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By David on January 25th, 2007

Received Student Loan Check Today, What Should We Do With It?

Today we received my wife’s last student loan check for her education; she finally finishes school in May. Hooray! It is for quite a bit more than the tuition, leaving us with a few thousand bucks to “play” with. My thoughts on this are as follows:

Since the loan does not start accruing interest until a few months AFTER she graduates, we are not losing anything by keeping the money instead of just depositing the check and sending a big payment to the overall student loan debt. Of course, the ideal thing would be to just send it to our credit card which has about the exact same balance on it, but it is at 0% interest until June 2007. Then we could then look at our overall financial record and see that there is NO credit card debt on any card, and the only thing we owe on are cars and her student loan.

So…..any thoughts on this? Would you keep the money and earn some interest on it? Would you pay off the balance of the 0% credit card? Or would you just cash the check and send a big payment to the student loan, using their own money to pay back what they loaned you?

Decisions, decisions. This check is just sitting here begging me to go pick up a plasma TV, but of course I know better. Or do I? ;-) Kidding…

debt • education
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By David on January 25th, 2007

Thursday Morning Money – Slow Day At Work Edition.

Boy is it going to be a slow day today at work. Good thing it is supposed to be real nice outside; maybe I will go for a walk down by the beach. Here are some posts I found to be of interest over the last couple of days:

Jim over at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity wonders aloud if anyone really wants to see his actual net worth in his posts from this point forward.

Trent at The Simple Dollar writes about evaluating your expenses for hobbies and entertainment in his ongoing series “31 Days To Fix Your Finances”.

Savvy Saver discovers that passive income is a misnomer after finding out that their new tenants prepaid for a year’s worth of rent up front..after they already bought the property.

Money, Matter & More Musings discusses the apparent lack of financial self control by graduate students.

ProBargainHunter discovers the joys of saving money…..by spending it on Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs.

Happy Thursday!

saving
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By David on January 24th, 2007

Where We Shop For Groceries To Save Money.

All the talk about coupons and sales surrounding grocery store shopping brought me to write this post. While I can appreciate cutting coupons to save money at the store, we have found the alternative to coupon shopping; Trader Joe’s. We used to shop at the big chain grocery stores, but the minute we discovered Trader Joe’s a few years ago, we rarely step foot inside a “normal” grocery store. The prices at TJ’s are much much lower than those at the big stores; so much so that our average weekly grocery bill at TJ’s is about $40 less than it would be at a bigger store. Add that up over the course of a year and it is a huge amount of savings.

TJ’s carries almost everything that we need; the only thing we need from another store is fruits and vegetables. This is not to say that TJ’s doesn’t sell these things, its just that sometimes I dont need 4 apples or 5 onions or a bag of green peppers. Sometimes I just need 1 of each or whatever. So for those items we go to Whole Foods or Wild Oats to get fresh, local, organic food that we can feel good about eating.

A lot of people have the misconception that Trader Joe’s is full of a bunch of hippies and they only sell weird food like Tofu and the like, but this could not be further from the truth. They have everything. It took me a long time to convince my mom that it was OK for her to shop there; in fact I had to take her to one in person in order for her to say “Wow, this place is cool.”. And coming from my mom, that is not a normal sentence. She really enjoys finding new things there every time she goes. Plus, she can get her staple products like milk, juice, cereal, etc at much lower prices than the big store.

I went grocery shopping yesterday there and this is what I paid for a few products, and if you compare what you pay for them at a “regular” store, you will see that they are much cheaper:

Organic Yogurt – $.89 each
Orange Juice – $1.99
Bag of chips – $.99
Milk- $2.99 half gallon
Corn Flakes – $1.99 (actually taste better than name brand version)
Cheerios – $1.99
Organic Free Range Chicken, 2 breasts – $6.99
Frozen Pizza – $2.99
Organic Bagels – $1.99
Minestrone Soup – $.99

Etc etc…

So, if you do have a Trader Joe’s near you, do not fear it…it could save you a lot of money on your grocery bill every week, even if you do want to buy smaller amounts of fruits and veggies at another store so you can get what you want instead of how they have packaged it. Happy Shopping!

saving
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