Here are random things to post but that don’t deserve their own post:
And overpaying the babysitter ensures that you’ll always have a high quality babysitter available. To me, parenting is the most important duty I have. If I am going to put someone in my place to do that for an evening I want to make sure I get the best there is available. If that means doubling what other families pay, that seems worth it to me.
Of course, we’d all be wise to take this as a reminder to listen even more now so we can be prepared for tomorrow.
I’ve had a lot of emails about my post on finances a few days ago. Since money is obviously an issue of interest for everyone, I thought I’d share one more tip.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been a beta-tester for Mint. Mint allows you to track all of your cards/accounts/loans online. You can think of it as Quicken online.
But what this online application is better than something like Quicken is everything is so simple. For instance, rather than downloading your data from different locations, it will all be updated every time you log in. Mint lets you track where your money is going. They let you know when you’re charged fees (and how you might be able to avoid them in the future.) And my favorite part is that your spending is analyzed and tips are offered on how you can better pay off your debts, earn more interest, or just save your money in general.
If you’re looking to get serious about tracking your money, give Mint a try. It’s now open to everyone.
A while back, my buddy and I decided to sell a website we had been working on for a couple years. At the time, the traffic was incredibly high and the ranking was in the top 80,000 sites on the internet. (That number may sound large but it’s quite hard to do.)
We listed the site on a high-end webmaster marketplace and by the end of two weeks we had sold it for much, much higher than we had ever imagined. It was a nice reward for working so hard on it. We split the money down the middle and went about in riotous living. Of course, riotous living in our colleges years would have meant bigger motorcycles and faster women. But at this time in our life it meant pay off all school/car loans and then invest the rest. Crazy I know.
At first I took my remaining earnings and just put it in my Wells Fargo Savings account. Candace and I rarely touched it and we hoped that we could just use the money to earn more money and we’d have cushion to fall back on if times got bad.
After a few months, I realized that the money was growing very slowly. As it turns out, brick and mortar savings does little for interest and growth. I thought I’d write about it now that I’ve found a much better option.
I decided to take a majority of the savings and move it to INGDirect. INGDirect is an online bank. It’s been around for years and it has a very good record of being consumer friendly and offering great interest rates. They are able to offer the higher interest rates because they don’t have the costs of buildings and branches.
The signup process is simple. We opened a Orange Savings Account that is paired with our checking account at Wells Fargo. This savings account has no fees, no minimum balances, no service charges and no hidden costs. And the best part is that the interest is high. At the time of this writing the rate is 4.5% compared to the Wells Fargo rate I had of .5%. This might not seem like much but it certainly adds up.
Let’s take an example. If you deposited $20k with Wells Fargo and came back a year later you would earn $100.23 in interest. That same amount with ING Direct would bring $918.80 in interest. Quite a difference.
Transferring money between ING Direct and Wells Fargo is simple and free because your accounts would be paired with each other. The only caveat is that it takes a couple days to move the money.
This is how we have it set and it has worked perfect.
One more thing to mention about ING Direct. Because it doesn’t have a minimum fee, you can start small. You can have $20 automatically go from your checking to your Orange Savings each month. You won’t even miss it and it adds up faster than you think.
I understand that some people have hesitancies to put money into an online bank. I think we’re at a point where it’s quite safe. It is insured in the same way as a brick and mortar bank. In fact, did you know that only 10% of money in the United States is paper currency. The rest is just digital money anyway.
I’d be happy to answer any questions if you want to know more. If you look into it and decide it’s something you want to do, I can give you a member referral and you’d even get a little extra money bonus for signing up. And before you ask, that’s not why I wrote this post. I’m just surprised at how much more you can earn by putting your money in the right place and thought you’d want to know as well.
Hope that helps.