Gather Little by Little

I often read The Wallet at the Wall Street Journal. A recent article asked the question, What was your biggest financial blunder? I started to think through that question and I could not come up with the answer right away. But I thought through several possibilities:

Purchasing our house

My housing struggles are well-documented on this blog, but I don’t think that was our biggest financial blunder. We purchased the house for a competitive price, we spent some money fixing it up and if we still lived in it, I don’t think we would be having any problems keeping up with the mortgage. A bigger financial blunder might have been when we moved three states away . . .

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One of the perks of being a personal finance blogger is that I get to receive copies of personal finance books to read and review. I seldom ever receive a book I don’t like, and every so often I receive a book that literally “wows” me. The Skinny on Credit Cards is just one of those books.

The skinny on credit cards

If you haven’t heard of the “skinny on series” (which I hadn’t), is a unique series of books that is inspired by the Manga literary phenomenon which combines the use of simple pictures and a story to convey a message. Trust me, they are like no other book you’ve ever read and I mean that in a good way.

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Last week, I posted about our housing situation and a large number of you took the time to respond with your thoughts and advice. I enjoyed reading through the thread and many of your comments challenged my thinking.

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When saving our money, we all want to get the best savings rate possible. In the past in order to do that I’ve either used bankrate.com or manually visited the the various online savings banks to see what their current rates are. That is until I learned about MoneyAisle.com.

Remember LendingTree.com? LendingTree allows you to provide information about the mortgage loan you’re interested in getting, and then banks bid to provide you with the most competitive rate. MoneyAisle is LendingTree for savings accounts. MoneyAisle allows you to specify the amount of money you wish to save, either as a standard savings account or CD, and banks will “bid” for the best rate. If you’re only saving a few hundred dollars or maybe even a couple thousand, you may not care about a slight interest rate variance. For larger savings though, you definitely should.

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Those of you who have been following me here on Gather Little by Little will recall that last year we decided to move up to the NC mountains. We put our home in Charlotte, NC up for sale and began house hunting in and around Waynesville, NC. Within a few weekends we found the perfect home, made an offer and inked a deal for purchasing it. Only one problem: our house in Charlotte never sold. We finally decided  to rent it using the services of a property management company.

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My wife loves working outside and gardening. As a child, she worked with her parents on their home vegetable garden and has always had a vegetable garden of some kind since we purchased our first home. Until now, we never had much room for a large vegetable garden. Prior to this year, we used alternative methods which included a container vegetable garden and square foot gardening. Those worked well of course, but never really yielded a large amount of vegetables, at least not enough for canning which is something I’d really like to do. I love canned green beans and corn.

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Okay, I am going to lay it all out and see what you think.

We own a home in another state. I am gainfully employed and making a decent wage – at least for us – in our new location. We are coming up on fourteen months since our move and we have had little or no interest in our home. When we last refinanced, our home was 90% mortgaged. We used most of the money from our second mortgage to improve the home just before the subprime mortgage crisis hit.

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This is a guest post from the blogger behind Studenomics a personal finance blog that offers common sense advice for college students and recent graduates. Studenomics is the ultimate resource for young people looking for advice on how to survive this current recession, grow their careers, manage their finances, and still be able to enjoy the weekends.

How many times in the last 8 months have you used the excuse, “I would attend church today if I didn’t have so much homework.” Well guess what? You can longer use this excuse for not attending church since college is out for the summer. I’m realistic and I know many college students won’t read the Bible daily or attend church services regularly, but there are many ways you could help your local church.

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I remember the first time I saw my father use an ATM or automated teller machine. I can still remember the name of the bank my parents used and picture the whole ATM setup in my mind – right down to the now-ancient looking digital numbers on the screen. I was quite inquisitive about how a machine could spit out cash. I mean, how much cash must have been in that metal and plastic box? Or did it print the money on the spot? Was there a tube leading from the bank vault that kept the ATM loaded with cash? Why was there a $200 withdrawal limit? Why were ATM bills so crisp? What if I watched closely and figured out my dad’s pin number?

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77 comments were made to my YNAB Pro giveaway post. I visited random.org and the random number it provided was: 14. The 14th commentator was:

Linda Jacobsen who is the winner of the free copy of YNAB Pro! Congratulations Linda!

For those that didn’t win, don’t despair.  For the next week, you can purchase a copy of YNAB or YNAB Pro and receive a 10% using the discount code: MAYDAY. This code is only valid through Monday, 5/18. You won’t find discounts to YNAB products often.

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