Well how-do!

It’s been a busy month at the 99k household. Very very busy. We’ve had soccer, we’ve had t-ball, we’ve had birthday parties, we’ve had grandparents visiting from across the country… it’s been crazy. I apologize for the lack of posting!

So this month we have a few changes going on in our financial life.

First off, we applied for the American Express Blue Cash card, it has arrived and we’ve switched from using our debit cards to using that one, wherever it’s accepted. So far we’ve charged close to $3,000 for the month! I get a little nervous about it, until I remind myself that there’s well over $3,000 sitting in our checking. However, if I was getting too relaxed about entering transactions into our budgeting software (You Need A Budget) then getting that card nipped that right in the bud! I enter everything every few days just to make sure everything is accounted for in our budget, just as if it was money spent right out of our checking account.

I actually get kind of disappointed whenever there’s a place that DOESN’T use amex now! One of which is our kids’ school! That’s $1400 bucks a month right there that is not earning us cash back! Oh well, at least the kids’ school even takes credit (that’s pretty rare). Anyplace that doesn’t take amex, we use our usaa mastercard for, which earns us 2% back.

And we have also made another change - we opened a high yield checking account with Charter Bank in Albuqurque, NM.

Mr. 99k and I had been pondering a high yield checking account ever since RL commented about the Charles Schwab HY checking account, and then a week later I read this article on Bankrate on high yield checking accounts. Charter bank was mentioned in the article which lead me to investigate. I also found this forum thread on fat wallet about Charter.

Their Turbo Checking earns 6% interest, as long as you meet a few requirements:

• Make at least 10 debit card transactions monthly (excluding ATM transactions)
• Receive one direct deposit or ACH auto debit monthly
• Receive your monthly statement electronically (e-statement)
• Access on-line banking at least once a month

Taking this list from the bottom up:

Access on-line banking at least once a month - I am super anal about our finances, so this is a piece of cake. I estimate that I will probably be accessing our account online approximately 427 times a month.

Receive e-statement - done. Easy to set up, and once it’s done, it’s done.

Receive one direct deposit or ACH auto debit monthly - I have set up the Charter checking account as an external account in our usaa online banking and have already moved funds into the account, and I believe any deposits made in this way will meet this requirement.

Make at least 10 debit card transactions monthly - This is probably going to be the hardest one, as we are using our new amex for everything now. I will probably have to keep my eye on this throughout the month to make sure it’s met each month. I may pay $5 ten times on one of our bills using the debit card at the beginning of each month, just so I know it’s over and done with. We’ll see how it goes.

So, while I am very excited to be getting a great rate, here’s the other thoughts on Charter and this change:

• It took a good month to get set up. Their system is not very streamlined for getting the account set up. Both my husband and I had to submit applications, for some reason mine was not verified properly and I had to then send in a notorized copy of my driver’s license. All this took about a week. After they received my driver’s license, they sent out papers for us to sign, which we did, and sent them back. (We also opted not to receive checks (which had a fee) in that paperwork.) A week and a half after those were mailed back, we finally received online access to our account. That was last week sometime, and we still haven’t received our debit cards. The turn around time, in my opinion was way too long.
• The online checking is pretty sad. There are no bells or whistles going on here. No place to set up external accounts to move funds to and from the account. This isn’t a huge detriment as I can do it from the usaa side, or even the e*trade side, if it comes to that. When I entered in a few bill payees, it searches to see whether they can pay that payee electronically or not. The search was a little klunky, and it would have been nice if you hadn’t had to enter the address until *after* it searched. With usaa, I several of our bills have e-bill, which means the bill amount actually shows up along with the due date right there on my bill pay page. The charter online bill pay just does not seem very intuitive from a design point of view, and just isn’t very well integrated. Again, I think we will probably continue to use our usaa bill pay for the few bills we can’t automate. And finally, I’m glad I made a note of our account number and routing number because it doesn’t show up anywhere. Most banks at least have their routing number somewhere on their site if you do a search, but charter doesn’t seem to - and they don’t really even have any instructions for making deposits. Not really any skin off my nose, but like I said - no bells and whistles going on here! There’s little to draw me to this account apart from their 6% rate.
• No direct downloading with Quicken. In fact, no web connect either. Nor any sort of import capability. The download option they have is a .OFX file, which Quicken (the blood sucking money grabbers) decided to outdate as a way to force people to upgrade to newer versions.
• And finally, I’m a little perplexed on how to go forward from here. Should I just move some of our cash over to charter and keep some at usaa? Should I have our mortgage pull from usaa? or charter? what about our other bills? should I consider charter our ‘debt savings’ account only? should we put our emergency fund there as well, as it’s earning a much better rate than e*trade? I know for sure we aren’t going to bother changing our paychecks from usaa to charter. I can push money over just fine, so why mess with it. And now that I think about it, with the quicken thing, it’s probably better to keep that account as simple and uncomplicated as possible.. We’ll have to factor that in.

So, we need to sit down and work out how bills and things are going to work, and I don’t think we’re going to ditch our usaa checking entirely, but being the financially anal person that I am, I feel all squirmy not having a plan right now.

that’s all for now,
-99k

JUST THE CREDIT CARDS, PLEASE

At the beginning of march, we had $30,428 in credit card debt.

In April:

we paid a sad, pitiful, lonely $228 on our credit card debt,
$0 was charged in finance charges
for a total of $228 debt paydown.

Our new credit card debt total is $26,635.

(Sad mopey face.)

THE ENTIRE PICTURE

We lowered our debt by $1,038 for a total of $91.7K.

It wasn’t a fun month. Shall we go into it? I usually like to keep the “monthly totals” posts to just the numbers, but sure, let’s get into it.

We aim to put $1400 towards credit card debt each month. However, in April, we had some issues with the heat pump unit for the upper level of our home. We looked into getting it repaired, even had them repair it, to find that the replacement compressor was bad, put in ANOTHER new compressor, to find that the reversing valve was bad. Our HVAC company graciously offered to suck up what charges they had incurred at that point (labor to install and RE-install the compressors, refridgerant) and suggested we replace the entire unit.

We did. It cost $2500.

So April went kind of like this:
Pay minimums on the cards (and since we had just transferred balances, this wasn’t a lot).
Put what would have gone toward credit card debt toward a new heat pump.
Take the remaining needed for the heat pump from our emergency fund.

It also means that May will be spent replacing our emergency funds until it is back up to $2000 before we get back on the get-out-of-debt train.

On the bright side - I’m totally excited to see what our power bill is going to be at the end of this month! Sure, it’ll be apples to oranges, since it’s heating costs vs. cooling costs, but still! I can’t wait!

Luckily for us, May is a month where my husband gets paid 3 times instead of just two (he is paid every 2 weeks), so we should be able to build the emergency fund back up AND put some money toward debt, not to mention a couple of events going on (a birthday, family visiting, anniversary, memorial day) that need to be budgeted for.

We also have a couple of changes in how we do our finances, which I’ll detail a bit more later, but the short version is we’re switching to a high yield checking account, we’ve opened an american express blue cash to start getting better credit card rewards, and we’re going to pile up money to earn interest while paying only the minimums on our 0% cards. I’ve tweaked and tworqued my spreadsheet to include our “debt savings” so that we will be sure to stay on track and keep that money safe. We’ve already received our new amex cards and have started using them, but we’re still waiting for our new checking account to process, so more on all that later!

-99k