photo credit: bloomsberries
It’s a New Year, and at this time of year many people are thinking about ways to save more money this year. You may be tempted to slash your grocery budget by only cooking at home, or cut back on monthly expenses like car insurance. If you haven’t tackled your biggest expenses though, this effort is misguided.
When we first started on the path to fiscal fitness we started with tracking our expenses. We followed that with our first No Spend Month. Since I wasn’t spending money, I spent a lot of time making a detailed budget that included everything we had spent on in the last year. I was shocked by the money we had spent in some areas, but looking at out budget it quickly became apparent that our largest expenses were our mortgage and car payments.
Around this time rates started dropping, so we decided to take a look at mortgage rates to see if we could reduce our biggest monthly expense. Rates had dropped but to enough to justify a refinance. A few months later rates plummeted, and we were looking at refinancing at a rate as low as 5%. The issue was our mortgage lender led us to believe they could get us a lower rate, and we paid to have an appraisal, and then they turned around and said we didn’t qualify. We started exploring other options and found our credit union could offer us great rates (5%), and the customer service was fantastic.
If you haven’t refinanced yet, use this simple rule of thumb. Closing costs should not exceed 12 months of savings for your mortgage. For instance: a savings of $300/month means you shouldn’t spend more than $3,600 on closing costs.
Despite talk of rates rising, you can still find rates hovering around 5% if you have good credit, and a good amount of equity. If you are struggling though, call your lender and see what they can do. Some companies are able to work with you depending on your situation, while others won’t work with you until you miss several payments.
You can find info about your local credit union at Credit Union National Association. Our credit union, Franklin Mint Federal Credit Union is fantastic. Find out if you qualify for membership here.
Have you refinanced in the last year? Are you thinking about refinancing? Or are you a renter? Learn more about negotiating your rent from Mary Pilon.
Kelly
I wrote a guest post on Consumerism Commentary titled “How to Spend Smarter this Holiday Season.” One of the ideas I mentioned was creating a “sale mail” email account. I got a ton of responses about the idea so I wanted to share it with you. I have been using a separate folder in my personal gmail account, but thought I should follow my own advice.
In 3 easy steps you can have a sale email account. The benefits to this are:
- all your sale info is in one spot, it’s easy to find
- you can keep yourself from purchasing impulse buys when you get your emails by creating a passive barrier
- you never miss a sale email
1. Sign up for a new email account.
Signing up for an account is easy, you just need to choose a name, password, security ?, and link it to another email account in case you forget your username or password.
I chose kellysalemail which was open.
2. Set up filters.
I like gmail since they make it easy to set up new accounts, delete bulk emails, and use filters. I personally don’t use the filters a ton, but you could set up one for each category: Home, Kids, Women’s, Men’s, etc. Or you could use one filter or tag for each place you shop: Pottery Barn, Rue La La, Nordstom’s, etc.
3. Get emails!
After your account is set up you can go to your favorite sites, and add the new email address. I went to my new favorite sale sites like Gilt, Rue La La* (click on the link for a $10 credit!), and HauteLook and changed my email. I also signed up for emails from my favorite stores.
Over the next month whenever I get a sale email they go into a folder in my personal account, and I can click on the links at the bottom of the newsletters or sale emails and change my email in the preferences on the site. I have had 2 sites already have no option to change my email address (or at least it wasn’t obvious) so I just deleted my account, and then signed up with my new email address.
For now my inbox is empty, but as it starts to fill up I may start putting other filters or labels on emails. Typically I would check it once a week (like I do with my folder in my personal account) and delete old emails with one swipe. Just choose them all and delete, since many of the offers will have expired.
Hopefully this tip will keep more money in your pocket by decreasing impulse buys, and letting you look for relevant discounts and sales.
Do you have a sale mail account? Will you set one up?
Kelly
* If you click on the link for Rue La La, I get a $10 credit, and so do you! 
