Building My Finances

Ever since I got out of college I've really become financially aware and have wanted to make the most of my money however I can. One of the first ways to do this is to watch your spending habits. Although I have a few credit cards, I make a conscious effort to keep them under control by not carelessly spending money on things that I know I would immediately turn around and regret buying. For the things I do need or really really want to buy, I make every effort to NOT pay the retail price. Part of this comes from my own bargain hunting, but a bit also comes from keeping an eye out for sweet deals that we post over at dealnews.com. After all, you never know when a deal will pop up on an item you don't realize you really want or need until it's staring you in the face. But then that's where the restricted buying habits come into play and I have to fight a lot of urges.

One of my main concerns now is putting money aside in a savings account. I have my main account at Bank of America, and as I've quickly discovered, the APY (annual percentage yield) pretty much sucks. After some quick research, I found that online savings accounts are the way to go for this sort of thing, and I settled on Emigrant Direct. At the time, they were at 5.1% APY... much better than the <1% with BoA's standard savings account. As the fed has cut rates, however, my yield at Emigrant Direct is currently down to 3.0%, which is a bit depressing. So I've started looking elsewhere... and little did I know, but my mostly dormant account at my state's SECU (State Employee's Credit Union) actually is quite handy. I recently opened a Money Market account there at 3.2% APY, which is slightly better than Emigrant Direct, and it's not requiring that I open a totally new account- it's just a new account within my existing account at the credit union.

This isn't the whole story, though... in fact it's just the beginning. I'll be discussing more of what I've discovered in later posts, as well as how I'm managing to move all of this money around multiple accounts and keep track of what's what. Stay tuned...