It’s available now!

It’s really good this week. Chock-a-block full of tips on saving money on dining, mutual funds, wireless broadband access and more!

Read the first two posts here and here.

I left off Part II with why it’s not always a good thing and left you with ’sound judgement’ as advice. Part III: DIY: How to figure out if it’s good or bad will hopefully elaborate some more on it.

Questions to ask:

1) How much will it cost to do this project versus calling a professional or buying a new one? Include things like, safety equipment, new tools, time waiting for permits, time off from work, etc.

2) Can someone else do this better than I can? Will it last a long time if I repair it myself, or will I just have to do it again later?

Here are some concrete examples on this.

My friend asked me to hem a pair of jeans for her. I said I could do it no problem. I needed to hem some pants I have as well. It cost about $2.00 for the spool of gold thread to match her jeans. What’s funny is that she was going to pay for it. I told her I would since I was going to keep the spool. She won’t use it anway. She’ll just ask me to hem her next pair. This is usually a $10 job at a tailoring shop. Easy and it takes about an hour. DIY GOOD!

A lady at knitting group told me it cost $60 for a tailor to alter her husband’s old suit to fit her teenage soon. She told the tailor to leave in the extra fabric so it could be let out later. (wise move) The woman told me the $60 was worth it for the difficult alterations and she didn’t have to buy her son a suit he’d likely grow out of anyway. (He’s only a sophmore.) DIY BAD!

I love wooly socks. It costs about $12-14 for nice sock weight yarn, plus about $5 for needles. It takes me about 2-4 weeks to knit them. A comparable pair of socks might cost $7-10 at REI. In terms of enjoyment, DIY GOOD! In terms of cost, DIY BAD!

Take those same handknit socks and darn them so they last another year. Whereas regular socks I would just throw away. DIY GOOD!

Handspun yarn is about $1.00-$3.00 per ounce of wool. It depends on the type and amount of preprocessing. This gets tricky because most yarn comes in metric form, like those sock yarns. So 100 grams = 3.5 ounces, therefore the sock yarn is about $4.00 an ounce, but I didn’t have to card it with nylon for durability, nor did I have to spend 6-10 hours spinning it myself. Again, In terms of enjoyment, handspinning is GOOD. Otherwise, it’s a money losing proposition.

I hope this illuminates some of my DIY points. I realize I’ve just illustrated why my knitting hobby is a bottom line loser. I know I only do it for the fun of it. Plus I don’t want to pay $50 for a pair of handknit socks.

Read the first part of the series, click here.

To continue the series, I bring you Part II: Why DIY is Bad.

Reasons Why DIY is Bad:

1) If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could end up spending a lot more.
2) Sometimes that ‘homemade look’ isn’t what’s called for.
3) You could get injured, hurt, or die. (My building manager fell off the roof while cleaning gutters. I am sad to report he passed on before an ambulance could arrive.)

I could only think of three. Again, if you can think of other reasons why DIY isn’t a good thing, please comment here and leave your name & blog to be credited/linked.

Overall, there aren’t many downsides to DIY. It’s a matter of sound judgement. I’ve had a hand in building a flamethrower. It was really fun. I was surprised at how easy it was. I was also deeply skeptical that this was a safe thing to do. But it all turned out ok. No one got hurt and the men all sat around trying to figure out how to make the weak little bursts bigger. (Typical. Just fiddle with the valve to let more fuel into the mixing chamber.) I did end up watching from very, very far away though.

As for the building manager, it was a very sad story. I heard his voice while I was in that pre-waking dream state and I didn’t know this voice was a real voice coming from outside my open window. (I was three floors up.) By the time I understood this was not a dream, other neighbors were attending to him. It was all very weird and sometimes I ask myself, what if he had been wearing a harness of some sort for safety? Just something to think about when you are planning a DIY project. Dust masks, safety goggles, thick gloves, steel toed boots, may all be good things to have while working on a project. Safety First!

The Carnival of Personal Finance is available at Fat Pitch Financials!

Many of them look interesting, but I’ve got to run to work now!

I was inspired by Free Money Finance. FMF writes lots of series about financial topics, which I now realize is a really clever way of getting readers to come back to his site! (Boy, mappy, you really are bright sometimes.)

My first series, in honor of FMF, is about Doing-It-Yourself and why it’s good. I hope it’s going to be a three part series. Part I: Why it’s Good: When it saves you money. Part II: Why it’s Bad: When it doesn’t. Part III: DIY: How to figure out if it’s good or bad.

Reasons why it’s good:

1) It can save you money to fix something instead of buy a new one. (So obvious!)
2) DIY encourages you to learn something new.
3) It’s empowering to know you fixed/made something.
4) DIY-ing means you can save the money you would have spent on something else.
5) DIY can bring people together. Couples working on the house, Grandma teaching kids to knit, etc.
6) The DIY experience can teach you something about yourself. (Gee, I really like pouring concrete! But I really hate housepainting with crappy brushes!)
7) Knowing how to do stuff makes you popular with friends! (You’ll buy me dinner if I help you install the dishwasher? OK!) You might be able to turn it into a career. (Finishing a gutting and remodel of his home, a friend just quit his job as a policy analyst to become a general contractor.)
9) Time spent on a DIY project is time not spent doing money-consuming activities like dining out, drinking, clubbing, golfing at 5-star resorts, etc.
10) You’ll have skills to barter after the apocalypse comes!

I’m sure my readers can think of many more reasons. Please leave a comment if you can think of more! (include your name for proper credit!) I will append them to the list and link to your blog if you have one.

In general, I like feeling self-sufficient. I’m joking about the apocalypse, but it’s something my girlfriends laugh about. One of them is nicknamed ‘Bear Claw’ because there’s really nothing she can’t do. She can do EVERYTHING, spin yarn, knit wool, tool leather, flint an arrowhead, etc. I think she’s even a blacksmith.

Living near the Pentagon, I worry sometimes that I need more skills. My boyfriend and I have considered taking EMT classes since we like to make ourselves useful. During a crisis, I am a CAN DO person because otherwise, I’d be freaking out.

It’s good to follow the old admonishment, ‘Go make yourself useful.’ There are many rewards to it, personally and financially.

The NADA Guides. My friend works there and pointed out their guides to me. Her family runs dealerships and she said they list prices that are more favorable to the seller overall. So check them out. They aren’t as well-known as KBB, but if you do a trade-in, the dealership certainly knows about them since they’re probably a member.

I don’t personally count my car as an asset since it depreciates. If you look at my NetWorth graph detail, you’ll see my note about being a bit lazy on figuring the worth of my vehicle. It costs so much to maintain and operate that it’s more of a liability than an asset.

Money Blog Network is the consolidation of 5 great personal finance blogs, two of which are listed on the left, Free Money Finance and Consumerism Commentary

Meanwhile, I’m still crazy busy and have not fixed FeedBurner’s Autodiscovery feature for this page, but I will get to it soon!

I made a bunch of deposits this week so I moved the Save-O-Meter to 34%. Progress, but slowly.

I think I got all my tax notices this year so I will be starting my preparations soon. Mostly I’m waiting for my tax forms to arrive so that I can plan if I am getting a refund or owe money. I am pretty sure I’m getting a Federal refund, but the VA one got all complicated last year. First I owed them money. Then I owed them some more money, then I got a mysterious letter that says I actually get a refund. I *knew* this state was wonky. They’re out to get Yankees like me.

I like to do all of my taxes by paper & spreadsheet. It’s all that accounting work I did when I was young. Last year I filed online through Quicken. I’m not sure I want to do that this year since there were things that I didn’t like about the way Quicken classifies certain tax impacting items. So, I’ll have to work the numbers on paper anyway. There is something about the ritual of buying registered mail receipts, etc. that make tax season kind of fun for me.

I hope folks are getting things ready too!

Greetings!

My recent post about real estate assessment triggered a comment from a friend about how to estimate current fair market value.

My current method uses a combination of the county’s public record available at the Washington Post, CraigsList, and Zip Realty. I’m lucky that I live in a metropolitan area where information is readily available. I know the Bay Area is also available at CL and Zip, but I’m not sure about county assessments. I’m sure some communities have public records online, but you’ll probably need your lot number or something like that.

I start out looking at the Washington Post for recent sales in my building and my area. Then I move to the comparable current real estate listings, & calculate the dollars per square foot for each listing, and then average out all the results and multiply by the square footage of my unit. Zip Realty has a nice page where you can look at recent sales in your area and they automatically calculate that figure for you. The problem is, if you live in a mixed neighborhood like mine, the single-family homes are far more expensive than condos, so I toss those out if they are wildly out of range. I also try to read how much the HOA fees are for other condos and what’s included in those fees. For instance, I don’t have a concierge/doorman or indoor pool. Trash & water are included, but I also get lots of parking, which a lot of places don’t have around DC.

CraigsList is mostly just for fun because people are awful grammarians. But they often have really nice photos.

For calculating the present worth of my unit, I try to average in stuff that’s only about 4-6 months old. But I also trend the sales in my building since I moved in 18 months ago so I can see the overall growth. I was one of the first studio buyers in the recent set of sales, so I have definitely seen a lot of growth. I shake my head a bit at some of the prices my neighbors have paid, but I know that some of the sold units are nicer than mine too.

Since I get to see the market listing, and follow up by looking at the final recorded sale on the county books, I can see if people are paying the asking price or not. So far, nothing has gone wildly over the asking price, and luckily nothing has been under. But I do see that some units have been on sale for a long time.

If anyone needs me to get more specific on the math, please email me and I will follow up with another post.

The Festival of Frugality is up at Canadian Capitalist!

I have submitted something for this week. I encourage everyone to go over there now and read more articles on frugality!