Coconut Oil and Your Health

Posted on November 2, 2011 by thegooch

Coconut oil is a great source of MCT’s( medium chain triglycerides) that cause your body to not store extra energy as fat. For this reason, it’s popular among bodybuilders and other who want to “cut”, or reduce the amount of fat content in their bodies. The oil also acts as a natural thermogenic, increasing metabolism and body temperature, which also promotes fat loss.

Some common ways of consuming the recommended 2-3.5 tablespoons a day are:
Use as cooking oil
Eat with a spoon
Mix with coffee
Use in place of butter

How about you? Do you make coconut oil part of your regular diet? If so, how do you ‘work it in’ to your regime?

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I Hate Perkstreet

Posted on October 16, 2011 by thegooch

They are making me keep money in my bank account in order to get Cash Back rewards.

Ok, this  is actually an effective way to encourage people to develop good savings habits.

Action, save money. Reward, 2% cash back on purchases.

I like it!

Saving is good

It is true that the “cash back” reward takes the form of gift card which cannot be deposited in a checking or savings account, but the minimum balance requirement will motivate people who might normally live paycheck to paycheck to maintain a reasonable balance in their PerkStreet account. And who knows, this might lead to further changes in behavior such as retirement savings and more.

What do you think?

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Lose Weight Without Starving Using The Calorie Deficit Diet

Posted on September 25, 2011 by thegooch

While there are a plethora of weight(fat) loss programs and diets out there, most of them require you to eat small meals that don’t fill you up, leaving you starving for hours. Or worse, cause you to cheat on your diet with fattening snacks. That’s why I think its important to lose weight without starving using the calorie deficit diet.

The Basis

Your body is constantly using energy to build new cells, repair damaged tissue, breathe, maintain body temperature, digest food, etc. The energy required for these basic functions is called the body maintenance baseline(BMB). The BMB varies from person to person bases on the age, height, and weight. In addition to these automatic processes, you need energy for your daily activities, this varies quiet a bit from sedentary, slightly active, very active, to professional athlete training 12 hours a day.

Finally, you may have activities that you aren’t doing the majority of the day, but affect your energy needs, such as playing sports after work, working out at the gym a few hours a day, and so on.

These factors, when taken together, define how much energy(calories) you need consume on a given day to function.

The Calorie Deficit

So what happens if you don’t consume enough calories in the form of food to fuel your activites for the day? Your body will scavenge its resources to find a new energy source. The main sources are protein and fat. Protein is generally used to feed muscles when the glycogen reserves have been used up. This is usually a problem for bodybuilders, who use supplements and timed meals to minimize this condition(called catabolism). In most situations, the body will metabolize or scavenge fat to produce enough energy to make up for the deficit. So , by engineering a calorie deficit, you can convince your body to burn that fat around your waistline to meet its energy needs.

To sum it up, to lose weight, calories in must be less than calories out(burned)

How to Create the Deficit by Changing Your Diet

The best way to create calorie deficit is to consume fewer calories than you burn. To do this while maintaining a healthy  diet, is to consume foods with a low calorie density. This means you eat foods that have a low amount of calories as compared to their volume. Some foods like this are fruits and vegetables. There are also diet or light version s of foods are lower in calories than their standard counter parts. You can find light breads, burrito shells, and other foods in the grocery store. One of my favorites is homemade microwave popcorn with nothing added. 1/4 cup of popcorn  gives me a huge bowl of popped popcorn that only has 77 calories. Compare that with a slice of bread that can have 110 calories or more per slice! Needless to say,  the bowl of popcorn fills me up much more than a slice of bread does.

 

How Big Should the Deficit Be?

Given the commonly accepted number of 3500 calories in 1lb of fat, you first decide how much weight you wish to lose per week, and then divide that by 7 to get the daily deficit that you need to create. You then subtract that deficit from your baseline energy needs, giving you your daily “calorie allowance”.  For example, to lose 1lb a week, you take 3500/7=500. Then if your baseline need is 2000 calories a day, your allowance would be 2000 – 500 = 1500 calories/day .

 

Keeping Track of Calories

You can do this however works best for you. There are a number of programs and websites that will help you keep track of your daily and weekly calorie consumption. Many provide other tools such as a food database which already knows how many calories are in certain foods/products, others have wizards that ask for you age, height, weight and then calculates your  baseline calorie need for you.

Putting It All Together

  1. Calculate your energy baseline
  2. Set your weekly weight loss goal
  3. Calculate your daily calorie allowance
  4. Build a diet of low calorie density foods that provides proper nutrition while forcing your body to burn fat to meet its energy needs.

 

*Disclaimer – I am not a doctor, nothing in this post should be taken as professional advice and you should consult with your doctor or nutrionist before applying any of the advice in giving in this article.

 

 

 

 

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Save money shopping online with Ebates!

Posted on August 2, 2011 by thegooch

One of the oldest and largest rebate sites on the Web is Ebates. In this article, I’m going to cover some of their main attractions and show how you can save money shopping online with Ebates!

Ebates gives you up to 26% Cash Back every time you shop online from over 1000 stores. Here’s a list of some well-known stores they are affiliated with:

  • Cellphoneshop
  • Drugstore.com
  • eBags
  • eCost
  • eBay
  • Home Depot
  • iTunes
  • JCPenney
  • Kohl’s
  • Macy’s
  • Newegg
  • Nordstrom
  • Overstock
  • REI
  • TigerDirect
  • Vistaprint
  • Walmart

How it works is you log into Ebates, click on the link to the affiliated store that you wish to shop at, shop, and check out. The store reports your sale to EBates, and finally your EBates account is credited for a % of the sale. Note that credits go into “pending” state for 30-60 days before you can withdraw them via check or Paypal. In addition to cash back, EBates offers savings with exclusive coupons, free shipping offers, and limited-time sales.

Save

Save money. Never pay full price!

This is a very low-hassle way to save money online. They also have a very nice referral program. If you sign up with Ebates today, we’ll each get a $5 bonus when you make your first purchase.

From now until Aug 31, 2011, they are offering this referral deal:

  • Refer 3 friends: $30
  • Refer 25  friends: $250 gift card
  • Refer 50 friends: Free Apple iPad2
  • Refer more for up to $10,000 in rewards!

Click on this image to sign up and save us both $5 !


EBates really is a  good deal, and I highly recommend signing up with them. Remember, the less you spend, the more you can save…never pay full price!

*Note that all Ebates links on this page are referral links to the Ebates account sign up page. 

Posted in Finance, Saving | 1 Comment

How to Save When Shopping Online

Posted on August 1, 2011 by thegooch

Introduction

In these difficult economic times, it really helps to know how to save big when shopping online. I’m going to explain my technique, including links to sites that will give you a big boost in the savings-savvy world. Let’s look at how to save when shopping online.

Piggy Bank

Save More

The overall technique is called stacking. Back in the mid 2000′s,  it meant using multiple coupons at the checkout. There might be a store discount coupon code plus a manufacturer coupon code that would on the same purchase. This does save you money, but my version starts before you even go to the store and continues after you’ve checked out the online shopping cart. What you’re going to do is leverage savings from affiliate sites, manufacturers, vendor’s, and even credit card companies to get the most bang for your buck.

Terms:

Comparison Site – Search engine that helps finds and compare online store prices for a particular item. Advanced features let you compare prices before and after shipping to warn you if a site with a low price will overcharge you for shipping. Bizrate and Nextag are well-known examples of this kind of site.

Deal Site – A site that is devoted to listing online/offline store deals. These differ from rebate sites as do not get commissions. They depend on advertising revenue generated from site visitors.

Rebate Site - Online site that receives a commission on referrals, and shares that commission with site members. Some of the most well-known sites are Ebates and Fatwallet. They often lists deals as well.

Let’s start saving!!!

Overview

  1. Find the Best Deals
  2. Select Affiliated Rebate Site
  3. Find Manufacturer or Store Coupon Codes
  4. Navigate to store from rebate site
  5. Shop
  6. Enter code(s)
  7. Pay with rewards card
  8. Redeem offline coupons


Find the Best Deals

Magnifying Glass

Find good deals

Finding the lowest prices on items gives you a good starting point with the caveat that you want to keep in mind which ones are affiliated with rebates sites. Always consider the shipping costs when determining who is giving the better deal. A store that cost $8 less but charges $16 shipping will lose to the store that costs $8 more but has free shipping. Try to find at least 3 stores with competitive prices. We’ll narrow the choices down in the following steps.

Another way to find deals is to use “hot deal sites”. Both Slickdeals and Fatwallet’s “hot deals” forum are good sources for an almost ticket-tape like stream of discounted items. Other online resources such as Midnight Box or even Amazon.com’s “Deal of the Day” can help you find discounted items.

Select Affiliated Rebate Site

Rebate Shower

Rebates save you money

Jump onto your favorite affiliated site(s) and see which stores will get you rebates, if any. Next pick the ones with the highest rebate. If there still is more than one contender, just pick whichever one you feel more comfortable with.

*Note!! Always research a rebate site before signing up. There is a lot of fraud on the Internet, so don’t take what they say at face value. The ones I gave have proven themselves, but there have been failed startups and plain old crooks in this sector past.

Find Manufacturer or Store Coupon Codes

Often the rebate codes you need are right on the rebate site’s “jump page” . Ideally,  the referral code and rebate code will be embedded in the URL It might be something like “$5 off orders $50 or more, $10 off orders $150 or more”  along with a code. If that isn’t the case, you’ll need to go code hunting. This search is often fruitless for store codes as stores tend to want to control distribution of their own rebate codes. Sometimes codes are targeted to certain groups of shoppers which is another reason they want to control them.

Decoder Ring

Coupon codes are often kept secret

Manufacturer rebates, are generally a lot easier to find. These will be instant( applied automatically at check out), typed in ( the manufacturer, store, and coupon site will provide it ), or print & mail (slow but they usually work ).

Sometime these codes just don’t exist, or they expect you to spend a ludicrous amount of money to take advantage of them. While this is depressing we are talking about free money at the discretion of the store/manufacturer, it’s not an entitlement.

Navigate, Shop, and Enter codes

This part is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll go over it to cover some potential gotchas.

Shopping Card

Checkout

Before you navigate to the rebate affiliate site, make sure that online store doesn’t already have a shopping “session” open for you. The easiest way is to make sure you are logged out, the site pages are closed, and any store cookies are cleared. This makes sure the your shopping doesn’t pick up where it left off last time, which was a shopping session without embedded affiliate code or rebate code. Not doing this can make getting your “cash back” benefit very difficult, as you’ll have to prove you did the shopping and made the purchase using the affiliate link. At the end of the day, if the rebate affiliate site doesn’t get paid by the store, neither will you.

Navigate to the affiliate rebate site, log in, look up the affiliate link(usually a store search) on the affiliate’s site, and then click on the appropriate jump link.

Shop at the store. If you have an account there, its good to log in first and then add the item(s) you want to the online shopping cart. Once you are done adding items, click on “checkout” .

On the checkout page, you will select the shipping address, payment type, and billing address.  Make sure you enter you  coupon code(s) here. The layout/language of checkout pages varies too much to cover it here, but generally look for the word “code”somewhere on the page. There should be an “add code” button or something of that nature to let you enter and validate the code. Note that you might get a bum code that is expired or doesn’t apply to what you are buying. This is one of the perils of using codes. You have to have tough skin and not give up after the first failure. Go back to the coupon sites or search engine and try to find some more codes. How long you spend on this step depends on what the potential savings is worth to you. If the purchase price is substantial, the it’s worth some code-searching effort. Otherwise, cut your losses, realizing that spending hours saving a dollar probably isn’t worth your time.

Pay with rewards card

So you are still on the checkout page and its time to select the payment method. You want to pay with a method that gives you some kind of benefit or kick-back for using their payment service. There are a plethora of credit cards that have cash back, airline miles, redeemable points, and similar benefits on the market today.

Credit Cards

Use reward cards

Debit cards have some rewards offerings as well. PerkStreet has a 1%/2%/5% rewards debit card that gives you a percentage of your purchase back and redeemable dollars. You can get gift cards or Visa Gift cards in exchange for these dollars.  Paypal has a 1% MasterCard that can be tied to your checking account, and gives 1% cash back that is deposited into our Paypal account. However, this card isn’t widely accepted , so your mileage may vary.

I won’t go into store cards, but the BillMeLater service does have some traction with online stores. I can’t recommend it personally, but it is a credit account (they pull your credit) that can give you discounts. As always, research online services before signing up for them, and do it manner that minimizes damages . One way is linking a checking account with a limited balance so they can’t access much of your money.

Enter your payment information, review your order to make sure you are happy with it, and submit your order. This step is an important one to grasp when you are learning  how to save when shopping online. Make sure you due as it’s generally the largest saving area after the coupon codes.

Redeem Offline Manufacturer Rebates

This final step is uncommon as vendors move to “instant” manufacturer rebates that the online store handles for you. On the off-chance that you encounter one, I’ll cover it in brief.

The key to the offline rebate is the proof of purchase label along with the rebate form. The form is usually a PDF file that you print out and complete. The UPC label is then attached to the form and mailed to the rebate address given on the form.

Summary

There are several ways that you can save money on online purchases. By breaking the shopping experience into discrete steps and looking for ways to save at each one, you can maximize your savings.

I’ve used these techniques for years but only shared them in financial-savvy circles. Given the economic downturn that is hurting all of us, I felt it was time to share these techniques with you.  Now that you know how to save when shopping online…

Save more, spend less, and stay out of debt!

Posted in Finance, Saving | 1 Comment

Pay Yourself First

Posted on July 29, 2011 by thegooch

Many people fall into the routine of paying their bills first and using whatever’s left for savings/retirement. Sometimes there isn’ anything left. This gives them an excuse for not having any savings, and then they further use it to justify using a credit card because they ‘don’t have any money.’

This is a very bad situation to get into as the person gets comfortable with not making financial decisions. They don’t have any money so therefore they cannot invest. They also do not have much incentive to innovate in order to increase income or cut expenses. They become complacent.

To break this viscious cycle; people should ‘pay themselves first’ by putting money away for retirement first. Don’t have enough to pay the bills? Then figure out a way to make more money so that you can. This forces the person to research and develop income streams that improve their overall financial health.

With this new mindset, people will get in the habit of making more and spending less money, attaining a great level of financial freedom.

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Making Debt is Easier Than Investing

Posted on July 20, 2011 by thegooch

Introduction

Since I began my debt snowball several months ago, I’ve been wondering why my younger self got into so much debt, especially when I knew quite a bit about investing, and had a number of investments. After much reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that it was because it took so little effort to spend more than I had, I acted appropriately. The question is, why making debt is easier than saving?

Here are the reasons that I came up with:

Roll of the dice

You know the interest rate

Credit card companies publish the rate for carrying a balance, cash advances, etc. It’s information that is readily available. You don’t have to guess what it will be next month. Contrast that with most investments, which tell you “past performance is no indication of future performance” but “we’re pretty sure your money will still be around next month.” Comforting.

 

Which investment path?

You don’t need to make financial decisions

When you are burdened with debt, you know what your are going to do with your money – pay the minimums and spend the rest! After all, you did your “good deed of the month” by paying the minimums, you deserve that new PS3!

Past performance schmerformance!

On the other hand, there is a menagerie of investment options, enough to fill books, prospectus, performance charts, and other marketing materials. Brokers, CPA’s , and fund managers a good income from just help you to decide what to invest in(still no guarantee of performance, ol’ chap )!

 

 

 

Your money is secure

You don’t have to worry about losing your money

First, you probably don’t have any to begin with, after your monthly debt payments are through with you, so what is there to worry about? The future? Worry about that tomorrow! If you invest, you’ll be reminded of watching a Rocky movie  where he falls down, gets up, falls down again, etc. This keeps you riveted to your seat everytime the market takes an upturn or downturn. You could be out playing basketball or watching sitcoms on your 115″ LCD TV(thanks, MasterCard!) instead of reading the wall street journal. “oh my god, Steve Jobs has a cold! Sell!”

The sky's the limit!

High Interest Rates Are Easier with Debt

It’s a given that credit card interest rates will beat out any savings/checking account that you can find on the market. Which sounds better “I’m making 17.25% by paying down credit card debt” or “I’m making 0.80% on my High Yield Savings Account that requires $100,000.00 minimum deposit” ? Just keep making debt and paying it off to get bragging rights. “oh, your ETF did 8%? Wow that is nothing.”

Conclusion

People go into and stay in debt because it is much easier to do that invest. The stability of the interest rate, relief from responsibility for decision-making, and debt-and-forget(similar to set-and-forget) nature of credit products appeal to those who don’t like to think or be accountable for their financial future.

While this article was written mostly tongue in cheek, I sincerely believe that it’s easier to let yourself sink into and stay in debt as opposed to building the discipline and good habits required for successful investing.  I stress to my readers that its worth the time and effort to develop both, and I hope my articles, past and present, help inspire you to do so.

In the end, if you don’t tell your money where to go, you’re going to be wondering where it went.

 

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Good Credit Is Not Just For Borrowing Anymore

Posted on July 16, 2011 by thegooch

I participate in a number of financial forums on the Web, and many people have a misconception that I feel needs to be dispelled. Good credit is not just for borrowing anymore!  It’s used for a variety of ways that have nothing to do with qualifying a person for a loan or credit line.

Are you going to steal funds, son?

Employment

Positions where the employee is managing or handling money, or are otherwise related to the finance industry often pull a credit report to determine how well the applicant handles money. Another reason is to determine how trustworthy they are in relation to confidential information(e.g. company secrets ).

Company Secrets

The reasoning is that an employee with a lot of debt may be  prone to sell this information to competitors, or otherwise abuse their access to such information for personal gain.

Security Clearance

Statistics show that the number one reason that Secret/Top Secret security clearances are denied is an adverse financial history.

Access to Classified Information

Whether government, civilian, or contractor, applicants who have foreclosures, collections, etc. on their credit reports are asked to justify these events or risk being denied the clearance required by their job. Denial results in their  not getting hired.

Ye Old Banke

Bank Accounts

Online banks often require authorization to do a hard pull on your credit as part of the application process. Each bank has it’s own justification for this practice, some say it’s for verification of identity(Alliant CU) and others say that overdraft protection(ING Direct) is a form of credit, and therefore the pull is necessary.

You can trust us

Insurance

Your credit report is used by insurance companies to determine how likely you are to file a claim. While their formula is unknown, the bottom line is profitability. High risk equals high  rates , low risk equals lower rates. Simple as that. Justified or not, having a good credit score can save you money on insurance.

Conclusion

While credit reports were originally created to qualify applicants for credit, their use has expanded to many other industries. All the more reason to get control of your finances and learn to work the system such that you have good credit but don’t carry debt. Check back here for my upcoming article on how to accomplish this.

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Best Firefox Tweaks to Optimize Performance

Posted on July 11, 2011 by thegooch

While Firefox is a great browser right out of the box, its default configuration is geared to work for the widest audience. As a consequence, most of the default settings are conservative and result in sub-optimal performance. Here I have collected what I feel are the best Firefox tweaks to optimize performance.

The List

Move Tab Bar Back Where it belongs

The GUI designer at Firefox obivously thought Microsoft had a good idea when they switched to ribbon menus, I don’t agree! I first switched to Mozilla(before Phoenix/Firefox existed) because it had tabs. Those tabs need to be connected to their associated pages, not hovering far above them.

Here is how you make it happen:

Go to “View->Toolbars” and un-check “Tabs on Top”

turn off tabs on top
Goodbye ‘Tabs on Top’!

 

Make Firefox Give Back RAM When Minimized

Typically when a program in Windows is minimized for a period of time, the program will give back the RAM that it used so that users of the system can use the memory for other applications that may be running. By default, Firefox does not perform in this matter, making your system run lower on RAM than it should.

To enable the setting so that Firefox gives back RAM, do the following:

1) In the Firefox address bar type: about:config and then hit Enter.
2) In the “Filter” search, type: config.trim_on_minimize
3) Right click on the setting and click “toggle” so that the Value turns to “true”.

After performing the above, you will need to restart the browser and Firefox will now “give back RAM” when minimized. To undo the change, perform the steps again but make sure the value turns to “false”.

Enable Network Pipelining

HTTP is the protocol used for most web pages today and multiple requests can be sent before any responses are received in your browser, and this is known as pipelining. Pipelining reduces network load and can reduce page loading times, but the downside is that not all servers support the feature. For the servers that do support it, this setting could drastically improve the loading speed of pages in Firefox.

To enable the settings for network pipelining, do the following:

1) In the Firefox address bar type: about:config and then hit Enter.
2) In the “Filter” search, type: pipelining.

You should see the following:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
network.http.pipelining.ssl
network.http.proxy.pipelining

Set the first option to: true and second option to: 8. The SSL option you can set to true, if you want to use pipelining for secure sites and if you are using a proxy, you’ll want to set the fourth option to true as well to benefit from pipelining using a proxy server.

Increase Concurrent Connections

Yet another network feature that can be tweaked is the maximum number of connections by server, and in total that are allowed at any given time. Users on slower connections may want to reduce this number to help prevent HTTP connection timeouts. Users on faster connections may want to increase it. Below are the settings that I use.

To enable the setting so that Firefox uses more connections at once, do the following:

1) In the Firefox address bar type: about:config and then hit Enter.
2) In the “Filter” search, type: max-connections

You should see the following:

network.http.max-connections
network.http.max-connections-per-server

Double-click each line and change the value to 40 and 15 respectively.

Tweaking Connections

 

 

Rendering Pages Before They’ve Loaded

Firefox readers web pages incrementally – they display what’s been received of a page before the entire page has been downloaded completely. Since the very start of the page usually contains only meta information, css, javascript and simply doesn’t have much useful information to display, Firefox will wait a short interval before rendering a page and this next setting controls that interval. The default is set to 250 milliseconds and we’re going to change it to 0 so that the page renders as soon as possible.

To enable the settings for faster page rendering, do the following:

1) In the Firefox address bar type: about:config and then hit Enter.
2) In the configuration window, right click and choose New ->Integer
3) Name it nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set it to 0

Decrease Page Reflows

Rather than wait until a page has completely downloaded to display it to the user, Mozilla applications will periodically render what has been received to that point. Because reflowing the page every time additional data is received greatly slows down total page load time, a timer was added so that the page would not reflow too often. This preference controls the maximum number of times the content will do timer-based reflows. After this number has been reached, the page will only reflow once it is finished downloading.

To enable this setting do the following:

1) In the Firefox address bar type: about:config and then hit Enter.
2) In the “Filter” search, type: content.notify.backoffcount
3) Double click on content.notify.backoffcount and change the Value to 5.

You may also increase the minimum amount of time to wait between reflows.

To add this functionality perform the following:

1) In the Firefox address bar type: about:config and then hit Enter.
2) In the configuration window, right click and choose New -> Integer
3) Name it content.notify.interval and set it to 849999

Speed Up Menu Display

1) In the Firefox address bar type: about:config and then hit Enter.
2) In the configuration window, right click and choose New -> Integer
3) Name it ui.submenuDelay and set it to 0

Summary

Firefox is a great open-source browser whose default settings cater to a wide-audience of end users. By tweaking the browser to optimize performance to above-average levels, you’ll get a better overall browsing experience.

SBKHPV6N8Q5C

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How to Become a Money Sweeper

Posted on July 3, 2011 by thegooch

sweep·er/ˈswēpər/Noun

1. A person or device that cleans a floor or road by sweeping.

Traditionally, a sweeper removes stuff that is just lying around serving no purpose. You can make an analogy of this in terms of money. Do you have funds scattered around that are not doing anything useful? Most of us do. In fact, we’ve probably have had it so long that our brains have been trained to ignore it.

Examples of ‘dust money’

  • Coins sitting the car ash tray
  • Coins in a chest of drawers/nightstand
  • Cash in billfold that will never get spent since the debit card replaced it
  • Bank account balances in a low interest savings or checking that will take several life times to grow into anything useful.

This is what most people would consider ’dust.’ My personal defintition adds to this definition funds that we did not plan on having.

Examples:

  • Savings from coupon mail-in rebates
  • Cash back rewards
  • Loyalty card disounts
  • Unexpected gifts or discounts

I think you get the idea. All of these items are dust money. Finding dust monies is much more rewarding than finding dust bunnies. You may not agree 100% with my list, but I’ll bet you would at least categorize some of it as “dust”.  So what to do with it? I’ll tell you what I do.

Sweep

Not a bad job!

Designate a bank account where you will collect dust money into. This will be your ‘sweep’ account. Periodically roll up and deposit money from your wallet and ‘change cup’  at home into the sweep account. Include also money that you budgeted for a purchase or expense, but ended up spending less thanks to discounts or other reaason. Since you’ve already mentally prepared yourself to spend this money, you won’t miss it. Just pretend that you spent it.

Balances in unused accounts can be wired to the sweep account. Cash back deposits, credits to your account, etc. can be transferred to this account as well. You may find that you need to designate more than one account as a sweep account, that’s fine, though don’t have too many. To keep the analogy going, this account is just like a large dust bin.

 

Dust Money Bin

Can you guess what the next step is?

Sweep the Sweep Account

This step gives all those stagnant funds collected in the previous step a purpose, which puts them to work for you. You’ll want to do this regurlary to make it into a habit. Personally, I do this monthly, and I put funds where they will be in line with my financial “focus” that month. I’ll cover financial focus in another post, for now, think of it as the area of your finances that need a boost.

Since individuals have a myriad of financial goals, the possible uses for these funds are practically endless. Here are a few examples of how they can be used:

  • Snowflaking a debt to pay it off faster.

  • Parking in a HYSA(high yield savings account) until a better opportunity comes along.

  • Rebuild an emergency fund that has been tapped.

  • Funding a budget category for future use.

  • Buying something you were already saving for

  • Investing

While you take some steps to reduce the amount of money that you need to sweep by having some funds automatically wired to investment or other accounts, I personally prefer this method as you get the satisfaction of seeing how much money you’ve gathered from apparently nowhere. It’s almost like magic. After you’ve done several sweeps, you’ll form the healthy habit of saving money simply for the reward of a larger sweep at the end of the month. I think you’ll find that you save harder during the month with the know that as a result you’ll find a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

 

All those ‘dust monies’ really add up!
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