I’ve been tweaking our financial situation over the last few weeks following the suggestions in Elizabeth Warren’s All Your Worth, which I think I mentioned, but can’t find that post at the moment.  So, I started by tackling home and car insurance.  I’ve been actually talking to insurance agents, and I’ve been proud of myself for saying to more than one, “I’m sorry but buying from you is more expensive than what I have right now.  See ya.”  I think I have something good lined up, and will find out for sure sometime today, but it’s been a time-consuming process.  Most of us, I’d wager, don’t pay too much attention to total amounts paid for either of these pieces of insurance.  And I’ve found that people display their prices in weird ways–sometimes monthly, sometimes bi-annually, sometimes yearly–so it takes work to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples.  I don’t think I’m going to save thousands of dollars annually, but a few hundred, possibly.

I also transferred a balance from one credit card to another with a low interest rate.  All my cards, whether I’m carrying a balance or not, (I only have the one I transferred that has a significant balance) have interest rates approaching 30%.  Can we say loan shark? Cause seriously? This is crazy.  These people have made lots of money off of me over the years (I’m not proud of that fact, but it’s true).  We pay on time.  We’ve paid off most of them, but still use them on occasion, and we get no break whatsoever.  Thanks for being a great customer; we’re gonna raise your interest rate now.  I remember the days when they raised our limits and lowered our interest rates.  My plan is to pay these all off in the next few weeks.  It’s a pretty small amount, but not an amount I regularly have lying around, so it takes a bit of planning.

My next step was to deal with savings and investments.  As Warren points out (and nearly every financial adviser does), just paying off your credit card debt is a form of savings.  The money you were putting into paying that off can now be put into a savings account.  We have a basic savings account that is now earning us very, very little in interest.  The account serves as both an emergency fund (which we’ve used in the last couple of years) and a college savings account.  We can pay for about a week of college with it.  Besides our 401(k) accounts, we have no other investments.  I’m terrified of investing in anything, especially after what happened just a couple of years ago.  I lost something like 30-40% of my 401(k) account.  And since I can’t contribute to it anymore (need to roll that over–gah!), it will take a while (if I leave it where it is) for it to regain its value.  Same for Mr. Geeky, though at least he’s contributing to his account.  So, following Warren’s advice again, I decided to start a small investment account, investing in index funds.  So I did this all online, doing a lot of research to figure out what company to sign up with.  And then yesterday, the company called me to make sure I was doing okay and if I had any questions.  And I think I freaked out the guy because I was pretty clueless.  Unlike with the insurance, where I could just say, sorry you’re too expensive for what I want, I couldn’t just say, “Look, all I want to do is get a simple index fund.”  I did mention that, and he said they had plenty of those, but then he asked, “What are your financial plans?”  And I said, “Well, they’re kind of vague.”  And then he put me in touch with a financial planner, which I think we’re going to pay a visit to next week.  Mr. Geeky actually agreed to this. We’ve avoided it because we felt like our financial situation was too simple to require one.  But it’s getting more complicated by the day.  Retiring, paying for college, and other financial needs and wants are closer than ever.

I was telling Mr. Geeky that the guy on the phone seemed surprised about my financial uncertainty, and we both agreed that we didn’t really know anyone who seemed to be on top of their financial game plan.  Maybe this is a problem with academics, who often have salaries that don’t give them enough money to invest in anything outside of their retirement plan and who have pensions and other benefits that mean they don’t have to do a lot of the planning themselves.

The next semi-financial thing I’m doing is setting up a will.  And yes, I know I should have had one a long time ago.  I’m just now realizing I’m a real grownup.  Mr. Geeky even agreed to this move, something he, too, has avoided over the years.  So, hopefully, we’ll have an appointment for that next week as well.  It’s not exciting stuff, for sure, but it feels good to be taking care of some of these things.

We will never be perfect on the financial front.  We just don’t have the time or interest to invest in managing our money, but we can probably do a little better than we are currently, and maybe leave the kids with a little something and be better off to help them when they’re getting started in their own lives.  And yes, I feel old saying that.

No really. Thanks to ProfHacker, I was reminded of Mint.com, a site for tracking your money that I heard about on NPR. The problem with hearing about web sites on the radio in the car: no internets in the car. Last week, I signed up for an account and pulled in all my various accounts. I still have to pull in the retirement account, but am planning on it today. It is soooo much fun and so informative to have all of my accounts–savings, credit, loans, investment–all in one place. I can see at a glance where my money is, what’s coming in and what’s going out. The coolest thing about the site for me was the way it decided on categories based on the name of the company listed in a transaction. It was about 95% accurate. It was easy enough to spot the things that were off and correct them.

Even more exciting are the graphs and pie charts. Here’s an example of one from my account (without numbers):
You can click on each slice to drill down into the category further. So, for example, that orange slice up there, that’s shopping. When I click on it, I get this pie chart:

That’s a thin slice of books and the rest for clothes. Clicking on a slice that has no subcategories takes you to the transaction itself. This is how I found inaccuracies in categories. I would see a huge slice for something like movies and then clicking on that slice would show me that they’d categorized cable as movies or something like that.

I find being able to visualize my spending and drill down to find exactly where the money goes extremely helpful. I know Quicken and other programs like it did this in the past, but the categories often had to be done manually and it was complicated to set up multiple accounts. I felt like you needed a degree in accounting to do it successfully. Mint, by contrast, is dead simple, relying on data your banks already keep. Since we’re down to one income with my own income coming sporadically, keeping track of our spending is more important than ever. I’ve already found some places to cut more corners, and I’m actually enjoying the process of managing our finances. Who knew!