Tips and Tricks | Coinage Personal Finance

Preparing Financially for the Holidays

Coinage Team — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 13:38:22 +0000

Between office holiday parties, potluck dinners, buying gifts for eight additional family members you only see once a year, and generally higher ticket items being gifted to your loved ones, preparing for the holiday season can be a stressful financial time.

In 2016, shopper’s in the US plan to spend on average $929 dollars this year on gifts according to American Research Group, all while 55% of us are living paycheck to paycheck.

Where are we planning on getting this extra $929 bucks!?

Hopefully, the answer for all of our readers is preparedness. I mean, every year we all know the holidays are coming, it’s not a surprise expense, so surely we don’t wait until the paycheck before to “get prepared” do we?

In our household, it’s real simple, we tally up the number of those near and dear to us and set a budget for each person, multiply, divide by the number of paychecks per year, and boom, budget. Here’s an example:

12 loved ones x $50 per person = $600 for loved ones

Add in a little love for the wife and I…

2 x $150 = $300 for ourselves

So that’s $900 in gifts for the holiday season, now to budget:

$900 / 24 paychecks per year = $37.50 per paycheck

And there you go, definitely not down to the penny, but come every holiday season, we’re prepared to shower our family with gifts, and you can do this in advance with a little foresight.

Need an extra little budget hack? In our budget, we just take this number and double it in a category appropriately named “Gifts”. Why? Birthdays! We figure, all the folks we buy for during the holidays, we’ll buy for on their birthday, why not be prepared!?

If you’re one of the readers that isn’t prepared this year(tisk tisk), we’d recommend these two guides to help you along your way:

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The Truth Behind 0% Interest Credit Cards

Coinage Team — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 14:16:59 +0000

The Odds are NOT in Your Favor

Ever stopped to wonder why companies are so happy to offer you 0% interest credit cards? Or why they are so pleased to let you borrow hundreds or thousands of dollars? All while you walk away with their product?

Is it because they want you to have the latest Super HD TV, or because your old couch doesn’t quite “go” with your coffee table?

I’m afraid to say, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. They aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. The truth is quite the opposite, they’re counting on you failing.

Underneath all the marketing glam surrounding 0% interest credit cards, is a term known as deferred interest. Deferred interest can be an amazing tool for building credit, smart debt payoff, and getting through unforeseen emergencies, but it can also be a sneaky threat to overcome.

Lets say you sign up for a 0% interest for 18 months offer through your local electronics store. You get approved and buy the latest and greatest TV for $3,000, all at 0% interest! Win-win right?

For the electronics store, definitely. For you, maybe…

You see, if you don’t pay off the $3,000 within the 18 month promotional period, YOU GET CHARGED WITH 18 MONTHS OF INTEREST!

Now, you’re $3,000 TV costs $1,000 more, not to mention the interest charged on the remainder of your payoff plan (likely another $1,000).

And it happens ALL THE TIME.

The electronics store would rather you NOT pay on time. They get their profit on the TV, now they make a profit on lending you money. Instead, you’ll find uncharacteristically low minimum payments. This ensures you won’t pay off the balance within the promotional period.

The game is stacked against you, but you CAN win if you’re prepared.

Winning the 0% Interest Credit Card Game

Before you ever sign up for a 0% interest credit card offer, or spend a single dollar, make sure you can afford the item. You should base this on the amount of the item divided by the promotional period, NOT based on the minimum payment. So in the example, we wanted a $3,000 TV over an 18 month promotional period, that’s $167 per month.

If you can work this $167 in to your budget, good news, you can likely beat the system. That means a $3,000 TV with no added interest. If $167 per month is outside of your financial reach, you may want to reconsider. Unless of course you love supporting your local electronics store.

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Track Your Holiday Spending with Smart Notes

Coinage Team — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 16:32:49 +0000

The holidays bring a unique complication to smartly managing your finances. Budgeting for things like bills is easy, you just tally them up and you’re good to go, but things like fancy dinners and gifts are a different story.

One of the best tools you have for managing your personal finances is your own history. My family uses the hash tagging feature of Smart Notes to hashtag all of our holiday spending as either #thanksgiving or #christmas.

We do this every year so we can easily look back at the previous year, and see what we spent last year, and use that as a baseline for the new year. A quick search for #christmas lets us know how to budget for the year.

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Check Coinage Status

Coinage Team — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 15:31:44 +0000

Pro tip! You can check the status of Coinage at any time by visiting our status page.

The post Check Coinage Status appeared first on Coinage Personal Finance.

Money Management

Coinage Team — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 14:32:46 +0000

Money management seems to be a phrase whose meaning is getting lost with the times. Technology, as impressive and convenient as it is, some times takes away from the true intention of a thing. With direct deposits, automatic drafts, online bill pay and debit cards, we barely have the need to look at our bank accounts.

Gone are the days when we had mental awareness of our finances because we actually pulled cash out of our wallets and purses. We felt the burn of “breaking” a $20 bill because we knew it started as a $100, and it’d soon be a nothing but a couple ones and some change clinking around in your car. Technology has put the jingle of change in it’s place… in your bank account. However with this shift, has come a dangerous state of unawareness with our spending. We just swipe the magical card and your purchase is complete. Ah, that’s a breath of fresh air from fiddling with paper and coin currency. But with this convenience comes a price. It will cost you awareness. How many times has your bank made you “aware” of your spending by sending you that lovely overdraft notice?

If it has never happened to you, God bless you. For the rest of us, we’ve been bitten by the naive stuper that our beloved technology induces. I mean this doesn’t happen with that antiquated paper with presidents on it, but we wouldn’t dare go back to that relic… So what do we do? We need to be more aware of our spending, so we turn to our good friend technology, the one that got us here in the first place. We start using the newest, most advanced bit of technology we can find. It automatically records my transactions, creates my budget for me and sends me reports on how I’m doing? Yes please, sign me up! But fast-forward a few months and how much more in tune are we with our finances? Slim to none. Technology has struck again, disabled us, it’s taken the work out of our hands and further put us in a state of passive money management. Oxymoron anyone? Passive management.

So now what? We can’t go back to check registers and spreadsheets. We need to actively manage our money but with the aid of technology. This is the line we want to dance with Coinage… Technology where it’s needed, not just because we can.

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