90-Day Life Challenge: Savings Goals

This was a big step for me today. I have a tendency to refrain from planning out my financial future because I'm too worried about having the money that I need on a daily basis. I've always saved for the future, but I don't typically feel like its ever enough or that the saving would ever end. The fact of the matter is, there should be measurable goals that we work towards as a family.

My 7 Essential Savings Goals

At the moment, I only have around $500 per month to devote to savings, but I know this won't be the case forever. I've got extra work becoming available starting in September, and DH's business has started to pick up, so he's able to contribute a few hundred dollars a month to our financial freedom. 

1. EMERGENCY FUND - I set our emergency fund goal at $2,000. My thought process was that this would cover tires for both cars and a month's worth of rent at the same time.
2. 6-MONTH JOBLESS FUND - Sometime around 4 am a few weeks ago, I happened to catch the Suzi Orman show. She suggests upwards of a 9-month fund, but that isn't really realistic to me. We are a 2-income household with a lot of family support in the event of an emergency. To cover 6 months of essential spending, we would need roughly $15,000.
3. HSA - Ideally, I would like to see at least $25,000 in a Health Savings Account. This would help with any surprise medical bills that I--or my little "dare devil"--might accrue.
4. 529 PLAN - Obviously, DH and I will want to be prepared with Wee-One is old enough to go to college. Like his father and I, Wee One will be asked to live at home, work part-time, and attend a local university, which will definitely help with the overall cost. In addition, we invest in a small personal account for him on a regular basis, and his grandparents have set up a custodial account as well. We settled on $25,000 as a reasonable goal.
5. NEW CAR FUND - Another $20,000. We are not specifically saving for a new car since both of ours are running beautifully and just had tune-ups, but we want to have a large lump sum set aside for major necessary purchases (i.e. new car, air conditioner, family emergency, appliances, etc...).
6. HOUSE FUND - Now, this is where it gets personal for us. This would be a good place for anyone to store their down-payment savings, but we have decided to go another route if possible. We want to buy a foreclosure property outright. No mortgage, just standard bills. Considering that a 2 BR/1BA, 900 sq. ft. home on 1 acre in this area goes for around $110,000, we feel that $90,000 should be able to purchase a reasonable foreclosure and allow us some wiggle room to fix problems or customize as needed. 
7. RETIREMENT - The most important piece of future planning in anyone's savings portfolio, but easily the most daunting. I highly recommend reading Retire On Less Than You Think by Fred Brock. It's a wonderful read, and gives great perspective about how to prepare for retirement logically--as opposed to catastrophically. I'm aiming for $500,000.

Here's an image of my own Savings Plan. As you can see, I used grid paper and a simple "bullet journal" style of charting. It just seems to work better for me if I am visually pleased by the charting process.

Cute, But How Is This Going to Work?

So good of you to ask, I asked myself the same question the instant I finished the Savings Plan. I'm restarting with my Emergency Fund. Like I said, I have $500 each month (approximately) to put towards savings. I am going to split this and put $400 towards my Emergency Fund, and $100 towards my 6-Month Jobless Fund. I generally do prefer to work on more than one thing at a time and have a little bit of that Dave Ramsey "snowball effect." It should take 7 more weeks to finish filling up the Emergency Fun, and then I get to deposit the full $500 into the 6-Month Jobless Fund. In October, I will begin depositing $25/month into each of HSA, 529 Plan, and New Car Fund accounts. It's not much but I will still be able to feel like progress is being made.

As more funds become available in October, I will immediately begin depositing $150/month into my local Credit Union Roth IRA. Why a Credit Union? So I can never lose the original investment. Why a Roth IRA? So I won't be taxed on what I withdraw from the account during retirement. As the other savings goals are met, I will end up deposit their full amount into the IRA, roughly $750/month. Of course, this is assuming that my income is fixed.

The last component of my savings is the House Fund. It's easily the most daunting because we so desperately want to find somewhere to call home. Everything else we bring in goes here....Who knows? Maybe this blog will take off...

Thanks again for "listening" to my pontificating and supporting me on this journey. As always, I welcome criticism and suggestion, from anyone.

Happy Reading,

Your Devoted Friend

90-Day Life Challenge: Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Well, I'm on to Day 2 of my 90-Day Life Challenge, and today is about Amazon's Mechanical Turk. I desperately need a little extra money to feel secure that we won't be homeless again if one of the cars breaks down, and we still have to focus on my medical debt. I've dabbled with it for over a year, very very sporadically, and have accumulated somewhere around $70 that I transferred to my Amazon gift card balance.

As you can see, it's not a scam. You really will earn a little extra money towards Christmas gifts, household supplies, etc, and there's no catch.

What is Mechanical Turk?

Amazon's Mechanical Turk, or MTurk for short, is a form of crowdsourcing work that pays individuals small amounts of money per assignment to complete microtasks at home (or on the go). MTurk's particular form of microtasks are called HITs--Human Intelligence Tasks--and they range from $0.01 per task, all the way up to $100 or more (depending on the work, of course).

How Much Money Can You Make?

As stated, the amount of money you can make on MTurk directly depends on a few factors:

1. Your "level" as a worker. When you start out, you do not have access to some of the better paying HITs because those requesters may want you to have a specific success rate (i.e. >95%) or have completed at least 500 HITs. However, this is easily accomplished by taking on as much "batch" work as you can until you hit the threshold that allows you to accept better work. More on that later. 
2. How much time you are willing to commit. Since my work at the preschool is only 10 months out of the year, and my work with the special needs baseball league has off-season time, I usually wax and wane a bit in my use of MTurk. However, for the purposes of creating a better source of income, I will be aiming for between 30 minutes and 4 hours every day.
3. Use resources that help weed out the good HITs. I will link a few below, including a Reddit forum that posts high-paying, low-time commitment HITs.

Ultimately, you can probably expect to make $2-3/hour when you first start out and are learning the ropes, but once you get the hang of "batches" and uses some the resources I have listed below, you will be able to earn (I've been told) upwards of $30/hour. Right now, I've progressed to $5-6/hour. 

What Are "Batch" Jobs?

"Batches" are jobs that pay only $0.01 to maybe $0.10 per HIT, but you can complete 5-10 HITs per minute making them a very efficient way to bump your experience and make money. You can find them by sorting your available HITs by "most first" (see image below). Transcription is a difficult one to start with unless you're good at that sort of thing already, but you get the idea.

So, What Am I Going to Do?

Right now, I'm a decent level worker with respect to my approval rating, and I have completed a little over 350 HITs, but I need to do better. 

Here's the plan:

• Complete "batch" work to get me to 500+ HITs, then 1000+, then Masters level. The Masters level is where you find the fun jobs that pay you $1-2 for 5 minutes of work, sometimes more. 
• I will post a follow-up to this post every 45 days, since that is the length of time that MTurk uses when you check your account and click on the link that says "see more." 
• MTurk and the appropriate forums will be loaded onto my computer when I wake up in the morning. If I have a few minutes to sit down and churn out a few, great, but if not, it must be available for me to do whenever I have spare time during the day. I generally feel too busy for this, but honestly, TV isn't as productive as paying down debt...
• At minimum, 30 minutes and 50 HITs must be completed before I go to bed at night.

Ultimately, I would like to see myself in a position where I am working around 1-2 hours per day, and make $30-60 daily. That would allow me an additional $900-1,800 in income monthly.

Plans for the Money

For a more detailed description of our personal finances, click here. Needless to say, we are functional, not quite comfortable, but we definitely don't have enough extra money floating around to preemptively handle household issues or significantly pay down debt. That's where MTurk comes in.

I have budgeted around $400 every month for odds-and-ends: tires for the cars, oil changes, new shoes for Wee-One, household supplies, and any other neccessities. Whatever isn't used just gets rolled over into the next month's budget. The thing is, all of these items can be purchased through Amazon. I've always transferred my MTurk earnings to a gift card balance so it works perfectly. Now, I have $400/month set aside that I can use to pay my medical debt!!

Useful Links for MTurking

HITs Worth Turking For (Reddit)
MTurk Forum
Turker Nation
MTurk Grind

Well, that's it. Good luck to anyone that would like to try MTurking, and let me know how it goes.

Happy Reading,

Your Devoted Friend