One tip that Mr. Ramsey offers that I find especially interesting is that to know if you’re saving enough, you need to take the amount you have saved in your nest egg (savings/retirement) and multiply it by .08.

If you can live off the resulting figure, then you’re saving enough. If not, you’d better step it up (after paying off your debts of course).

I was surprised. I consider our savings rather paltry, but we actually *could* live off the results. Granted, we’d cut the cable and be living on rice and beans, but we would only have to cut our household expenses by another $300, which wouldn’t be hard.

What they say in the Total Money Makeover is true–the closer you get, the easier it becomes. We now are on the last of our “snowballs” (only one remaining debt to pay off), and it’s disappearing quickly because every extra resource can be dedicated there.

We haven’t followed one of the guidelines–we haven’t stopped saving. We’re still saving for retirement and for planned major expenses (one daughter’s adoption finalization, etc). If we’d stopped this, we could speed up the process even more.

If you’re just starting your Total Money Makeover, or considering starting the program, don’t loose heart. It goes so much faster than you’d expect. Good luck!

This is part 10 of a 30 part series on financial literacy for the month of April, Financial Literacy Month.

Motley Fool provides excellent communities and message boards, and some affordable financial literacy classes (at least they have, I’m not sure if they’re still available).

I learned about Mint.com from Motley Fool.

They also have excellent tax-planning resources!

The site is free with a free membership but there’s a premium membership as well. I’ve never explored this, as I’ve found everything I’ve needed in their free pages.

My only word of caution is “beware the ads.” Their advertising borders on oppressive. It also frequently has a doomsday or get-rich-quick tone that I tire of. There is email “why the oil boom is coming SOON” and the site is covered with ads. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the content from the ads.

They also have so many Fool-branded affiliate relationships that I can’t always tell what all they’re endorsing, or what is going to get me to sign up for some fund or stock newsletter. I find myself only reading the first 1/2 of all their pages and never the sidebars because of the advertisements.

That said, the message boards are excellent resources, as are their tip articles like “60 seconds to get out of debt.”

If you’re new to personal finance or trying to learn something new–check them out, but beware the ads–here there by dragons.

Here’s a brief list of what we’ve done so far, and where it’s getting us. Remember, my layoff was December 7th, and today is April 2nd.

• Called all lenders and negotiated lower interest rates. Followed up by shredding all credit cards. Value: Priceless!
• Learned to cost-cut around the house: home-made laundry detergent. Saves $7/mo.
• Budget and track all expenses with Mint.com.
• Renegotiated and repriced insurance, dropped the gap coverage on our paid-off/high-mileage cars. Saves $4/mo.
• Used the library more. Estimated savings $20/mo
• Developed passive income streams (adding advertising on this web site and others, as well as Lending Club interest). Earns $1.10/mo.
• Rolled-over my fee-intensive 401K into a more affordable IRA Savings TBD
• Found tax advantages to starting my mobile-notary and freelance writing business.
• “Re bundled” our cable-TV package to the same service and same company at a lower introductory price. Saves $25/mo.
• Received our tax refund and paid off an adoption loan ($150/mo, a credit card $100/mo and a student loan $110/mo). We have just one credit card left. Saves $360/mo in debt payments.
• Refinanced our 30-year fixed mortgage, and rolled in our home equity loan ($329/mo). We put both into a 15-year fixed mortgage and will be paying just $89 more than we were paying on our old mortgage payment. (We used Smarthippo.com to find a better rate). Saves $240 per month and 15 years off the life of our mortgage.
• Testing out some meat-free recipes for dinner. Last night the kids loved eggplant parmesan (they thought it was pizza!). Saves $24/mo.
• Renegotiated cell-phone plan (due to new business). Saves $100/mo.
• The layoff reduced our household’s commuting cost. Saves $200/mo in fuel.

  These tricks save us $981.10 per month, but we’ve noticed that now that all expenses are tracked, our household expenses have been reduced by about $1300 per month.

Here’s a few things that we’re not doing.

• Working more than 45-50 hours per week.
• Missing out on time with our kids.
• Cutting our daughter’s preschool (we may do this to ‘snowball’ an extra $660 per month, but she’s having so much fun, we’re having her stay for now).
• Clipping coupons.
• Stuffing envelopes or participating in “get rich quick schemes” and “pyramid sales.”

Ok, I know, nobody likes to do it, and you really can’t do anything about your expenses until you know what they are. How did I finally conquer this dragon? I signed up for Mint.com. It’s a free, online banking aggregator (i.e. dashboard) for your money. It downloaded 90 days worth of transactions on all of my bank accounts and put them in one place. Egads! $115.85 spent in 90 days on my cat? Are you kidding me? You can see my earlier post about Mint here and how it works, but I’m telling you, this may have saved this family’s bacon! While we consider ourselves to be fairly frugal people, what we learned is that we simply aren’t extravagant… but we’re definitely aren’t frugal. At least we weren’t. Mint doesn’t keep your personal info, it is just shown to you through their site, so don’t fret, they won’t Twitter your Visa balance.

Bottom line: The thing I love about Mint.com is that I didn’t have to track my expenses for a month and loose four weeks of time. It took a retrospective look at what we’ve spent in the past few months and categorized it, saving time and allowing me to start slashing our expenses while I had the gumption. Result? A viable household budget on our new income in hours, not weeks.

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The bottom line: to creditors any paying is good paying right now. Try to get them to drop your interest rates, and pay as much as you can every single month. I sit down to write the check every month and challenge myself to pay 10% more than I had planned. Every rebate check or babysitting dollar you get, throw it at those debts. I’ll bet the credit card companies hate me. Every time I deposit anything “extra” to my bank account, I write a check back to the credit card company for the same amount. They get a half dozen checks in the mail every month.

You’ll be surprised at how fast it goes down, especially if you have your net worth on Mint. If you check your Mint.com page every day, your fingers are on the pulse of your finances and you feel compelled to tackle those debts. I sure have and it’s working great for us. We’ve turned around our finances so much that we’ve moved our expected debt free date up by more than 18 months.

Good luck—and please, let me know how it works for you!

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Also, this week is midwinter break for our oldest daughter, and I thought this would be a good opportunity to instill some financial virtues in her. This morning we put on some loud music and sorted out the “penny bucket” which had about four pounds of coins of various nations. We sorted all the US money into coin rolls and such, and then dropped it off at the bank, $33. Not too shabby.

I’ll “snowflake” this to the last credit card. I’m ambitious now. I’ve seriously caught myself looking around the house to decide what I could sell to unload that one LAST debt and be free of my plastic chains.

Last week our oldest daughter came home and sat down on the sofa by where I was writing and said “Mom–today I learned about interest. Did you know there are good kinds of interest and bad kinds of interest?”

Wow. Those kinds of teaching opportunities don’t come along every day do they? It was the same time that the tax refund came and I was just about to pay off two credit cards entirely.

I sat her down and opened our Mint.com dashboard. I showed her our “good” interest, such as my Lending Club investments, which are earning about 11%). I also showed her our “bad” interest, and how we were going to pay off two of our three credit cards and put them through the shredder.

I encouraged her to save for her future. Tomorrow we’re opening “Smarty Pig” savings accounts together. Come back soon to see how that went.