CalorieCents

Banking

Posted by moonimus on Jan 8, 2008

I’ve been sick the past four or five days plus I’ve been away on business. I’m gearing up for another business trip that will last through Friday. Hopefully, I’ll be able to mend on the road. If anyone has any suggestions for managing a cold while not at home, I’d love to hear from you. This also hasn’t done me any good in the weight loss department.  I’m a personal believer in waiting until you get better before putting additional physical stress on your body. I missed this week’s weigh in but I’ll get to it next week.

So my banking situation is a little complex though I’m ok with the setup for now. Here’s the breakdown. I’m a rate chaser when it comes to savings account and I’ve had online savings accounts at igobanking, fnbodirect, but now have settled on One United.  I know SingleMa had a  bad experience with them but I think they’ve worked out their kinks.  The rate at One United is 5.3% APY but they pay interest quarterly.  I’m crossing my fingers that the rate will stay the same after the next anticipated Fed rate cut.  Eventually, I’ll probably put my savings into a money market fund but that’s not happening any time soon.  The savings account is pretty straight forward.

The checking is where it gets complex.  Before I switched jobs, I opened an ingdirect account.  At the time, I think ING had a 4% APY for its online checking.  The only drawback with ING is that you need to keep a brick and mortar bank account for some convenience, especially for deposits.  My brick and mortar bank is Chase bank.  I can get frustrated with them because of their fee structure.  We have 3 accounts with Chase, one is a joint account, one is an individual account for me and one is an individual account for my wife.  We set up the individual accounts for our respective allowances.  This way we don’t ruin Christmas, birthdays or random surprises.  Normally I would close the joint account but we make all the joint deposits into it and its easier to keep things clean instead of commingling joint money in our allowances.

I’ve also recently opened up a rewards checking account at Toledo State Bank.  (You can read more about rewards checking accounts at the excellent Bank Deals blog.)  I can earn 5% APY on upto the first $70,000 if I meet the following requirements: 1) setup a direct deposit or ACH transfer into the account every month, 2) complete 10 Debit Card transactions (non-ATM) 3) receive electronic statements.  There is a local NJ bank that offers 6.01% rewards checking but I want to see if they will lower the rate after the next anticipated Fed Rate cut.  I haven’t yet received my checks from WalMart for this account so I haven’t moved my automatic payments and direct deposit yet but that should happen by next week.

Once the direct deposit has been set up. The ING will get a set amount and Toledo will get the rest.  The ING account will fund the joint Chase account at the first of the month and then we will transfer that amount into our individual accounts and then mid-month ING will fund the individual accounts.  I’d close the ING account except that Toledo doesn’t do online ACH transactions (since Chase will charge me a fee if those accounts don’t receive electronic funding every month).  I’d have to call Toledo and I’m not calling twice every month to do that.  The One United account is linked to all the accounts.  Did you follow all that?

Obviously, I’m not keeping this very simple.  I’ve thought about moving the brick and mortar accounts to Commerce Bank since I’ve heard a lot of great things about them but I have a feeling they’ll charge me fees if they are not automatically funded every month just like at Chase.  Anyone think I can do this easier?  Any solutions would be most welcome!

Motivation

Posted by moonimus on Jan 4, 2008

One of the biggest problems I have in my life is throwing myself at things with reckless abandon and then burning out very quickly. For some reason, I get satisfied with the small amount of progress and then stop everything that made me successful or I get distracted by some other shiny new project/goal. I have never learned to appreciate the process, the struggle, the journey. I’ve often asked myself why I do this and the best answer seems to be that I want to be good at everything. All my life, I think the effort to get from good to great was never worth it. Now that I’m getting older and more mature (maybe?), I srealize that being great at a few things is much more gratifying than being a jack of all trades.

In the book Mastery by George Leonard, he mentions 4 types of people: the dabbler, the obsessive, the hacker and of course the master. At different points of my life, I’ve been all except the master but I plan to change all that this year. I have an aggressive goal of losing 30 lbs by June 1, 2008. With everything I have to juggle, I will need to have razor sharp focus to get to that goal. My main motivation of losing this weight is to decrease all the risk factors that I may face in the future. My most important asset is my health. Who cares how much money I’ve saved if there is something wrong with me physically, mentally or spiritually? Nothing matters if I’m broken.

The #1 principle in personal finance is spend less than you earn. This is absolutely the most fundamental concept of getting your financial house in order. The #1 principle in losing weight is burn more calories than you consume. Now you can rephrase that anyway you want (like consume less than you burn) but I intentionally phrased it with “burn” first. In his book, Ultimate Diet Secrets, Dr. Gregory Ellis states that the focus of any weight loss plan should be on activity first. Eventually diet will have to be adjusted once a person has done everything he can to maximize calorie burning within his lifestyle. This is the approach I will be taking first.

Because of my former, glorious, athletic high school days, I often would kickoff a weight loss plan with extreme dieting, punishing workouts in the gym and thoughts of running 400 miles in 3 days. Then about 2 weeks later, I’m pigging out on ice cream, lying on my couch because I tweaked my back and realized on day 1 of running that I should have scaled back to 400 inches in 3 days. I think you get my point.

So I will be working out in the gym 2 - 3 days a week focusing by using a modified 5×5 plan (provided by Mehdi at stronglifts.com) and then embarking on a walking program and tracking my “active” calories burned by using a Caltrac. The Caltrac accurately measures calorie burn unlike step counters and calorie burners on treadmills. The use of device has been published in scientific studies so I feel comfortable about its accuracy. I won’t wear the Caltrac all day but if I leave my apartment or I leave my office building, I will be wearing it. The current goal is to burn 300 calories a day. Though I won’t be diligently watching what I eat, I won’t be frequenting buffets or eating tubs of ice cream on a whim. I’ll track my progress and report my results at the end of the month. I think I have the correct mindset going into this thing and I’m excited to see my results.

This time I’m motivated to be a Master.

Financial Background

Posted by moonimus on Jan 3, 2008

In my about page, I stated I am an inactive CPA in the State of New York. I am pretty good at auditing but have no professional tax experience. You can ask your other CPA friends what I mean. I think it’s funny when many people assume CPAs must be experts in tax planning. It’s just not true. Most CPAs I know are audit experts. Not to say that there aren’t CPAs that are tax preparers and planners. Usually a CPA who makes it his business to know taxes is a tax professional. I am NOT one of those.

As you can see in my debt scales, Mrs. Moonimus and I are about $40,000 in debt not including our mortgage. I thought about adding the mortgage to the debt scale but decided to exclude it. This is partly due to the fact that we are using the Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover as our financial plan. Most of you familiar with the plan knows that we first start with $1,000 Emergency Fund and then attack our non-mortgage related debt. As you can see the lion’s share of the debt is a student loan. This was for Mrs. Moonimus’ grad school loans. The only thing is this loan has an absurdly low 2.375% interest rate. I’m not sure if I want to attack that debt. How would you guys handle that?

Our baby was born this past May and she is awesome! However, we decided that Mrs. Moonimus would stop working to raise our baby which caused a big shortfall in our income. I quickly changed jobs soon after, got myself a raise and better benefits and we are getting by on my salary alone. Recently, my wife started tutoring some kids in the neighborhood (she is a teacher) and so we get some extra income that way. The last two years, we were phased out of the Roth IRA but 2008 we should be ok to make contributions. If we follow the Money Makeover plan, we’d have to build the emergency fund to cover 3 - 6 months of expenses and then think about contributing for retirement. My company requires a 2% contribution into a defined contribution plan and then has an extremely generous matching program. The match is great since it provides us with more flexibility with our money.

So far our goals for this year is to save $1,000, pay our credit card and personal debts, and maybe pay off half of the student loan though I’m still unsure about this. Also I’d like to see if we could increase our net worth 12% though I haven’t looked at those numbers very closely.

Weight Loss Background

Posted by moonimus on Jan 3, 2008

Ever since I started elementary school, it seems as if I have been in a back and forth struggle with my weight. I was a pudgy kid when I was little but I was always one of the taller kids so my length probably hid some of my weight problems. Currently, my height is 5′ 10″ and my weight is approximately 230 lbs. I’m a fairly broad guy but most people would consider me borderline or fully obese.

I started becoming very active in high school. I wrestled in the 215 lbs weight class even though I used to hover between 185 and 200 lbs at any point in the season. The next lowest weight class at the time was 177. I wasn’t much of a wrestler but I was quicker and more agile than most. I trained very hard during the offseason by lifting 4 days a week and running 5 days a week. The route I ran was a vicious 3 mile hill infested run and absolutely grueling in the summer. Not that I’m proud of it now, but I once lost 14 lbs in one week during my senior year. After that, my season was completely lost and I was a shadow of myself on the wrestling mat.

In college, I continued to keep up with the workouts but they became increasingly difficult to maintain the effort without the motivation of competition. I entered college at 185 lbs. I gained 15 lbs as a freshman, 15 lbs as a sophmore, and 10 more lbs as a junior. I was at 225 lbs for a while until one day in grad school, the scale said 245 lbs! I was 5 lbs away from 250!! I couldn’t believe it and I took it upon myself to turn it around. Three years from that point, I had become 196 lbs. It took a lot of hard work but I slowly lost my progress after a business trip soon after. Since then, I’ve crept back up to 230 lbs.

During the time of my gaining and losing and regaining, I was using different training regimens. I got into something called High Intensity Training, then Superslow, then variations on Superslow. I also went on the low carb diet during the losing period but went back to carbs not long after I hit 196. So I haven’t been a model of consistency.

Last year, I read a book called Ultimate Diet Secrets by Dr. Gregory Ellis. It was an eye opening read and I hope to share the knowledge I learned from that book into CalorieCents. I highly recommend this book! I am currently reading a book called Starting Strength and my next will be Practical Programming for Strength Training both by Mark Rippetoe and Lon Kilgore.

You can see in the right sidebar my goals for weight loss and decrease in body fat percentage. June 1 is 21 full weeks away so I’d have to lose about 1.4 lbs a week. It sounds so easy, doesn’t it?

Introduction

Posted by moonimus on Jan 2, 2008

So this is my first foray into blogging out in the great wide open. For the last few years, I’ve been over at xanga blogging inconsistently about various topics but now I’ve decided to narrow the focus to Personal Finance and Weight Loss. That doesn’t mean that there will be occasional sprinklings of unrelated topics.

So why blog? I was inspired by Clever Dude and through a link at Clever, Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, to take some action. Years before this point, I had read books like The Richest Man in Babylon, Your Money or Your Life, the Millionaire Mind and loved them. The first PF Blog I read was Iwillteachyoutoberich and then followed by the Simple Dollar. It’s hard to keep up with how many I read now. You can check them out on my blogroll.  Essentially though, I’m blogging to learn something about myself.

Since my “initiation” I’ve been introduced to David Ramsey, Suze Orman, John Bogle and David Bach.  My family has become more frugal and we have set some aggressive financial goals.  In the last year, I’ve come to realize that I will continue to make mistakes in this journey and that I shouldn’t get discouraged at any setbacks.  I used to get so frustrated with myself about not having the ruthlessness, cunning and desire to automatically change.  Now I know that true change is not easy.  It is gradual and filled with setbacks.  Which brings me to my next thought:

I’m still figuring out the whole html thing so I’ll ask for your forgiveness in advance for any future egregious errors. I am happy to have actually gotten this far.