HisHersMoney

Like so many other people now I have received my stimulus check. Unlike Hers, I apparently don’t make too much money in the eyes of the government and got the full $600. Also unlike Hers, I plan on actually going out and using that money to have some fun!

You see, I have another large financial windfall that just finally came in as well. Ninety percent or so of that is going straight towards my credit card debt and will pay off between 65-70% of it. With some other additional income that I’ll be receiving from now through July, I will pay off my credit cards completely! That will leave me less than $8,000 in debt with just under $5,000 on my car loan, which we are seriously considering selling and living with one car.

This is also the first year that I’m planning on fully funding a Roth IRA or doing any real retirement investing. So Hers has obviously gotten me on the straight and narrow path towards financial independence. It’s great that we’re going on this journey together and I can’t wait to see where it ends up. I’m sure we’ll have a big post up soon as we’re about to go ahead and combine the checking accounts and bills, which obviously is a big step and also a pain in the rear.

So back to this extra check from the government. What am I doing with it? I’m going to Atlantic City and playing poker, blackjack, and any other game that I feel like at the time with a buddy who’s moving away very shortly! If I come back with money still in my pocket, then it will go straight into the emergency fund. I’m guessing that there are many PF bloggers out there who shudder at the thought of just ‘throwing’ that money away. I consider it entertainment with a great friend.

I’m actually a pretty decent poker player. Hers doesn’t like me playing that often and I respect her wishes, realizing I was risking too much when I had as much debt as I did. I just want to point out that poker is a game of skill and I actually made an extra $12,000 (yes I claimed it on my taxes) in 2006 from playing online. In the future I will discuss how people that like to play poker can do so without risking debt and going broke through what is called bankroll management. It’s sound money advice that I think most of you will get the idea behind right away.

It’s better late than never and so I present to you my updated net worth for April courtesy of both NetworthIQ and Zoho.

As you can see, things are going well in terms of paying down the debt. That’s my biggest goal right now and then I’ll really step things up in terms of savings and retirement. Hers and I have set up a new budget for after we combine our finances and we’ve built in a pretty ambitious savings plan that I feel we’ll be able to stick with.

So I had a bit of a dilemma. You see, I am a Gamer. Essentially I get probably 60-70% of my entertainment out of video games, with about 20% from TV and the rest from going out for a few drinks with Hers and friends.

Overall, I feel this is great value as the amount I spend on video games per hour played comes out to be far less money spent than other forms of entertainment. If I spend $60 on a video game that I end up playing for say 40 hours that works out to be $1.50 an hour. Compare that to a movie at the theater which is normally say $7.50, for a total of $5 an hour for a 90 minute movie.

The key is to figure out which games will I play for that amount of time. So I spend quite a bit of time researching different websites and magazines, reading reviews and talking to other people that I play with to see what they’ll be purchasing. That’s a big key with the games coming out today as most of them are playable online against other people. This really enhances the amount of time that you can expect to spend playing the game as it is never the same game when playing against human opponents.

So I had my eye on both Eve Online and Grand Theft Auto IV. The key differences being that Eve is a purely online game and subscription based, while GTA is a single player console game with a larger initial outlay of funds. The subscription model is still a fairly recent idea when it comes to games. Everquest was the first really popular game that used it. Normally you pay about what you would or slightly less, for a normal game. After the first month, however, there is a monthly charge of anywhere from around $9.99 to $15.99 for access to the required online servers. This makes the company more money long-term but also opens up gamers to having a huge online world where they get to interact with others.

In the end I decided to get them both. I’m figuring that GTA should take me somewhere between one to two months to finish, unless I play it much more than I’m guessing I will. Then I’m going to sell it on half.com. I’ve had pretty good success with selling there recently and I figure that it should easily go for 75% of my initial cost. So if I get $45 back on my $60 purchase and play it for 40 hours (it probably will end up being more) that ends up being a little more than $.33 per hour of entertainment. Not bad.

With Eve, luckily it’s a slightly older game that’s been out for 4 years. It still has a thriving community of players, with greater than 300k subscribers. It is less than a lot of other games, with the first month coming in at $19.99 and the monthly fee after that being $12.99. So for essentially one night at the movies each month, I get a virtual world that I get to explore in a spaceship and interact with some friends. I see value in that.

In closing, just let me say that Hers does not share my ‘passion’ for video games and this obviously will be coming out of my discretionary ‘allowance’ fund.

Apparently SmartyPig is taking the time to listen to its’ customers and the blogging community. Their marketing team and even their co-founder are participating in discussions on various blogs on how to improve their service. Apparently the latest build of their website will include the ability to withdraw funds through ACH. This is great news and was the only real drawback to the site that I could see.

That allows users to save for bigger and better things. Say a newlywed couple want to start saving for a house down payment? Well instead of doing the traditional registration for household items, they could just refer friends and family to deposit into their SmartyPig account in order to help them reach their goal!

For myself, I’ll probably take advantage of the extra 5% that you receive for withdrawing to a store gift card since I’m saving for gifts anyway. The links below are generated directly from SmartyPig to give you an idea on what it looks like to show others your savings progress.

Last night, Hers and I took in a baseball game at the new home of the Washington Nationals, appropriately named Nationals Park. Luckily she gets free tickets as her place of employment has 8 seats reserved for employees throughout the season. This is good because the seats themselves (in the club level) would end up being pretty darned pricey judging from the carpeted interior where the food vendors and beer is located.

It’s never cheap when you go to a professional sporting event these days. Quite frankly they end up being about as bad as the movie theater, holding their guests captive. Just like any good consumers, we bought a program, a foam finger, and had dinner at the park. The damage just for my dinner alone was $20 for one beer (domestic), a chili-cheese hotdog, and chili-cheese fries. Now I’ll grant you that the food was GREAT, but it was from Ben’s Chili Bowl which is a D.C. institution and I could have gotten the same food I’m betting for half that price at another location.

So here are some tips for your next trip to the ballpark:

• Eat BEFORE you head to the game. Enjoy just a snack at the game
• Take public transportation to the game. This of course is so that you can also drink cheaply before the game if you must have a few brewskis.
• If you want to support your team, fine. Just purchase team apparel AWAY from the ballpark
• If there is a ‘cool’ hangout at the game where you don’t need special tickets to get to, purchase the cheapest tickets available and go there! At Nationals Park, it’s got to be the Red Loft bar in center field. It’s a great view, they’ve got other sports on TV while the game is on, and it’s just a great atmosphere.

Hey who doesn’t love free money? For a limited time, Revolution Money Exchange is offering a free $25 to anybody who signs up for a free account before April 15th. Their website seems pretty straight-forward. It’s basically paypal with a web 2.0 front-end. I just signed up using a link from Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity and they’ve already credited my account. Now I just have to wait for the bank account verification process. If you’re looking to get some $$$ and help a new blogger out, sign up using the link below to send some referral greenbacks my way.

I came across an excellent article by Paul Michael at Wisebread this morning. It asks the question “What will you do when gas hits $4 a gallon?” and responds with “I’ll pay it just like everyone else.”

And you know what? He’s exactly right. For probably 90% of this country, we’ll just suck it up, drink a latte or two less a week, and live our lives as we had been. Let’s face it, most people are not willing to fundamentally change their lives unless gas say doubles or triples from even where it’s at right now. People these days can’t live without gas, electricity, and the internet. They are staples of our everyday life.

Paul also linked a YouTube video that I found fascinating and left me wondering how long if ever that we’ll see something good come from this man’s invention?

We’ve now made it almost one full month in our new joint blogging endeavor. So far I’m very proud of the time that Hers has put into this as it really is her first blogging experience other than a few guest posts on my personal blog. I would like to start doing monthly updates of our financial progress and also the progress of this blog. I figure that with 3 1/2 weeks under our belts I would go ahead and do one now and then start trying to be on time at the beginning of each month.

We’ve been able to get one of my credit cards paid off, the engagement ring paid in full, and more than the minimum payment for the highest balance of my cards. Unfortunately, I had to pull $2,000 out to pay a retainer fee for a lawyer instead of paying down debt further. So overall, good progress and it will seemingly get better.

The site itself is receiving steady increases in traffic each week according to our install of Mint:

I’m hoping that means that we’re doing something right and that people can appreciate what we’re trying to do and our writing style. I’ve almost become obsessed with reading all of the other PF blogs out there in my newsreader each day and trying to participate as much as possible.

There should also be some semi-regular columns starting soon. I have what I feel are a few good ideas for series that will prove invaluable to us in tracking our progress and education in all matters personal finance related.

After a long weekend in the coding trenches, immersed in the inner-workings of Wordpress, it looks as though I’m finally 99% happy with our little website. There’s still a little tweak or two to be made at some point but I’m not fretting about it. So what exactly was done?

Well, with Wordpress 2.5 released, I upgraded to that. Easily done as we were already running the pre-release version here. I also had become less than happy (already!) with the look of the site and rebuilt it by modifying the freely available Xplosive Reloaded theme from Blog Oh! Blog. Make sure you try out the different color schemes by using the links on the top-right! In trying to not completely geek out on everyone and in keeping with the personal finance theme, here’s a list of the tools I used and the cost associated with them. Note that I use a Mac so these programs may not be available to you.

• CSSEdit – Shareware – 29.95€ – A wonderful CSS editor that lets you extract styles directly from websites and edit them in real-time to see the results.
• GIMP – Open-Source – Free – If you don’t need to do a ton of image-editing or if you’re just too poor (like me) to purchase Photoshop, the GIMP is an excellent free alternative.
• Yummy FTP – Shareware – $25 – My favorite FTP program ever. Performance is good. Their folder sync feature is what I use to backup my websites. Transmit is another good yet more expensive alternative for Mac users and Cyberduck is an open-source alternative.
• TextMate – Shareware – 39€ – One of the leading text editors around. Fairly expensive, in fact the most expensive piece of software listed. But if you do any coding, from HTML, PHP, C++, etc… this is a great program. The best part for me is that it interacts with YummyFTP and lets me edit files directly on the web server. TextWrangler is a free version of BBEdit for those looking to save money.

You’ll notice that I use mostly shareware or open-source software. I find the quality to be just as good if not better than that of the giant software publishers. It also normally is much cheaper and I end up supporting small business owners that are passionate about their products.

For you other bloggers out there. What tools do YOU use to keep everything up and running?

Well, if you read the post below that His wrote earlier today you will see his comments regarding the Bose Home Theater speakers that he is currently “jonesing” for. Well, let me let you in on a little secret: Prior to the current transformation that His is experiencing, those said speakers somehow found their way to our house! Now, I’m not talking about a brochure or picture of them, but the actual speakers. Delivered in a big box, direct from Bose themselves.

Paid for of course by, oh wait, they weren’t paid for, they were financed.

I utilized the Return to Sender option and told Mr UPS to take them right back where they came from and when His got home from work I informed him of his decision to return the speakers and hold off on that purchase. For some reason he didn’t remember making that decision but I think he realized that this wasn’t one of those battles worth fighting.

So, why am I telling you this? So you can see just how far he has come in only two months. It was just late January when those speakers temporarily escaped from the Bose factory only to be returned safe and sound. Now he is using some of his allowance funds to save for them. I am so proud of him!