April Expenses – $1212.29

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for April.

Household $404.32
Entertainment $90
Transportation $310.62
Food $99.29
Student Loan $183.15
Travel $0.80
Phone $26.30
Health $97.81
Total $1212.29

 

My April expenses were not too bad considering I bought a car and took a vacation to Niagara Falls. If it weren’t for the six month insurance expense of $198.66 and the car registration expense of $60.50 I would have made my $1000 target.

The reported monthly total doesn’t reflect all of my personal expenses for this month. I left out the purchase price of my car since it would throw off my expense average. Also, since the car is an asset it doesn’t make sense to immediately count the entire cost as an expense. My friend JK at MyFrugalMiser has a good way of dealing with the car expense. He expenses the car depreciation monthly according to the amount of miles driven. Although this is a reasonable way of tracking the car depreciation expense I will not be doing this. Mainly, because I don’t want to bother tracking my mileage. Also, because a lot of miles will be business miles and it doesn’t seem accurate to count the depreciation as a personal expense when it is also part of the business mileage expense.

The monthly total also doesn’t reflect the extra $2383 I paid towards my student loan since including that amount in my monthly total would throw off my monthly expense average. Although, I won’t report the extra amount paid on my student loan in my monthly total I will always report it in my expense post and possibly elsewhere.

For some reason my monthly phone bill declined from the usual $26.81 to $26.30. That decline will be short-lived. I bought a new phone last month because my old one wouldn’t run the Uber app I needed to drive for Uber or the Amazon Seller app which is extremely helpful to have for my FBA business. Since I upgraded my phone I lost my grandfathered $25 a month rate on Virgin Mobile and will now have to pay a $35 a month rate. That is still a pretty good deal and I plan to write off the extra $10 a month as a business expense.

Even though we took a three night vacation in Niagara Falls my travel expense for the month was only 80 cents. That is in part because some of the vacation expense was paid in the previous month and a lot of the travel was free or almost free. For the amount of the vacation expense I did have to pay during the month I was able to get reimbursed for most of it by my travel rewards credit card.

This month my expenses should be about the same other than the car expenses. I might also have increased medical expenses since I’m guessing some of my medical bills will become due. Other than that it should be another low expense month.

Niagara Falls Trip Report

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CAM00518After the end of tax season my GF and I took a weekend vacation to Niagara Falls. If you have been reading this blog for very long then you know we did not spend very much on this vacation. Our total spent for three nights hotel, two round-trip tickets from KC to Buffalo, three days car rental, and admission to several attractions came to just a little over $200. This post will explain how I managed to keep the cost of the vacation so low.

 

The airfare was basically free. I still had lots of Rapid Reward points left over from signing up for two Chase Southwest credit cards last year which allowed me to book my flight for free. I also earned a companion pass last year which allows my GF to fly for free with me as well.  This is pretty nice since we get double the value out of my points.  The only thing I had to pay for the two round-trip flights was the tax of $5.60 on each flight each way.

The hotel room was completely free. I received 25,000 Starwood points for signing up for the SPG American Express card and meeting the spending requirement earlier this year. Three nights at the hotel used up 10,000 of those points. We stayed three nights at the Four Points by Sheraton in Niagara Falls, NY.  The room was pretty nice by my standards. It was a little smaller than our room at Excalibur, but much newer and a little fancier than Excalibur. From reading reviews of the hotel I knew to request a river view room and I’m glad I did. We wouldn’t have gotten the river view otherwise and it was a great view. The hotel had free cookies by the front desk which were delicious and a nice perk for staying there. The hotel was about five miles from the Falls, which wasn’t a big deal since we had a rental car. If we ever go to the Falls again I’d probably get a hotel on the Canadian side though.

view from our room
View from our room

As you might have guessed, our main reason for visiting Niagara Falls was to see the Falls. The first day we went to Niagara Falls State Park and did some sightseeing there. A plus to being early in the season is that we didn’t have to pay for admission to the park or for parking. Also, it was not at all crowded. The minus is that some parts of the park were off-limits due to being covered in snow and ice so we couldn’t get quite as close to the Falls as we would have been able to later in the year. Also, the Cave of the Winds tour and Maid of the Mist boat ride were not yet operating. At the park we were able to view the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls from Goat Island and we also walked on the bridges to the Three Sisters islands and observed the rapids above the Falls.

The next day we headed to Canada to observe the Falls from the Canadian side and to visit some tourist attractions.  It was also the first time either one of us had been to Canada so we were excited to visit Canada for the first time also. The previous day I had bought us two Wonder Passes which included tickets to Niagara Fury, Journey Behind the Falls, the Butterfly Conservatory, and 24 hour passes for the WEGO bus system. The tickets were $19.95 Canadian each which I think is a great bargain. The visit to Journey Behind the Falls was worth that much all by itself. This was another plus to coming early in the season as Wonder Passes are only available in the off-season. The view of the Falls the previous day was awesome but seeing the Falls from the Canadian side is much more awesome. This post is already getting unwieldy so I won’t go into detail about everything we did. I will highly recommend going on the Journey Behind the Falls tour. You actually do journey behind the Falls. There are tunnels dug behind the Falls and you get to walk through the tunnels and observe the Falls from behind the Falls at a couple of different windows. There is also an observation deck where you can view the Falls outside at a pretty close range.

We both really enjoyed our visit to Niagara Falls and will probably go again sometime. On the next visit I would plan to stay on the Canadian side since the view is much better from there and most of the attractions I’d want to see are there also. A lot of the American side seems to be run-down and the roads are in terrible condition. The next trip we would also like to explore a little further into Canada. We didn’t feel like we experienced much Canadian culture in Niagara Falls since it was pretty similar to any other tourist town. Is there anything else you would like to know about our Niagara Falls vacation? If you’ve been to the Falls before do you have any suggestions on what we should do on our next trip?

April Income – $2747.38

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Here is a breakdown of my income for April.

Online Income $105
Interest $2.53
Cash Back $45.06
Amazon FBA $159.91
Jobs $2434.88
Total $2747.38

 

April was a good month for income. It should have been a little better. I was expecting to receive two full paychecks in April. Unfortunately, I missed three days plus a couple of hours due to being hit by a car. Getting hit by a car is not good for your finances. I should get paid for that time eventually, but it will probably be a while.

My Amazon FBA income was my best yet. It is still a long ways away from being a full-time income though. I’m trying to ramp that income up and hopefully I will be successful.

My other sources didn’t contribute much and that probably won’t change this month. This month will likely have a big drop in income since I no longer have my full-time job. There is a possibility that I’ll be starting a temporary job tomorrow. Since I haven’t heard from the employer yet I’m thinking that job probably isn’t going to happen. If I don’t get the job I plan on driving for Uber to make up some of the job income. In order to keep paying down my student loans I can’t have any poor income months. I plan on working full-time hours at my various endeavors and I’m hoping that results in a full-time income.

 

 

Paying Off My Student Loans

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studentloanpayoff I have decided to pay off my student loans. This is something I’ve been considering since last year. After doing some calculations on a student loan calculator I saw that when my student loans are finally forgiven under the income-based repayment plan I would owe almost six figures in tax on the forgiven amount. Financially, I come out about the same whether I pay the loan off over the next 10 years or pay the minimum allowed under the IBR plan. It makes more sense to pay down the loan now while I’m able to make decent money though. Under the IBR plan the loan would be forgiven when I’m 67 years old and I don’t want to have six figures of tax debt at that age.

At the beginning of April I owed $138,690.66 on my student loan. Hopefully, that is the highest it will ever be. At the end of April the balance was $136,888.70. I managed to pay off about 1.3% of the loan during the month. I’ve added a widget in the sidebar to track my progress. I wish I had started paying the loan down earlier, but it wasn’t until 2013 that I was making enough to pay down the loan. I need to increase my income a lot more to be able to pay off the loan in reasonable period of time. The interest rate on my student loan is 6.875% and I incur over $600 of interest each month. That is over $7000 a year down the drain. That makes it tough to make progress. If I were on the 10 year plan my monthly payment would be approximately $1383. Therefore, I need to pay more than that if I want to have the loan paid off sooner than 10 years. That will be extremely difficult, but I don’t think it is impossible.

My main strategy for paying down the student loan is to pay everything I can towards my student loan. It is a pretty simple strategy. After paying my modest expenses, the rest of my income goes toward the student loan. Since I don’t have a steady income right now I am keeping a cushion of $3000. Once I have a steady source of income again I will reduce that cushion down to $2000. If I hadn’t bought a car in April I would have had an additional $6000 to pay towards the loan. I need the car to make money so that was a necessary expense. I’ll have a post next week on my various strategies to pay down the loan. If you have any tips on how I can pay down the loan quicker I would love to hear them.

Changes Coming…How Can I Improve Tight Fisted Miser?

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Traffic to this blog has been steadily declining the last couple of years and is a little less than half of what it was at its peak. Reader engagement has dropped to almost nothing. My post about getting hit by a car only got a couple of comments. In the past a post like that would have gotten at least a dozen comments. I’d also usually get multiple comments on almost every post. The decline in traffic and comments isn’t entirely unexpected since blogging much less of a priority the past couple of years. I’d like to change that now since it doesn’t make much sense to continue blogging if nobody is going to read my posts.

In 2012 I received a lot of criticism on a post about using the income based repayment plan to repay my student loan. Although I try not to let internet bullies bother me, the insults and disparagements did get to me. That led to fewer posts and to self-censoring my posts to avoid more criticism. I think that might have contributed to the blog’s decline in traffic and comments.

I also recently discovered a widget was redirecting some of my traffic but I don’t think that was having too big of an effect on my traffic and comments. If you have had any trouble accessing this blog please let me know and I will try to fix whatever is causing the trouble.

I do have some ideas for changes to TFM. I’m hoping the changes will actually be improvements. Last year, most of my posts were income, expense, or SWR posts. The income and expense posts will continue since I like them. I’m not sure many readers care about them though. That is why I intend to write more posts on ways to save money or money. There will be at least one post a week with actionable advice on one of those topics. The first post will be up Wednesday. I’m also planning on changing the theme and writing about paying down my student loan. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions on how I can improve this blog.