Taxes, Bonus and the potential demise of a "Close Friend"

In July, My company pays out bonuses. I have been looking at my accounts, and this combined with my unspent welfare(Rebate) check may lead to some good news.

Good News, The First:

I can now afford to run a power branch out to my detached garage. This with be a Do-It-Yourself project for me. I estimate the cost to be around $600, but will be happy if it stays under $1000 including the garage door opener, which is the primary benefit of having power out there. Up here in the winter, which is the best 10 months out of the year, a garage door opener makes life so much easier. no getting out of the car in the -10F weather to open the garage door. Currently my roommate and I only put our cars in the garage if we're expecting a large snowfall. I can't wait to join the masses of people who don't have to scrape their windows.. I can use the 10min a day elsewhere...

Good News, The Second:

The other major benefit is that with the bonus money and my rebate check and my tax return(My first full year in a house, and I wasn't sure how much that would affect my taxes so I just left my withholding and grossly overpaid) which were all "windfalls" or unexpected money this year; I should be able to pay off my student loan. If it is not quite enough to cover the loan, I should at least be able to pay off enough that my regular payments should have it paid off before the crimson creeps up on the forests this autumn.

When the student loan is gone, I plan to start saving for a new car as mine is 11 years old and I have no idea when the car will be unreliable enough that it can no longer serve as my primary transportation. My goal is to pay cash for my next car.

After that, I still need to do the following: Max out my Roth contributions, start saving for non-retirement investments. I am still thinking about Rental properties just for the amazing about of cash flow that can be built for retirement years. It takes time and effort, but I'm OK with that, I like to stay busy.

Are there any other method for providing cash flow? I prefer cash flow to appreciation simply because cash flow can be used to pay bills now or used to buy more investments without the hassle of selling...

Man fighting unreasonable parking fees from his HOA

Man is booted by Arizona Parking Solutions even though he has a valid parking permit.

While he was initially in the wrong for not displaying his permit, the fact that they booted immediately without any warnings is unreasonable. Then when he called and said that he did have a permit, they still insisted that it was $140 to remove the boot.

This is why I will never buy a home in a development with a HOA if I can avoid it. Monthly fees paid are used to contract with companies who then charge you more money?? Sounds a bit like extortion. To me, that's a bad investment. Pay money to have my life turned miserable. Thank You, but I'd Rather Not.

Is this a good deal for the "Homeowners"?

It's been awhile since I've Last written

I am working on a summary/discussion for Chapter 2 of Financial Statements. Should be forthcoming. I suppose starting a blog wasn't necesarily a great thing, since I only like to write when something strikes me. That makes for irregular updates. I'm working on trying to improve. Please stick with me.

Checked Escrow today

The money has been refunded, so that is one item off my list. Now if only my tax info would come in so I can file and get that done with.

I'm not dead...yet

Called about the escrow account. Apparently something was wrong with the check written for approximately 50 accounts, so they re-issued to avoid cancellation, and the value will be credited back to my account. I will check back to ensure the funds are replaced.

On Christmas Eve, a City snowplow hit my car, so now I have to get estimates to fix it and submit a claim to the city. I still have to decide if it's worth fixing, or if I will just put it towards a down payment on a new car. The damage is mostly cosmetic (I lost 1 light) but with post '93 vehicles, if anything happens to crack the bumper, the entire bumper needs to be replaced. Since my car is a 1997 model and I expect problems with it in the future, since I just had to have a water leak into the passenger compartment fixed in May to the tune of $1000, I don't know if it's worth fixing cosmetic damage.

All kinds of new experiences for me these past few month!

Mortgage Escrow

I got a notice in my E-Mail about Escrow activity happening on my account. I take a look and it appears that my annual Homeowners Insurance premium of $720 was paid. I love the fact that I don't have to worry about paying these bills, even if it means that I have an opportunity cost by keeping the money in the escrow account. The one problem I have with this payment is that two weeks ago there was another Homeowners insurance payment of $720 deducted.

This is the first time that this has happened, so I will give them a chance to resolve it. However, if this becomes a trend rather than a rare occourance, I believe that I may be in for some very frustrating times. I sent in a request for information on those transactions, we'll see what I hear.

GnuCash

So after trying to use Quicken in a Virtual Machine and having problems with it, I decided that I needed a new accounting program. I preferred one that was native to Linux as that is my Operating System of choice . I decided that I would try GnuCash (http://www.gnucash.org) which is also available for Mac OS X. Setting up my accounts in Gnucash took about 20 min or so, and was not hard to understand. The biggest change from quicken was that Gnucash uses accounts where quicken uses categories. So now instead of all my gas transactions being in a category of Auto:Gas, they are recorded to the Auto:Gas expense account.

These Expense accounts (There are income accounts that behave similarly) basically represent another entity's books so that I can place the other half of my double entry into their "books". While this is a little confusing at first, I figured out that if I thought of those accounts as the accounts receiveable for another person, that account was essentially a joint account used only to transfer money. That helped me get used to the change.

Right now the program looks promising. I plan on trying it for at least a couple months to see if it will work for me. The one thing that I can't budge on is that it must be able to accurately import all the .QIF files that I download from my institutions, as I don't normally type any of my data in, I download it from my banks, and double check the data as I'm importing them. Because I am the only one that uses my accounts, and I don't have that many transactions, as I tend to spend a lot of money in few transactions, I can usually remember everything I did in the last month by looking at where the money went and how much it was.

For me, keeping records of my finances is my one HUGE downfall. I hate it with a passion. I hate records, I hate to organize (although I do like an organized space, I just don't want to do it.) and I hate double checking everything just so that I can look back later and say "Wow! I filed that!" I'm hoping an easy to use program will help alleviate some of my pain.

Is there anybody else out there that uses GnuCash? any hints for someone just starting out with the program?