Money Surprises - from the automated world

So, every Saturday morning I have a ritual. I open a spreadsheet I created about five years ago and start entering data on all my investments and debt.

It's quite the eye-opening experience. Luckily, I have a notes field to explain what some of the expenditures that week. This is a purposeful exercise and though a lot of my life is automatic, I prefer to keep doing this exercise. It is the one activity that forces me to capture a snapshot of where I'm at every week and it reduces the amount of money that I spend on my one spare day of the week (Saturday). After all, it's really hard to be tempted to buy even groceries on Saturday when the morning starts out with reality staring at me in the face.

This morning was quite the eye-opener. After logging into all my accounts, I realized that my mortgage, my six month car insurance bill, my yearly life insurance bill, two credit card payments, tithing and home insurance all hit me this week!

The pro is that it all happened electronically without me having to worry about a thing. The con is that I hadn't been tracking exactly when these automatic yearly payments would hit me. Thank goodness for having a job for continual money flow and for overdraft line of credits. This too shall pass.

Ah well, this means that this Saturday will be even more realistic. No need to grocery shop when I've got some food storage to use and the gas tank is already full.

There is some good coming out of this bad economy - we are all becoming a little more savvy on the money management side of things.

Now, on to logging the investments which have turned into a bad gamble at this point.

Credit Card - reducing my limit?

So, I get a letter in the mail today from one of my credit card companies stating that they are reducing my credit limit as if this is some kind of honor.

Excuse me?

This is not a good thing. Anyone that knows about FICO scores knows that the debt to credit ratio is important and they reduced it to just right above the amount I have on the card. Speak nothing of the fact that it is a 0% interest loan!

Now I have to worry that they will change their promise of the 0% interest rate and tell me after the fact.

I've heard about this on the news, but for the amount of transactions that I do, and with having a high credit score, I thought I was above the fray. Not so. It appears that all will be punished.

Right now I'm thinking that I need to move the money over to one of my other cards so they can't win at their own game. After all, the person that will be losing the money will have the most vested interest in the game and so now that they got my attention - I'm in the game. And I will win it.

Ok, serenity now Rebecker....I took the day off to blow off some work stress and this is just adding to it.

Time for the treadmill perhaps?

Kudos to Penderbrook

When a lot of neighborhoods are upping the amount of fees being paid by homeowners, I received a letter in the mail from my neighborhood association stating the following:



"Please note, that the Board felt it prudent to keep the Assessments at their current level. In this tough economic period for everyone, the Board will be looking at ways to lower spending. Landscaping will be scaled back a bit, and the annual picnic will be more modest."



I'm glad they are able to do this. Of course, they enclosed the budget and it looks like they still have a $300,000 slush fund in case of emergencies and so not sure why they would have raised the rates.



Now, let's see if they raise the monthly condo fee. That's what I'm afraid of because have a beautiful new clubhouse with all the latest and greatest exercise equipment. Hmmmm. Maybe that is why they sent out this letter first.



Either way, I'm glad that I pay $480.00 this year for the assessment and no more.