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Do you want to know how I saved $42 in Gas Bill?

Lately I have been reading about home energy savings tips. I'm first time home owner and definitely not used to $200+ in Natural Gas monthly bill. So, I decided to find out ways to to save energy to lower Natural Gas bill. Last year, when I was living in apartment, one of my friend said, he had to pay $230 for Natural Gas bill. I thought he must had all his doors and windows open, but it doesn't took long for me to realize that. So, I was desperate to find ways to save energy.

Different Energy Saving Options:

I was exploring different way to save energy and I came across this interesting article from Lowe's on Energy Saving. Layout on page 8 that lists different ways air gets in and out of the home gave a different perspective to me about saving energy. Overall, I came across the following ways to reduce energy consumption

• Home Insulation
• Weather Strips - Doors, Windows and Attic
• Lower the Thermostat
• Increase Humidity ( Lower humidity takes longer to heat the home)
  
• Install programmable thermostat
• Set the thermostat to 30f and sleep under Bear Skin ( I will pass this one :) )
  

First, I decided to explore weather stripping for doors and windows and see if that would really help lower the energy bill. From Lowe's I got 2 energy saving strips to close the gap below the doors of the rooms we don't use frequently( day time and night time). The strip I got was $2.75 each. Its has self-adhesive, but I used 3M's small adhesive strips to attach cover the gap between the door and the carpet. Because, if guest have to use the room then it will be sealed off from air circulation and I have to peal off the strip, causing paint damage. From the Lowe's Energy Saving tips, if playing card can go through gap, energy is wasted.

So, after covering the gap between door and carpet and changed the air filter and waited for next month's Natural Gas bill. Apparently that worked. Since, Natural Gas consumption varies every month, I did some analysis, comparing January month's bill with February.

Monthly Energy ( Natural Gas ) bill Analysis

	No of Days below 40F	Average Monthly Temperature	Monthly bill
Oct - 2007	0	$22	71
Nov - 2007	15	$115	55
Dec - 2007	20	$180	44
Jan - 2008	21	$207	44
Feb - 2008	22	$165	37

As, you can see, number of days over 40F in February was 1 day more than January and average temperature was 3F more. If the average temperature was more than, say 10F, then it would have been difficult the justify the installation of energy saving strip save me $42.

What Next:

Thermostat is located below the attic door. I realized, when I set the temperature to 70F, bedroom apparently gets heated to 73F. There was 3 degree difference between master bedroom and place where thermostat was installed.

I was curious to know why there was 3 degree difference. I went into attic and asked my wife to close the attic door. I was able to see gaps in the attic door even with the weather strip. So, I installed Rubber weatherstrips yesterday.

I plan to install programmable thermostat and weather strips to other windows and doors. Hopefully that will help us to save on energy costs. I'm interested to hear about what you did to lower the energy cost.

Secrets of Getting Rich : Video

I stumbled upon this video by Robert Kiyosaki. It was interesting watch. But, I certainly have to spend more time to read related books and articles to understand, if that can be done and what are the risks and complications I can run into. I did search on you tube and interestingly I came across few more video's about Money and Finance. I will watch them sometime this week and see what Robert has to say. Till then enjoy the video. So, are you ready to get Rich?

Free TurboTax 2007 Download

Download Turbo Tax 2007 ( Desktop version) for Free, No Efile is included. 1 Federal and 1 state included. My friend got TurboTax 2007 for $20 in Costco 2 weeks back and I was searching for that deal, but I found this link to download TurboTax 2007 desktop version for free.


Follow the link.

( Update : Link is not working anymore )

Click on Buy Now on TurboTax 2007 Deluxe Version

Select Download Turbo Ta 2007 for Windows or Mac

Ciclk on Add to Cart

You will see Turbo Tax 2007 : Total Savings of $44.95

Click on checkout

Create new user account or login using existing user id and download the Turbo Tax 2007.

Enjoy free Turbox Tax 2007. Bingo! savings of $35 to $45.

Source of the link : Finance Buff

Other Interesting Read:

How I saved $42 in Energy bill in 1 month.

How does Federal Rate Cut Impact My Finances.

I have been watching my 401(k) fluctuate and day by day I was very curious to learn about the U.S. Financial Market and how it impacts average person's financial life. So, I spent sometime today to understand and learn more about the Federal Rate Cut process. Here's some of the articles that I found interesting.

Will Today's Big Interest Rate Cut Do the Trick?

...... The Federal Reserve's cut of a half-percentage point in interest rates today, following close on the heels of last week's three-quarters of a point reduction, probably won't keep the economy out of negative territory this quarter.....

..... It generally takes six to 12 months for the full impact of rate cuts to work through lending and spending channels. So, most of the impact from the Fed's cuts won't show up until the second half of this year. That's also when the package of tax breaks now being hammered out in Congress should begin to boost consumer and ...

What the Fed's move means

The practical effect of the Fed's move is that business and some consumer loans will be cheaper as rates that move with bank prime rates move lower. The rate cut confirms a downward trend in interest rates since last summer.
Futures trading suggests a 60% chance the Fed could move rates lower again in March.

I learned about how the Stock and Bond funds react to Federal Rate Cut. I'm 27 yrs old and still have aggressive attitude to invest in 401(k). I had good returns last year, but my portfolio is getting big hits this year. I'm reading lots of articles on how to Diversify the portfolio, but I want to invest majority in Stocks. Lets see how the market reacts tomorrow, I see the Futures are priced less.

Mint vs GeeZeo vs Wesabe - Which is better.

Yesterday I wrote about Mint vs GeeZeo. I wanted to explore Wesabe. I read many good reviews about Wesabe, but I wanted to explore it myself. So, I created account and decided to give it a try. To use its groups and networking features, you don't need to provide the bank account details.

There are other tools like Yoodle, Expensr, Mvelopes, Spendview and of course Microsoft Money and Quicken. I haven't expored Expensr, Mvelopes and Spendview yet. Sometime in the future, I will give it a try. I'm sure in somepoint of time all the free tools will be paid service, but some basic features will be still free.

I have used Microsoft Money for couple of years, but I have account with Bank of America and I think its $5 per month service charge to access Bank of America accounts from Microsoft Money. I felt its more work to export the transactions manually. I personally feel GeoZeo to be better( personal choice). Here's my comparison results of the 3 personal finance tools

	Mint	GeeZeo	Wesabe
My general thought's	Colorful, user friendly, but I feel its slow when displaying the Spending Trends. Difficult to identify to which bank the transaction belongs.	Transactions are listed under each account and more readable then Mint. Uses Tag Cloud feature.	Transactions are listed under each account. I like the way in which transactions are listed. Tags are more appealing than GeeZeo
Usability	Adds tags to the transactions automatically, but I have to make some changes to get it right.	Simple to use, yet powerful. Budget screen loads much faster then Mint.	Tags needs to be manually edited, but similar transactions gets updated automatically.
Automatic Account Updates	Yes	Yes	No
Downloads to cell phone	You can receive mobile alerts.	Provides support to download the transactions to your mobile device.	I couldn't find that options.
Networking with other users	No	Yes	Yes
Money savings tips	Displays offers from bank, credit cards, phone companies based on your account records. For instance, if your Checking account APY is 1.00%, it will display other bank that offers more Interest on your money.	Subscribers provide savings tips, coupons list for shopping and helps to join groups of similar interest. Example "pay off car loan", "save t buy iPod"	Provides similar feature as GeeZeo. I personally feel Wesabe's Groups are more helpful than GeeZeo's. And again, it depends on the readers tips and comments.
Security	Uses Yoodle to fetch bank account details and transactions. Yoodle is supported in many financial institutions like Bank Of America.	Uses Cash Edge's aggregation service is used by some of the largest financial institutions (e.g. Vanguard) and hosted at Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)	Uses a software program that runs on your computer and keeps your passwords safe, encrypted on your local drive. Read more on this below the table.
Adding Accounts	I had to spend considerable amount of time trying to add the right account. For instance, if you want to add Citi Credit Cards, it will list 2 options ( Citi Credit Cards Only and Citi Drivers Edge Card) and it asks for different credentials before you can add the account.	It was much easier to add the account. Gave my user name and account was added. I feel adding accounts is much easier in GeeZeo than Mint and Wesabe. I was able to add my 401k and home mortgage accounts too.	You have 3 choices to add the account. I tried using Firefox Uploader. Account adding feature is not within the application. It a program installed in desktop or as add-in to Firefox. I had to search for Bank of America. After I clicked next to Bank of America, new tab was loaded with BoA website and I logged in to the account and manually downloaded the transaction. This steps were recorded and for future updates, I had to manually re-run the recorded steps. I was not successful in updating the records with HSBC and Bank of America.
Who is the winner	I have been using Mint for some 4 months now, but after finding GeeZeo, I'm planning to use it for a while and then decide, if I really want to come back to Mint. I enjoyed the stay with Mint, then Microsoft Money.	I personally feel GeeZeo is much better then other 2. Will I go back to Mint or Wesabe, it really depends. but for time being, I'm going to play with GeeZeo.	It was little difficult to add the accounts manually. Yeah, I'm kind lazy to do the manual work. When, I login to the account, I would feel much more comfortable to update all the accounts in few mouse clicks. But, not open up a recorded script to upload the transactions.

Hope you enjoyed this article. I would appreciate if you leave a comment about the comparison.

Other Interesting Reads:

How I saved $42 in Energy Bill in one month.

Mint.com vs GeeZeo.com

If you have numerous bank accounts and finding it difficult to manage all the financial accounts, there are tools available over the web that will help you to manage all the accounts in one place.

Most popular among the tools are Microsoft Money and Quicken. There are als0 other tools available. To name a few

www.quickenonline.com

www.mvelopes.com

www.geezeo.com

www.wesabe.com

www.mint.com

I have used Microsoft Money, Mint.com and recently started using GeeZeo. I personally feel comfortable in using GeeZeo than Mint.com or Microsoft Money.

Microsoft Money has more features, but if you have account with Bank of America, you will have to pay a monthly fee to get account updates. So, I prefer using Mint or GeeZeo.

So, get started and play around to see what features they provide, that could help you track each penny. When number of bank accounts ( Checkings, Savings, Credit Card, Loan, ..) increases it will be difficult to manage all the accounts.

These web based applications makes life much more easier. Tags features offered by GeeZeo is more handy. It helps to associate a transaction to specif tag that you can save to Smart Folder for easy access.

As you can see, in the picture, GeeZeo lets you to set budget and track your spending. Mint.com provides a different view tracking the spending, but again its my personal choice to prefer GeeZeo over Mint.com. The picture on left shows how GeeZeo budget interface looks.

The picture on left shows how the Spending Trends interface in Mint look. As the name says 'Mint - Refreshing Money Management'. Also, Mint allows to create Email Alerts. I'm still playing with GeeZeo to understand its features. I also found the groups and blog very useful. The Tags feature in GeeZeo, where you can see what others users are saving, and their goals gives you more encouragement when you actually get to see their progress they made in paying off the debt or reaching their financial goal.

I was talking to a friend of mine over the weekend, who said, he still don't know anything about 401(K). He was also worried that he couldn't save much and not sure where the money he earns goes at the end of the day. These above 2 web application will help track the spending.