Day of Good Customer Service

The quality of customer service was so good today that I had to write about it before my laziness kicks in.

I booked tickets for a trip we are planning to go on. We wanted to leave friday late night. The flight we got leaves at 12:15 am. You get where I am going? Right, I booked it for Friday morning instead of Saturday morning. I called the airline company and they changed my flight to saturday morning without any extra charges. I couldn’t believe my ears when she said there won’t be any extra charge. The airline to applaud is ‘SunCountry Airlines’.

The other call was about car insurance. I got to talk to a real person within a few seconds. And they helped me with every single question I had. And the rates I got were awesome. So the insurance company to applaud today is ‘Ameriprise Auto Insurance’. We saved about $500 per year in auto insurance.

Kudos to both these companies. If somebody is thinking if these companies paid for this, they are absolutely wrong. If you think they lowered my rate because I mentioned that I would blog about them, they don’t even exist in a real world. I have never heard of such a thing happening and I did not do anything like that.

Such good customer service made my day!!!

Long Time! No See!

Hope everybody is doing okay. I can’t even get myself to type ‘Hope everybody is doing good’. It just feels like it can’t be the case and hence there is no point in asking so. So, is everybody doing okay? We are doing fine here at the unequivocal house. Things haven’t changed much. I have been wanting to post about our progress in 2008 and our plans for 2009. The honest to god truth is that we did not reach our goals in 2008. But we are satisfied with what we accomplished. And plans for 2009 are going in full swing.

We wanted our networth to be $99,000 by Dec 2008. According to my sheets, our networth was $93,141  by end of Dec 2008. I feel pretty good about that since we started 2008 with $30,000. By end of 2008, we didn’t have any debt except the car loan and the mortgages. As for plans for 2009, if things go alright our networth improvements should be similar to that of 2008. End of 2009, our networth should be somewhere between 150,000 and 160,000 depending on how well we keep up with the budget. The car loan will be paid off in 2009. As usual, we will continue paying extra towards our second mortgage. Once the car loan is paid off, there will be an extra on the extra towards the second mortgage.

2009 Budget breakdown is as follows:
Mortgage - 26%
Savings – 22%
401k – 11%
Car Loan – 10%
Travel – 4%
Property Tax – 4%
HOA – 3%
Grocery – 3%
Gas – 2%
Restaurant – 2%
Personal Expenses – 2%
Car Insurance – 1%
Home – 1%
Cable – 1%
Cell Phone – 1%
Electricity – 1%
Entertainment – 1%
Gifts – 1%

On the non-financial end, I am hoping I can write more often. The new job I took up last September, I love it. I got a 10% raise in January. It was completely unexpected. But I accepted it gracefully. LOL. I want to work out and get off a few pounds from my body. But it’s getting nowhere.

And thatz it for now.

Being Disciplined

We decided that once we paid off the loan from our parents, we would build our emergency fund upto $20,000. We changed this slightly to pay an extra amount towards our mortgage and build the emergency fund. Looking at the state of affairs right now, we feel that this is a good time to start investing in the stock market. But there is a small sense of discipline in me that is stopping me from doing it. At the rate we are saving right now, we would completely fund our emergency account by end of December. Though there is an itch to go and buy company stocks right now, I think we will wait until December. Something tells me things are not going to turn around completely before December.

Hello after a long time!!

Hey everybody,

It’s been long. Before I start anything I need to thank Joe for keeping me away from buying anything Gold. Though I am around 10% down on FFNOX, I feel much safer at that place rather than a place I would have been if I had bought the precious metals fund.

I took the new job and it’s been awesome. Commute is long but it’s okay since I take the train. Spent a fair share of money on vacation plans for Thanksgiving weekend. Got a stupid citation and have to pay about $400 for that. So things on the financial side are going at pretty much the same level. I am hoping that next year would be better than this. I am still hoping to put away about $20,000 in our savings account by end of this year. I am about 60% there. Still a long way to go. It’s not going to be easy.

My CFA preparations are going nowhere since I started the new job. I am hoping that everything that things would settle down by end of this year and the new year would be much more organized. I have to revisit my 2008 goals to see where I stand. I am pretty sure I will not be reaching my financial goals by end of this year. But I am pretty happy about the start I had this year. Last year, I did not even know what I wanted to do. This year has given me a lot of knowledge and ground work to make the coming years better.

I haven’t regained my data files and I haven’t found the time yet to put together my networth data. So I’ll have to wait a little bit more before I post my networth updates. Hope you guys are hanging on in these tough times.

Bye for now…..

Lost All My Data

Last friday, I lost all the data I had about our networth. The excel sheets that I used to track our progress is gone. I tried to use free data recovery software to recover the data. But with no luck. I need to sit down someday and put together all the information. I should also figure out a better way to backup the data that I store on external media.

New Job Edition

Yeah…I found a new job. And it’s great.

It’s panic time for my manager at my current company. They have been running around to get me a counter offer. It’s about time I got something better.

It was one of my goals to get a new job this year. I was expecting this to happen much earlier in the year. But it’s better late than never. To top it all, it’s in an industry that I want to work in. I can see my opportunities growing with moving to this new position. The only negative I have with this new found job is that they don’t have matching 401k contributions. But hey…right now I don’t have any benefits since I work as a contractor.

There are a few things that I learnt during these couple of days.

1) All along, people have been telling me that I should expect a lesser salary if I am employed as a full-time employee compared to being a contractor. The difference in pay attributed to the benefits that come with a full-time offer. I now know that it is just nonsense. This new offer got me a 33% raise with benefits compared to the existing contracting position. They have also offered me equity in the company. How about that for dessert?

2) I think one of the main reasons women get paid less is because they are too ashamed of making a counter offer. When I first got the initial offer, I was pretty excited and I just wanted to take it. Thankfully, BB was there to stop me and indeed write an email for me making a counter offer. And it didn’t even take 5 mins to get a reply accepting the counter offer. It all seemed too easy. A raise of about 10% for just asking.

3) Your managers are not here to take care of you. What I mean is they are not here to make sure you get what you deserve. It is up to the individual to market him/her self to obtain what is due. Until I told my current employer that I am leaving, I was pushed around everytime I asked for a full-time position. I was also not offered any raise when my contract was renewed. Once they knew I was leaving, they seem like they would do anything to keep me here. Well, I need to hold on before I make any judgements. Lets see what they will offer before I jump to any conclusions.

If things don’t change too much, I will be joining the new job in 2 weeks time. The best thing that I learnt out of this is that, now I know I am worth much more than what I get paid right now.

Another Goal Accomplished?

I’m getting there. I can’t wait. Will update you once I clear out a few more things.

Networth Update – August

Debt paid off since 01 Nov 2007            : 33,276.76
Increase in assets since 01 Nov 2007     : 21,531.74
Change in networth since 01 Nov 2007  : 54,808.50 ( +8.73% since last networth post )

The car payment has been deducted from my checking account, but it has not been applied yet to the loan account. If the payment isn’t applied by tomorrow, I need to call my lender to check the status. That would be another -400 to the debt paid off.

We are currently concentrating on increasing our emergency fund. Also we have come up with a weekly allowance that each of us would take for our lunch and other individual expenses. This is the first week we are following this. This is a drastic reduction in our monthly miscellaneous spending amount. Let’s see how this goes.

Update on Ebay Transaction

The seller emailed back saying that he will not be refunding the extra shipping cost. He also mentioned that if I were to resend the package to him, he will repay me the cost + est ship – actual ship. Interesting!! I would have still bought these books if they were listed for $100 + shipping costs.

I don’t know if this is ethical or not, but I sure know that I let my hands get dirty without knowing this ahead of time. I am contemplating if I should report this behaviour to ebay or leave a feedback with this information about the seller. Mabbe I was the only one to not have known this before hand.

What is blogshares.com??

When I logged into my account today, I saw this link was referring to this blog. I don’t know ”ibebruce” who added my blog to this website. Do any of you have any experience with this website or such?