No Debt Plan

No Debt Plan is a blog about living a debt-free life. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (e-mail subscription also available). Learn more about me, or some of my most popular posts. Thanks for visiting!

This blog is reaching new heights every day because of you, the reader.

Now I’m asking a quick favor of you guys and gals out there. Can you let me know how I’m doing? Are you enjoying the articles? Am I focusing on one topic too much? What haven’t I talked about that you want to read more on?

I’m looking for honest critiques and opinions. Naturally, I love everything I write. (Not quite!) So if you’ve got something to say — positive or negative — please share it!

I’d also like to get a few more reader questions. What finance issues are you confused about? What can I help with? You can either leave a comment or e-mail me directly at nodebtplan at gmail dot com.

Again, thanks for stopping by. Here’s what is in store for the rest of this week and next week:

• A discussion on a lawn care mistake I made recently
• How we saved $175 on window treatments (use a Mac… bah dum sch)
• A Net Worth update (just waiting on the mortgage payments to post for accuracy)
• An article about how much house you really buy each month

Cheers!

Overview

March was incredible month for No Debt Plan. My article The Concept That Changed Our Financial Life hit the frontpage of reddit and reached #12!

With reddit came a lot of traffic — over 4,700 visitors in one day. By far the best month I’ve had so far in terms of traffic. Unfortunately, all of that traffic brought some hosting issues which took several days to resolve. I quickly dropped from the front page and into obscurity. Fortunately, even without the reddit traffic I still increased the number of visitors that visited by a healthy margin.

The Monthly Stats (vs. 1 month ago):

• Posts: 43 vs. 30 (43% increase)
• Comments/Pingbacks: 103 vs 57 (80% increase)
• Visits: 7,369 vs. 1,750 (321% increase!)
• Page Views: 9,636 vs. 4,033 (139% increase)
• RSS Subscribers: 75 vs. 28 (167% increase)

I would also like to point out that I peaked at 78 subscribers before reddit came to visit. I hope that bodes well for the future.

Popular in March:

These posts were popular this past month.

• The Concept That Changed Our Financial Life
• Our Cars Cost Us $0.242 per Mile
• Should You Invest in Visa?
• The No Debt Plan: Step Two: Achieve Free Cash Flow
• Mistakes: Procrastination
• Budgeting Tools

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What’s Coming in April:

• No April Fool’s jokes
• Continuation of the No Debt Plan series
• Some resources to earn income on the side, as well as some free money resources
• More green house/living articles
• A few more Dumb Money articles

Thanks!

Thanks for making this blog the success it is thus far. You’re helping me live out something I truly enjoy doing. If you enjoy this blog, the honest to goodness best thing you can do for me is to e-mail five of your friends and tell them about this blog. Here’s a quick e-mail you could send:

Hey! I’ve discovered a new blog that I enjoy reading and thought you might, too. The blog is No Debt Plan and the author focuses on helping people get and stay out of debt. Why don’t you take a look, or try subscribing to the RSS feed?

Or something like that (maybe that was a bit cheesy for you). And hey, if you’re feeling generous, tell more than five friends!

You may have noticed No Debt Plan has been down since early Wednesday. I am working on getting this fixed. My apologies — please stick around!

Since it is working right now, I am guessing it is going to go down again for probably another 24 hours. Hopefully I will be surprised.

One of my posts, The Concept that Changed Our Financial Life, is experiencing a bit of reddit effect. Not 10,000 visits or anything like that (not on the front page yet), but over 1,300 2,200 4,100 visits thus far today. That’s 10x 22x 41x more than normal!

You can vote for the post on reddit. I would appreciate as many ups as possible.

For the reddit users, please feel free to stick around, comment, engage in discussion, etc. You can also subscribe via RSS or e-mail.

You can also find out what this blog is all about. A little bit more about me.

Long story short, I write to try and help people get and stay out of debt.

Again, thanks for stopping by!

I just saw a post over at FIRE Finance about Smart Money (magazine) running a “March Madness” tournament for stocks. Basically it says that you can win $10,000 just by playing in this contest — sweet deal, right?

But wait.

Look at the contest ad over at Smart Money’s page: Market Madness.

From the rules:

“3. Prizes. The Grand Prize winner will receive USD$10,000 which may be used towards payment on a car lease. The Grand Prize will be awarded as a check made payable to the Grand Prize winner. Only one Grand Prize will be awarded.”

Hogwash. Win $10,000 towards a lease on a car? Specifically, the Nissan Murano. Who wants that? No, thanks. I’d rather have $10,000 cash, but Nissan wouldn’t like that too much.

Plus, stock picking like that doesn’t encourage intelligent investing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a smart campaign. You’re giving a discount on a lease to one consumer and you’ll have thousands of people play and get exposure to your brand. And in the end, you’re still “selling” a product to someone — just at a significant discount.

Update: Smart Money has clarified the rules, and the money can now be taken just as cash. You don’t have to apply it to a lease with Nissan.

I recently discovered a new blog, brip blap. An interesting name with some well written content to boot.

Steve is running a book contest. He’s giving away several awesome books, and two e-books. Getting Things Done, Your Money or Your Life, The Greatest Salesman in the World, X Marks the Spot, and Zen to Done are on the list. You can find out how to win one of these great titles over at his blog. And you might want to subscribe, too. I’ve been really impressed with the writing over there. Keep it up, Steve. (And no, this isn’t brown nosing trying to win the books.)

Round 1 of Free Money Finance’s March Madness is well under way.

The first 8 games have finished up voting, and the results are in. Results for Game 5-8 are above.

You can look at the full bracket I developed with Excel. I’ve noted who voted last in each set of games so I can go back periodically and update. I also highlighted whoever was in the lead (or has won for finished games).

Finances can be complicated with the number of accounts that are involved. 401k, 403b, Roth IRA, Roth 401k, online savings accounts, CDs, taxable investment accounts, checking accounts… I could go on and on. That’s a lot of different things to keep up with. In my view, the fewer accounts you have — or at least the fewer financial institutions you are dealing with — the better. This is valid to a point; more on that later.

The smaller the list the more simple your life will be. All of our financial transactions are done online. The more accounts involved, the more logins and passwords we have to remember. It can really start to get daunting.

I wrote about What Accounts We Use in January. Here’s what we are currently dealing with: 1 paper checking account, 1 online checking account, 1 online savings account, 1 taxable investment account, and 1 (soon to be 2) Roth IRA accounts. Additionally, I have a 401k through work and my wife has a retirement plan as a teacher. Thankfully some of these overlap and reduce the number of logins I need to know.

Granted, multiple online savings accounts allows you to move the money to the bank with the highest return on your savings. I know some people out there have two or three different savings accounts for this. That’s all well and good, but to me it seems like a lot of hassle for a tiny bit extra return. Plus when it comes tax time, you’ll receive more forms from more banks. Too much hassle for me.

This is Only Valid to a Point

Let me stress that you shouldn’t be consolidating your accounts solely for the sake of simplicity. That can be a major mistake as you will be hard pressed to find one institution with a “one size fits all” program. Some diversity is healthy; don’t close accounts just “because”. Online savings accounts exist for a reason. You wouldn’t want to close all of them and give your money back to your brick and mortar bank that pays 0.02% interest just to get all of your money under one roof.

Here’s how you can effectively limit the number of accounts you have to deal with:

• Understand your financial needs – You need to be able to see the whole picture of your finances before you start making any decisions. Figure out where all of your money is currently located.
• Make choices where it makes sense — Pick the one online savings account with the highest interest or best customer service. You can leave the other accounts open with $1 (or the minimum required if it has one) to give yourself the option of switching back in a few months if you end up regretting your choice. After 6 months if you are still satisfied, drop the others. You can always go back.
• Roll over old investment accounts — This is something Money magazine always harps on. People tend to move jobs and leave their 401ks behind. The funds sit without any investment direction, or worse, a direction that was correct ten years ago and is now way off base. Dumping all of these old accounts into a rollover IRA would gather all of the money in one location, with one investment direction. Obviously, that is much easier to manage.
• Avoid fees — Financial institutions like to throw in little fees that nibble away at your money. They seem harmless alone, but can add up together. Make sure that when you close or rollover your accounts that you won’t incur any fees (or at least minimize what you do incur).
• Don’t worry about it — If you go through this exercise and close just one old account, you’re making positive progress. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Make your system work for your personal preferences.

How many accounts are you currently wrangling with?

I can pretty much wrap up February with this: Thank you, Get Rich Slowly!

February was a great second month for No Debt Plan. A guest post over at Get Rich Slowly brought a huge influx of traffic in. That post, Dumb Money: The Movie Theater, generated a ton of comments (102!) over at GRS.

February vs. January:

• Posts: 30 posts vs. 13 - a 123% increase. I’m actually pretty surprised I had averaged on post per day. I didn’t think I came even close to that.
• Comments: 57 comments vs. 8 - a 612.5% increase. I wouldn’t mind if we averaged an increase like that every month!
• Visits: 1,750 vs. 158 - a 1000% increase. Of course a big jump is expected when you get to guest post on a hugely popular website like GRS. Thanks again, JD!
• RSS Subscribers: 9 vs. 28 - tripled the number of people reading the site via the RSS feed. If the subscriber number tripled each month for 7 months, I’d have 59,000+ readers. Okay, maybe that is just a bit of wishful thinking…

Most Popular Posts

• The Automobile Gas Log
• Planned Trips: NYC
• The Savings Snowball

I also posted the first true step in the No Debt Plan with Step One: A Budget.

In short, thanks for coming by. Your readership and comments make writing worth while. I hope you find something useful here. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with a reader question, comment, or suggestion.

And please tell your friends about the site!

Free Money Finance is hosting his very own March Madness Tournament. He’s accepted 64 posts, put them in brackets against each other, and is letting his readers vote on a champion. It’s a very interesting take and a great way to get a lot of bloggers together.

Of course I had to throw a post into the mix, and I bracketed into Game 11, Post #22. My post, Dollars Before Cents, is facing off against The Ugly Payday Loan by Life Lessons of a Military Wife.

I’m relying on your votes to take me all the way to the top! So head on over to FMF, have a read of all the posts, and get your vote on!

Update: This is what I love about the blog carnivals and things like this… it brings you new content, new blogs, new people to read. I found a few great articles in the different brackets:

• How Do I Organize 181 Accounts by MyDollarPlan. All I have to say is… wow. My hat is off to you. Playing arbitrage with $200,000 is just past my risk level. Impressive, no doubt, but good grief! I would be afraid that when I tried to transfer the money at the end of the opening period that I wouldn’t be able to find a card that would take me.
• Little Steps: 100 Great Tips for Saving Money by Trent at The Simple Dollar. I’ve glanced at this a few times in the past, but a great read nonetheless.
• I also really enjoyed A Little Too Late Advice on Building Wealth at brip brap. Really enjoyed your writing style, brip brap.