Monday, April 23, 2007

Twenty Small Ways to Save the Planet


This is a great article by Smart Money. Even though I am something of a "green" person, I did not know about some things on the list, like the fact that printers and other electronics have energy star labels, or that you can pay to offset the emissions of your car every year. My favorite? Reducing junk mail. You don't have to be "green" to know what a waste of time, money and resources that is.

Friday, April 13, 2007

April Net Worth -- it's ugly

If you check out my net worth badge to the side, you'll see that my net worth has dropped by $20,000 this month. The primary reason is that we are selling our house, and the cold, hard fact of the matter is the housing market is down and the worth of our home has dropped $20,000.

On the bright side, our retirement accounts have gone up 70%. The accounts themselves did increase in value, but we also added $2,000 into last-minute IRAs so we wouldn't have to pay as much in taxes. We still need to come up with a fairly large chunk of money for taxes, primarily due to a miscalculation on state taxes, but the silver lining is that this has forced us to add more to our retirement accounts. Last year our retirement accounts went from $350 to $2400, primarily due to aggressive contributions on my part (my husband didn't actually have a retirement account until about a week ago), but it's still paltry compared to what we should have. Now we have passed the $5,000 mark, which is a nice feeling.

You might be wondering -- why sell our house when we were looking to rent out the guesthouse? I will address this more completely in another post but essentially we are trying to buy out the rest of the family in an estate settlement and had to make the choice to sell our property. I just wish this had all happened two years ago when the housing market was hot, but oh well...we won't lose money on the deal because we didn't go crazy during the refinance rush and get a variable APR or max out our equity. In fact, except for a small home equity loan that we used to fix some major problems, we haven't touched our equity at all. It was hard to do -- everyone pushed us to refinance and take out our equity to get rid of other debts, but now I am glad we stuck it out and paid things down. We've finished paying off both vehicles and although we clearly still haven't gotten a good grip on our credit card debt, the only other debt we have are student loans.

Kiva

One of the most amazing ideas I've seen in a long time, Kiva is a microloan program for the world's poor. Basically, you choose to give $25 to someone to help fund their start-up business, and then you get repaid with interest. While there is some risk that the business will go under, Kiva says that fully funded loans (most loans are around $1500) have had 100% repayment since they began.

What a wonderful way to invest in humanity and help people to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps."