. That might not seem like much, but when you’re saving such small amounts that could easily equate to a 5% fee or more. Digit and Qapital don’t have monthly fees which make them a better option in my opinion.

My biggest complaint about these apps is that the amounts put into savings are too small. I used Qapital for about a month and a half and it put $36 into the app savings account. Such a small amount of savings is not going to add up very quickly. It would be a lot easier to just set up an automatic transfer from checking to savings of $100 a month or whatever amount you can afford. Personally, I just send money to my IRA or 401k whenever I have some spare money and I haven’t had a problem maxing out my IRA. If instead of sending the money to a no interest savings account the apps sent the money directly to my IRA or to pay my student loan I would find these apps much more appealing. Since that would prevent the app from making money on their savings accounts I don’t see this kind of change taking place.

I realize that some people suck  at saving  money or have just never started saving money and they might find it easier to use one of these apps. Even though it is super easy to transfer money from your checking account to your IRA I know a lot of people will find it to be too much of a bother. For those people, these spare change apps could be a good deal. I think the apps might also be good for parents who are trying to teach their teens to save.

If you are already in control of your personal finances and have already developed a savings habit then I don’t think you should bother with these apps.  You could use one of these apps to save money in addition to the money you regularly save. Personally, I don’t think it is worth my time to save money with these apps since it is another account  I need to monitor and will use up more of my limited time and mental bandwidth. Since I already save (or pay down debt with) a large percentage of my income it is doubtful the apps will result in any extra money saved for me.

All of that being said I do have a Qapital referral link for those that are interested. If you sign up through the referral link and make a deposit towards your goal we will both make $5.  If you would like a referral link via email you can leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll send you a referral link.

Do you think spare change apps actually help people save money?

 

How I’m Getting 3 Hotel Nights in Las Vegas for $47.51

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Welcome_to_fabulous_las_vegas_signThis week I’ll be in Las Vegas from Tuesday to Friday. This trip was planned about a month ago. I had some airfare credit on  Southwest from volunteering to be bumped last year that was about to expire and decided to use it for a trip to Vegas. With my airfare covered a hotel room was the only major expense I needed to pay. I originally only planned to stay two nights in Vegas. Then I found out my mom had also planned a trip to Vegas with a couple of my aunts and they would be arriving the day after I left. Therefore, I decided to stay another night which will allow me to have lunch with my mom and my aunts at the airport when they arrive. I felt it was worth paying for an extra day in Vegas in order to get to meet them. I also get the value of another day to do stuff in Vegas and as I explain in this post the extra day isn’t going to cost me much.

I had several options to choose from to get cheap or even free hotel rooms in Vegas.  I have Starpoints that I could have used to book a free room at a Four Points. I decided not to use the Starpoints since hotel rooms are already cheap in Vegas I could get a lot better value from my Starpoints using them elsewhere.

I also could have used some of my Chase Ultimate Rewards to book three hotel nights. I decided not to use my Ultimate Rewards for a couple of reasons. One is that when booking through the Chase site your Ultimate Rewards only cover the base hotel cost and taxes, they don’t cover resort fees. I’d still have to pay the resort fees out of pocket. I could write a rant post about resort fees, but I’ll save that for another day. Another reason for not using my Ultimate Rewards is that although I can use them to pay for a hotel without paying anything out of pocket it isn’t really free to use them.  Ultimate Rewards can be redeemed for cash so using them to pay for a hotel basically costs you the amount you could have gotten by redeeming the points for cash. For example, if it cost me 2800 UR points to book a hotel which I could have redeemed for $28 in cash then I’m basically paying $28 for the hotel. When you add the foregone cash to the resort fees then the hotel night from using my UR points wasn’t really free. Using the UR points would still have been an okay deal, but I had a better option.

Wyndham Rewards currently has a promotion awarding you with $100 in Wyndham gift cards when you stay two times with them during the promotion period.  I stayed at a Wyndham property once during my April hike and once during my July hike and satisfied the terms of the promotion. The $100 in Wyndham gift cards is awarded as four $25 gift cards and only one gift card can be used per each hotel stay. Also, the cards have to be used by October 31, 2016.   That makes it a little difficult to take advantage of all the gift cards since you need four different stays to use up the gift cards.

I mostly solved that problem by booking one night at three different hotels. Wyndham has a lot of properties in Vegas making it easy to stay at three different hotels. It will be a little bit of a hassle to have to check in three different times, but these are small properties so I don’t anticipate a long check-in line like you sometimes have at the mega hotels. My first night I’m staying at a property that doesn’t have a resort fee and I’ll only be paying $7 and change for my room. The other two nights I’m staying at properties that have casinos and I’ll be paying $20 and change each night for my room. I could have saved a little more money by staying at non-casino properties. However, the casino properties had much better locations for my purposes so it was worth paying a little extra. After all, $20 a night is still pretty cheap.

My only other expenses will be bus, food, and gambling.  The bus will be pretty cheap. I’m going to get a 24 hour pass for $8 the first day and I might get another 24 hour pass for the last day. The max I think I’ll spend on the bus is $16. Food will be cheap since I like cheap food. I don’t consider food a travel expense since I eat out all the time when I’m at home too.  I’ll be sure to eat at In n Out at least once and I’d like to try Shake Shack while I’m there too.  I also have a couple of free buffets from playing My Vegas Slots.  If I’m not too unlucky gambling the entire trip should cost me less than $100 out-of-pocket.  Although I’m far from a master at travel hacking, I hope this shows how it is possible to travel without spending a lot of money.