New goal for the year

While I have been working and going to school we have gotten overly spendy with our grocery bill. We have been working on keeping our eat out bills low but I had let our grocery bill go. I have decided this is going to end. We have a budget of $50/week and we are going to stick to it. I found a couple websites that do matchups for wegmans (my preferred store) and one for tops (my non-preferred store but it is closer. I made our list for this week and we will be going shopping this weekend. I also rejoined the WIR (women in red) grocery hound on their new board, http://notmsnmoney.proboards.com/index.cgi. I'll report back on how well we are doing for both this week and the whole month.

Hotel Reward Programs and why students should join them

I love hotel reward programs, they allow to gain rewards for staying at certain hotels and often once you hit certain criteria you get "free" or complementary items, such as "free" breakfast or snacks. Between my fiance we belong to clubs from the Marriott, the Hilton and Holiday Inn (priority club).
So far, we have redeemed points from only the Hilton (one in Hawaii and one in San Fransisco) both for our honeymoon. We should however, get enough points through priority club to redeem for three nights before the wedding in California.

My fiance travels for conferences paid for by grants, his boss or the department depending on why he is traveling to conference. Two years ago we both were going to the same conference and one of the professors told us we should look into Marriott's reward program. We checked into it and seeing no fees, we signed up. Because we were there for a conference we received extra points on top of the points for the cost of the room but we still do not have enough points for another stay. Part of the reason for that is I prefer Hilton.

Both my fiance and I have Hilton credit cards, one visa and one american express and we have gotten most of our points through their signup bonuses, however, we also got quite a few when my fiance went to yet another conference.

My fiance could have stayed at a Marriott for this conference but decided on Hilton because the credit card we had gave him silver membership (instead of the lowest membership, blue). We chose to get Hilton credit cards instead of a card through Marriot because Hilton has two credit cards without annual fees, Marriot does not even have one. He got a Hilton visa and received 20000 points for signing up. Between the sign up bonus and conference stay he had enough for our night in San Fransisco. This will allow us to not fly fifteen hours from Hawaii straight back to buffalo but have a night's rest in San Francisco.

We also have gotten points for Hilton by doing surveys for erewards. Erewards also gives points for priority club. The other reward programs we joined expecting to get the most points when my fiance traveled for conferences, priority club is different. Most holiday inns and other priority club hotels include complementary breakfast and lower prices than other reward program hotels. Even we compared the cost of motel 6 to priority club, if we included breakfast and two people per night priority club normally won. Priority Club hotels are where we plan to stay on our vacations if we do not have enough points to stay at the other hotels for free.

I signed up for priority club and was able to find a code to start me off with 300 points. Granted that is not a lot, I need 5000 just to get a discount at the hotels, but it is something. This brings up a great benefit of priority club hotels, unlike the other hotel programs, you can use your points at 5000 intervals to lower the cost of your room. I do not however, like priority club's credit card. It has a $49 annual fee, though it is waved the first year. We did decide to get the credit card for the points after the first purchase, however, I just received the card and have not had a chance to use it yet. I will report how long it takes them to credit the points, they say it will take 6-8 weeks.

Now I know most students are not like my fiance and do not get a "free" trip at least once a year but I still think students should join multiple hotel rewards programs. As young people we will be traveling, visiting friends, seeing new places or even interviewing for a new job. It may take a while to get free night using these programs but they are free and why not take advantage if you can? Also, often hotels will give free points if a problem occurred during your stay, if you belong to their program, they will not offer if you do not.

Update on the millionaire goal- March

We are inching closer and closer to our millionaire goal. We now have $9222 in invest accounts/bonds thanks to our investing, ing's bonus and the two percent reduction in social security. We plan to increase our retirement funding in April. By doing so we believe we will pass the $10,000 mark in July of this year.

Investing Stocks vs Real Estate

My fiance and I were looking for a rental property but we have been looking for almost seven months now and have not found anything that works for us. It would be easy to give up but we refuse to. However, with classes, the wedding and work it looks like we will be pushing off looking for any properties so unless something drops in our lap. Also, we are working on improvements on our current rental.

While we are dealing with all our craziness we will be funding our Roth at 10% of our income starting in April. We do want to increase the retirement savings to 20% but until we get the second property or my fiance gets a raise ten percent will have to do.

Patience is key to investing no matter if the investing is real estate, stocks or bonds. Though I would never say to time the market, one should only invest when the timing is right for the person.

ING came through

Wow, this was the quickest bonus money I have ever received. In the last post I spoke about using my EF money to deposit in a Roth IRA from ING to get $50. I was expecting the bonus to take two or three month to deposit (normal time line for bonuses) but I was pleasantly surprised. The $50 was deposited on the 25th of this month.

My DF and I have been talking about what track we will take now, for investing. We know we want to move his money away from T Rowe Price so we won't have an annual fee and eventually we want to move most of our money to Vanguard. However, we also want to buy at least one property here in western New York, we hope to buy three.

We do have our eye on one property right now and may need to put off increasing our Roth deposits and the move to Fidelity until we decide if we want the house or hopefully buy the house.

A Roth and an opportunity

I got a wonderful deal from ING offering a $50 bonus if I opened a IRA with a minimum contributions of $200. The deposit could be considered either a contribution for 2010 or 2011 but the $50 had to be a 2011 contribution.

The problem with this deal was the contribution had to be deposited by February 7th, 2011 and I had only $11 this month to invest, excluding the $50 required to be invested in T Rowe Price. I wanted to take advantage of this deal, obviously, it had a 25% return but how could I?

Starting in March we were planning to up our retirement contribution from $50 to $200. But where to get the money by February 7th? Thankfully I had money in my EF. In my mind my EF is not just for emergencies but also for opportunities such as this.

I opened the Roth today in a Roth IRA savings account and to repay my EF I will up my contributions in April not March.

People may wonder why I do not just roll over the $200 once the $50 is deposited. The reason is the Roth at T Rowe Price is in my fiancee's name and my only Roth is at my credit union earning less than the Roth at ING.

In April my fiancee and I will roll over his Roth from T Rowe Price to Fidelity and start depositing $200 per month until there is over $2000 in the account, then we will roll the account in ING over to Fidelity as well and begin depositing the $200 per month in my Roth.

What to do with the 2% Savings from Social Security

As some may know, for this year everyone will be paying less on social security, 4.2% down from 6.2%. In the long run all this will do is make social security more likely to collapse and less likely for our generation to be able to rely on it. Therefore my plan is to increase my retirement savings by the amount I am "saving".

The IRS gives companies until Jan 31 to get their payroll computers set up and until March 31 to get the excess money back to you but that still gives everyone time to up their 2010 contributions.