"100% of people who do not save money do not have any!"--Dave Ramsey

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Xist

I have $3,736.06 in retirement!

That’s a start.

Originally Posted by Xist

Why does everyone insist that I am waiting for something?

Because you said,

Originally Posted by Xist

If I am able to save $13,600 in the next year I am unsure that I would be able to do anything significant with it

I can think of a lot of things to do with $13,600. Pay off your credit cards, set aside a few grand in an emergency fund, buy a sensible and reliable car to replace your two 20 year old cars, save for retirement.

However, don't make a specific plan of how to save $13,600, and then execute that plan it will not happen. What are your financial goals for this year

And, you said:

Originally Posted by Xist

I just want the opportunity to work full-time.

You have wanted that for some time – it hasn’t happened. The harsh reality is that it likely won’t happen in your current situation. The combination of employment field and location are not working. So that means you need to change fields or locations.

You give the impression of someone metaphorically stuck – waiting for something to change.

As someone else said earlier “What is your long-term plan?”

Originally Posted by Xist

I was heading towards bankruptcy and\or homelessness when I joined the Army.

My first car was a $2,500 Honda. Where did I go wrong?

Instead of looking at the past how about looking forward.

You live with your mother and you pay her rent. Where is the rest of your paycheck going? Even at only 30 hours a week it seem like you should be able to save some money.

I highly suggest, in the friendliest way possible, that you look at your monthly spending and see what is necessary and what is not. Track every dollar you spend for a couple months and you might be surprised how much little things add up. I know I was the first time I did that.

Also, I'll give you a tip that has worked for me. If you want to save -automate it. Set up an automatic deposit for what is required to meet you savings goal. Then make your spending manual and limited. Set aside a set amount of spending money per paycheck or month and take it out of the bank in cash. When the cash is gone it is gone. You can't spend money you don't have and it is instantly apparent when you have reached your budget limit.

[Xist]

To adjust the math of someone that I am sure is a perfectly nice person, $3,736.06 in Vanguard's VFINX would be worth $63,353.41 in 27 years, but based on my 3% inflation math, we will have 100% inflation by then.

I am curious what my retirement actually gets.

The only interest that I have paid on my credit card in probably 2.5 years was when I used the same card that had a balance transfer and did not have a grace period. I lost $1.10 more than I earned in points.

I have mentioned a few times that I should pay off my credit card debt with the last school paycheck.

I am going to have an emergency fund. Credit cards should work, but I am not going to rely on "should" in an emergency.

The Accord is mechanically sound. Cosmetically, she has seen far better days. Once I get the Civic dash back together she should be good, too. She drove great after I had the mechanic lash the valves.

Cosmetically, she has seen far better days, too, but eventually something will happen that I will not be able to fix, whether it is the Honda's fault or not, and it is really annoying to need to scroll down so far when I look up car parts [by year].

I am going to open that Wells Fargo checking account with my first paycheck next year and that is supposed to give me a $400 bonus. Then I will close it and open up a Western Vista Credit Union Rewards Checking account that currently pays 4.09% interest.

If either of those deals ends or changes I will go for the next best.

Even if my main job doesn't improve, my second job keeps growing slowly, and I started talking to another agency.

I just hope that I do not end up with 8 bosses.

I do not remember in which thread I listed my expenditures for the previous 90 days or something, but the only criticism was spending $3.24 at Burger King a couple of times a month, and, I will remind you, I will have paid off $13,600 of personal debt on a $36,000 salary.

It is almost 38%. Yay.

Some lady is bragging to everyone that will listen that she saved $100,000 in 3 years.

She saved 40 - 50% of her income, so she made sixty-five to eighty thousand a year.

My paychecks from my second job have gone to my savings account at Navy Federal and all that I have done with it is pay off $2,000 of my student loans, make one credit card payment, and I recently transferred a little over $2,000 from Bank of America.

It is sitting at around $8,750, but taxes will take much of that, and I will use the rest to pay off my credit card.

Well, it is time to wrestle clients! I just want to mention that I did work with my brother this morning and then I had him do a 15-minute kettlebell workout--while he threw a tantrum.

He multitasks!

He was definitely sweating, but I felt like I was doing all of the work, moving the kettlebell and him the whole time.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Xist

To adjust the math of someone that I am sure is a perfectly nice person, $3,736.06 in Vanguard's VFINX would be worth $63,353.41 in 27 years, but based on my 3% inflation math, we will have 100% inflation by then.

To get inflation adjust numbers you take the investment percentage (In this case 10.53% for VFINX) and subtract your inflation estimate (3%) and plug that new percentage into a compounding interest calculator.

That comes out to $28,126 in inflation adjusted dollars.

Originally Posted by Xist

I am curious what my retirement actually gets.

What is it invested in?

Originally Posted by Xist

The Accord...

The Civic....

I'll ask again. Why two cars for 1 guy. Twice the insurance and twice the registration fees.

Originally Posted by Xist

I will remind you, I will have paid off $13,600 of personal debt on a $36,000 salary.

Which is awesome

That second job is really paying off.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by Xist

Employers pay to find new hires and Job.com pays people 5% [of what?!] when they accept a job.

I just wish that I had some idea of what jobs they list. You need to create an account.

"We share most of the fees that would normally be paid to an agency with our jobseekers."
So, not 5% of their fee?
"[W]e [...] offer you [...] up to 5% of your first-year salary as a reward."

When I was heavily involved in hiring people I learned we were paying a headhunter 40% of the new hire's salary to post the job and screen candidates.

Even if they give 5% back they are making plenty of money

[oil pan 4]

I know people who couldn't pay off 13,000 on 4 times that income. I would say you're killing it.

[Xist]

The starting pay isn't great, but it is slightly more than the charter school pays; additional hours, retirement, and benefits appeal to me greatly!

I absolutely hate to leave my kids and hope they find a replacement. They were doing occupational therapy through Zoom before TPgate. Hopefully they do not need to do that, it requires a babysitter.

As far as I know, there aren't any other SLPAs in the area, or at least everyone else already has a job. My brother's SLPA will be working here full-time, but I believe that she currently earns 50% more at a school in another area. She always complains about her home health pay and I think that she earns 50% more than me there also.

My other job pays 266% more than the school.

I cannot imagine her working for so little.

I wonder why there is an opening now. It is always fun to ask. The district's websites just show one SLP for six schools. I cannot find anyone else in Google cache and the Wayback Machine doesn't show anything.

If they count all five years of my experience it will be an extra $3,000. If they count the two years that I have worked at schools it will be $1,200 more.

I kind of want to ask if they are interviewing many applicants for that position. It would be funny if they say that nobody else applied, but do you think they would say "We have been overwhelmed with applications from a wide variety of experienced people," even if it weren't true?

One current and one previous supervising SLP have given me permission to use letters of recommendation they wrote for other applications. My leaders in the Guard always supported me and I asked one Sergeant for a letter. Maybe I should ask the others, but I have hardly heard from them since I left.

I cannot continue my application until I have three letters.

[Xist]

I spent the morning looking up stuff to apply to the school job and asking permission to use letters of recommendation.

I have not heard back from that Sergeant. I will give him until Monday and I will reach out to my other old leaders. Maybe they will respond this time. I would rather reestablish contact, but not ask for anything--this time!

I worked with my brother again. I really should collect data, but it definitely seems like I am seeing slow improvement. Mom complained that it wasn't a full hour, but I had him count 10 mini M&Ms, we did 140 flashcards, and then counted M&Ms again.

A hundred and forty flashcards are not many if they are cooperative, but it seems like I spend half of the time saying his name and trying to get him to look at me.

Then we did another kettlebell workout. I thought that I played the same video as before, but there were definitely different exercises. I was struggling and supposedly I was making him do the work (I wasn't!). When the instructor started yet another exercise I changed it back to Hallmark and got my brother water.

Somehow I played a half-hour workout video, not 15 minutes!

I need to figure out how to get Mom to declutter. She used to complain about how big her table was in the living room. She had me take it to storage and then we picked up a footrest.

That was way more comfortable!

She uses it like a table, but stuff always falls off. Almost every time that someone comes over she says "Quick! Hide the junk!"

Then she gets upset that I lift the footrest lid and dump everything inside. No, we can't put stuff away, especially unceremoniously!

Then we picked up another footrest, which she also uses as a table. It is also empty. Unfortunately, the lid is hinged, and I cannot just remove the hinges, so there is no easy way to move the junk inside.

I pushed back the footrests to have room to work out and realized that it had not been vacuumed underneath for too long, so I did that before pushing the footrests back. Today I pushed them forward and it was also dirty underneath, so I vacuumed that part.

Shouldn't I move all of the furniture at once and vacuum underneath?

I do not think that I mentioned Mom's bed anywhere. She always says that she needs a firm mattress, but for some reason after Dad passed away she bought a double-pillowtop.

Then she started complaining that her bed was too soft and her back hurt. This led to far more naps during the day and, instead of spending a great deal of time trying to get her to choose a mattress [on-line], I did a bunch of research and bought her a Casper.

A bunch of people on YouTube promote those mattresses and give you a $50 coupon. The problem [for us] is that Casper gives them $75. That isn't a problem for them, but Casper's default coupon works out to over $100 off a queen-sized!

NextBigThing got me $125 off of $1,095, 11.4%. I tried every code that I could find and that was the best. I installed Honey just to check and it didn't do any better, so I uninstalled it.

The fun thing is that after all of that work I found it on Amazon for $985.

It arrived yesterday and I was furiously attempting to catch up on notes with a giant and a ridiculously-heavy box next to me on the bed. Mom mentioned that she and my brother received their stimulus checks last Friday.

"Can I interest you in a brand-new mattress?"
"I need to sleep on it."
"Perfect!"

She slept a lot!

It was $1,024.32 with tax. I am sure that someone will tell me that they got a better mattress for $300, but we are happy so far.

I just need to get the old one out of my office!

Hopefully we can get some money for it after TPgate. When Mom bought it we put the best cover on it that we could find, but I worry the cover got damaged when I wrestled it out of her room, across the backyard, and into the shed by myself, despite constantly asking my brother for help.

[Ecky]

It's hard to put a price on a good night's sleep, even when it's someone else's good night's sleep.

I personally sleep on a Japanese futon. It's a firm cotton pad around 3" thick which I unroll on the floor every evening.

[Xist]

I wondered if there was anything substantial in the claims that you can get into real estate with zero money down. Too good to be true, right?

I watched dozens of videos and all that I got out of it is that if you pull a Homemade Home and find an off-market vacant house that the owner cannot sell due to some problem, you solve that problem, and then instead of making a deal with them, you find someone to buy it in exchange for $5,000+, yes, you can get into real estate, and all that you need to do is read this run-on sentence.

I believe that Homemade Home sold one house because he felt that it was too much of a hassle. He usually fixes them and rents them out. This video is about that first house, he paid $5,000 for it, and after renting it out for eight years, which more than paid for itself, he said that he was fixing it up [again] to sell it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ4XNwz_nbk

Meet Kevin buys them off of the MLS and pays people to fix them. Kevin's main job is as a realtor\YouTube\selling courses\I really don't know, but he would have orders of magnitude more cashflow than Homemade Home, who fixes up houses, and makes and sells furniture.

Huh. This video from his original channel has over one million views!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvmhQk3VWtQ

555,000 views:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNYG0JD7Ot8

Here he shows how to make a nice kitchen island:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNLNeV14WCs

This ten-minute video shows all of the work that he did renovating a house that he bought for $12,000. It currently has 8,835,555 views!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBCbbXlVOhs

Before you think this is a legitimate man not trying to get rich off of getting people to pay to learn how to make money, don't forget his $5 book!

Imagine if you will, I waste $5, and find a house like the blue one with bars, but it has some problem. The owner cannot sell it, but needs the money. I make an arrangement with them, fix the problem, pay $500 up front, and $300 a month for 5 years. I replace all of the flooring, repaint every wall, and replace the roof, and rent it out for $500 a month. I do not have any idea how much all of that would cost, but someone said that it usually cost him $15 per square foot, that house is 520 square feet, so maybe possibly $7,800.

I do not know if anyone would pay me a $5,000 finder's fee, but that would be vastly easier. Then I would have $5,000 for a better deal.

I keep finding videos from one channel that says they have a free software for finding wholesale deals and if you use it to find them a deal they will pay you $10,000. There are two problems: 1. The free program costs $1,000 to use. 2. Who the heck says "A software?!" Clearly he is not a computer guy!

It seemed like each video has at most one piece of useful information. In one video he says that before you try to use the MLS to find a deal you need to figure out home values in the area. He tried to make it sound complicated, but he was selling a $1,000 program. He said:

1. Look up sold homes within 500 square feet that sold in the past 3, 6, or 12 months, as far back as you need to go to get adequate data.
2. Calculate the average sold price.
3. Calculate average square footage.
4. Calculate sold price per foot.
5. Calculate average sold price per foot.
6. Use all of this to estimate the After Repair Value for a house in that ZIP with a given square footage.
7. Calculate this information for houses currently for sale in the ZIP and sort by price per square foot.
8. Forget all of this and pay $1,000 for a free program that you cannot use until you pay $1,000.
9. In another video he says to note when the home was built and for homes currently for sale, for how many days it has been on the market.
10. Estimate $25 per square foot to renovate [that was supposedly particular to this house, he showed a repair calculator in his app].
11. Estimate closing costs at 9%, carrying costs at 6%, and profit at 20%.
12. Subtract all of those to get your asking price, which in this case were around 38% of estimated renovated value. He said in another video that flippers usually offer 70% of the asking price.
13. Call the selling agent and make your offer. They may present your offer instead of a higher one because they would receive a significantly higher commission.
14. If they refuse, call back weekly.

Also, he makes it sound like the wholesaling industry is a multilevel marketing scheme. In one video he says that if you are broke to use all of your free resources, but once you make a deal, invest that money back in your business, which includes getting mentors.

That is fun because the premise of the video was getting into real estate even if you are homeless. Presumably a homeless person would not be the only one that feels that it is necessary to spend the money not being hungry and homeless.

However, what really interested me is that he indicated that you need to pay for a mentor, which is why I say that it is an MLM scheme. He says that he still pays for a mentor.

Who is his mentor? Does he make videos?

Do you remember Ty López talking about getting mentors in his lame first video?

He needed to pay them?

He said that when you found the market value for a neighborhood to narrow it down until you had fewer than ten houses, but I forgot and found fourteen that sold in our ZIP for $125,000 or less. I should narrow it down further, but I will give a summary: The average home had 1,117 square feet, was on 30,554 square feet, and sold for $91,825.86 $83.16 per square foot. Two around 1,400 square feet were bought for around $79 per square foot, renovated and put on the market, but then taken off in March or April.

Some need work or had unfinished renovations. The price per square foot varied between $49.60 and $106.63. If you toss out the highest and lowest they vary between $60.68 and $102.85.

Maybe $60 per square foot for a house in poor shape and $100 for a renovated one?

That would suggest the small blue house is worth $31,200 needing repairs and $52,000 renovated.

Yeah, they are asking $79,000.

I excluded the weird A-frame house because it has a $2 monthly HOA fee. With 912 square feet, it theoretically isn't worth more than $91,200, but they are asking $119,000.

They can ask a million...

[Xist]

I did not hear back from the Sergeant that always gave me a reference or the agency with whom I chatted on Thursday, but I reached out to a lady that randomly said that her agency paid the best rate that I have ever seen, but she did not give any additional information. I asked and she did not respond.

We chatted for a while on Sunday and she says that if there is a need she would pay better than my current agency, but both she and the other lady asked if I wanted to change agencies. I just said that I want to help more people and asked if they allow people to work for multiple agencies.

Neither responded.

I would rather not leave my current clients and agency, but they prohibit us from working for another agency. They may make an exception because they really are not finding me clients, but if I leave they will no longer make money from my clients.

I guess that she will reach out to the local support coordinators and get back to me.

This is a different guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TeW4U3eV1Q

I believe that he is talking about people calling because of his "I Buy Ugly Houses" signs, but these guys also talk about sending junk mail. He will estimate how much he should be able to sell the renovated home and tells them "Just so you know, I can only offer you] and then 70% of the ARV. When you go to look at a home take a video [in landscape] and he skipped how to get potential buyers to contact you, but take down everybody's information, and send them the link to the video that you posted on YouTube. As soon as you have a good offer ask "How fast can you close?" The correct response is "As soon as we can get a clear title."

You reach out to the other people that made an offer the next time that you have a deal.

He has a website and a similar tool. I do not have any idea how it compares, but it says up front that it is free for five days and then $97 a month. He also says that if you get a contract and send it to him he will split it 50/50 with you. He says they focus in 11 markets. One is Phoenix and another is Tempe.

The other guy seemed to live in Mesa, so I think that it would be hilarious to sell deals in his territory.

If you just send him a lead he will pay you 25%.