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3 Ways Young Homeowners Can Save $3745 (at least) Each Year

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If you recently bought your first home let me congratulate you. This is possibly the very best time to buy real estate that you’ll ever see in your lifetime. You made a smart move. And because you are a smart real estate investor, I know you’ll be interested in taking advantage of the following 3 ways young homeowners can save even more “moolah”.

1. Home Warranty

I owned a home warranty program for years and it was a waste of money. Of course it felt great not to have to worry about running into major unexpected expenses, but the cost just didn’t justify it. First of all, you are stuck with any repair person the home protection company sends out. Next, the deductible you have to pay is often pretty close to the amount you’d have to pay to a contractor of your own choosing. Last, when you do have a major repair, you are stuck (again) with whoever the company sends out unless you are willing to go through a great deal of red tape.

You’re always responsible for upgrades, code changes and any problems associated with misuse or poor maintenance. I cancelled my home protection plan several years ago and it turned out to be a fantastic decision. If you follow my lead on this, you’ll save at least $600 a year.

2. Life Insurance

If you are a young homeowner you might have a young family or plan on having one. As a result, you definitely need life insurance. But when it comes to term life vs. whole life – play it smart. Term life is your best friend. It’s cheap and it does the job. It’s true that at some point (20 or 30 years down the road) your term insurance will expire. But by that time, you may not need life insurance anyway. Term life is so much cheaper than whole life that you can take that savings and invest it. This way probably you’ll have much more than the whole life promises.

One of the biggest problems with whole life (and I feel it’s criminal) is that agents sell you the whole life you can afford because it pays them a whole lot more commission. (Maybe that’s why they call it “whole” life.) And because it buys a great deal less insurance than term, people end up dangerously under-insured. You could save several thousands of dollars each year and have better coverage just by having term instead of whole life insurance. Look into this ASAP.

3. Good Credit Score

Because you are a young homeowner, you’ll be using your credit for a very long time. And you might have to lean on that plastic a lot right now to pay for all that new furniture and appliances. If you able to get even a slightly better credit score, you might end up savings a bundle every month. That’s because a higher credit score will help you get lower interest rates on credit cards and mortgages.

Find out what your score is and make sure there are no errors. If there are mistakes, fix them. You can easily do most of this without paying a cent. You can even get your credit score for free and sign up for services that provide updates whenever there is a change to your rating. This has helped me a great deal.

As a young homeowner you might be facing some pretty hefty expenses and that can be daunting. Take these 3 steps. Dump the home protection plan. Get rid of your whole life insurance and buy term instead. Finally make sure your credit score is as high as possible.

Will you save $3745? I don’t know. You could save a lot more. You’ll never know until you start taking action.

What are the biggest expenses you face as a young homeowner? What have you done to reduce those costs?

This was a guest post written by Neal Frankle. He is a Certified Financial Planner ® and owns Wealth Pilgrim – a great personal finance blog. He writes extensively about ways to help people make smart financial decisions. One of his most in-depth posts was his review of CIT Bank.

Personal Finance Reassessment

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Occasionally, there comes a time when you have to take a look at your personal finances and do a little personal finance reassessment.  While the need may arise to do a complete overhaul once in a while, a simple reassessment can usually suffice.  All it takes is a little attention, and some dedicated time to making sure that your finances are in order.

Recently, my wife and I were, more or less, forced to do a little personal finance reassessment.  That’s such a nice, delicate way of saying it isn’t it?  Truth be told, our finances were (are) in a mess. The ripples from when I quit my job last November are still plenty big, and the new job that I have seems to have come just in time to keep us from completely going under.  Combine the drastic decrease in income that event brought about with a couple of people who remained stubborn in their budget, and it was a recipe for disaster.

financial peace jrLuckily, we’re usually pretty good at talking about money with each other.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s plenty of room for improvement.  But, we’re good about not getting into any heated arguments with each other, and being able to figure out where we’ve gone wrong and correcting it.

So, we sat down and caught up our dreadfully behind budget.  And, let me stop here to say something.  What kind of idiot doesn’t keep doing the budget when he quits his job and is making a fraction of what he used to?  This guy.  Dumb.  So, yeah, we caught up the budget.  About 6 months worth of financial data entry.  Some by hand because our bank doesn’t keep history online over 90 days.  So, one by one, directly from the statements I printed off.  Did I mention how dumb that was?

In case you’re curious, catching up on about 6 months of budgeting takes about 6 hours.  6 HOURS!  It’s done though.

One of the things that we discovered, after having done all of that, is that the reason that we were in the pickle that we were in wasn’t because of the loss of income, although that played a part, but more because of how badly we had slipped in the last few months with our spending.  July and August in particular were well above what June was.  In our defense, those are usually higher spend months because they’re usually the only real summer months we get up here in North Dakota, but it was still way off.  And it cost us.  The last several weeks have been pretty hairy, financially.

The scary part of all of that is that we haven’t had a bad financial situation like that for over 5 years.  And, maybe, in that 5 years, we’ve become a little bit lax in our budgeting, and in our finances in general.  No more.  We’re taking the control back, and keeping our finances in order.  Not doing so could mean disaster.  It surely means stress, and that’s something we just don’t need.

During our little reassessment, there were several things that we picked up on.  Like the fact that we didn’t have any life insurance on me.  In my previous job, my employer kept a policy on me that would have been more than sufficient.  For some reason, they decided to cancel that policy when I quit.  😉  So, we’re now budgeting for life insurance policies. Or, the fact that our spending on eating out and groceries had gone way up.  A simple attitude adjustment helps with the eating out, and we’re going to start trying to use menu plans to keep our grocery bill down and to spread it out over the month. Another thing that seems to be part of the issue is the timing of some of our bills.  Before, I made enough that it wasn’t an issue when the bills came due, we always had at least enough to make it to the next payday.  Now, with my lower salary, it’s getting a bit tight right before the 15th (when my wife gets paid), and a few of the bills that come in right before the 15th are adding a little extra stress.  I need to call a few of them and try to get them moved to a slightly later due date.

In the end, our personal finance reassessment came just in time.  We kept a close enough watch on our finances to see the need arising, and were able to meet the need and keep things from getting any worse.  Chalk it up to a lesson learned.  The (almost) hard way.

When was the last time you had a personal finance reassessment?

img credit: Matt Mcgee, on Flickr

I Quit My Job: Where I Went Wrong

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I tried, through my previous posts, to adequately cover the reasoning, and process, of quitting my job.  One thing that I didn’t cover, however, was the mistakes I made along the way.  I think that, partially, I couldn’t because I hadn’t had enough time to ruminate on them.  I also think that I couldn’t because I didn’t want to expose my weaknesses.  Now, I’ve had time to think about it, and I think I can easily identify the things that I would do differently should I have the opportunity to try again.  Maybe they aren’t all mistakes (I don’t count some of them that way).

Quitting Your Job The Right Way

One of the biggest changes I would likely have made would have been to quit the right way.  The decision I made, while necessary, was made quickly (over two days), and without much fore-planning.  Part of the motivation was that I had wanted out of the job for quite some time.  How much I wanted out wasn’t really clear until after I was out.  In hindsight, I should have started making moves well before I did.  Unfortunately, I was mired in the comfort of a position that I had held for over seven years.  Lesson learned: comfort is nice, but freedom is nicer.

Have a Full Plan B

Because of the hastiness of my departure from my position, I didn’t have a full plan B.  I had no idea where the money was coming from to even partially replace my income.  What income I had wasn’t dependable.  In a way, I was smart enough to at least get a part-time job.  But, without a full plan B, I think it was likely doomed to fail.

Wrong Way

Get After IT

This is probably the biggest mistake I made through the whole ordeal.  I quit my job, without a plan B, and then didn’t get after it nearly as much as I could have.  I wanted to focus entirely on my blogs and websites and grow them to at least a part-time income.  I severely underestimated the time it would take to do so, and should have spread my roots a bit and taken on other small projects to fill in dead time, and especially, fill in dead income spots.  Towards the end of this round of self-employment, I started to realize that I needed to pick up my game, but by then it was too little, too late.

Have an Exit Plan

Nobody likes to think that they are going to fail.  Just like nobody likes to think that they are going to get into a car accident or die, but we still buy car insurance and life insurance anyways.  While you can’t just go out and buy entrepreneurial failure insurance, you can have an exit plan so that you not only know when it’s time to move on to the next thing, but you also have a plan on how to get there.  I had none of that.  As a consequence, I probably waited several weeks too long to even begin looking for a new full-time job, and risked not getting something in time to fill in the income I needed when our savings was depleted.  I got lucky.  My first paycheck at my new position came only a few days after the last transfer from the savings account happened.  Even so, we’re still struggling to keep up without that cushion that we had grown accustomed to.

I Would Do It All Over Again

Despite all those mistakes I made, I would still do it all over again.  I know the mistakes I made, and am better able to prepare myself to not make them again.  I’m not afraid of failing.  At least not to such a degree that it prevents me from trying.  It’s a little bit like riding a bike.  You’re going to fall off.  It’s going to hurt.  But, you’re going to get back on the bike because you like riding your bike.  I like riding the entrepreneurial bike!

img credit : Crystl, on Flickr