Click Accounts & Lists, then under ‘Your Account’, click ‘Account’.
Scroll down to ‘Manage your Data’ and hit ‘Request Data’:
Then click ‘Your Orders’:
Then check your email and click the link to get your list of orders:
For some reason, this process takes days, not seconds like it should, but eventually you’ll get your data:
And then you’ll get an email with a link to download your data:
Everyone should know how to fix a flat tire. If you have an inflated spare, pop that on. If you don’t, you MIGHT be able to patch the tire on the side of the road, or even fill it with ‘fix a flat’-style goo until you can get a proper repair. To do that, you need the right tools in your car.
Keep a tire patch kit like this one for fixing nail holes in the tread (but NOT for the sidewall) of your tires. Choose the appropriate size kit for your tire.
Also keep a spray can that you can fill your tire with, and then re-inflate it, to get home in case you’re not prepared or able to fix the flat where you are.
I keep a hand bicycle pump to top off my tires, although I’ve found a foot-powered one takes less work. An electric one is even easier, and doesn’t require any physical exertion… Keep both in your vehicle if you’re worried about the battery life of the electric one.
A pump in the car solves the common problem of your spare being flat when you finally need to use it.
Have a tire pressure gauge. The cheapo ‘pencil’ gauges work fine. Throw one into each of your vehicles. Read your car’s owner manual for the appropriate pressure to fill to (usually between 30 – 34 PSI.)
Most cars come with a spare tire & jack + wrench to jack up the car, remove the lug nuts on the flat, remove the tire, and fasten on the spare/fixed tire. Double-check this kit–usually in the trunk of your car– and make sure it works fine. Practice changing your tire if you’ve never done it before. Keep a pair of wool or synthetic gloves in the car for cold conditions.
In addition to the above, get roadside assistance through your auto-insurer, AAA, or (in my case) through your cell phone provider. This will cover towing in situations where fixing a flat tire isn’t enough to get you on the road again.
First, you absolutely must stop digging the debt ‘hole’ deeper: Set up the BTF banking system. You absolutely MUST create more income than your expenses + taxes. There’s no other way to whittle down your total debt permanently. Anything else is just a shell game of moving debt around from one place to another.
If you have high interest debt (> 10% interest rate), I highly recommend you cut all/nearly all unnecessary spending temporarily until you’ve paid off that debt. The interest you save alone will let you splurge more AFTER that’s accomplished.
Immediately pause as much discretionary spending as you can bear to: use up the food and other stuff you have at home. Sell something you don’t need to get cash. Defer purchases. Eat, drink, and entertain at home instead of going out. Tell your friends you’re on a ‘spending diet’ for the next month as a way to refuse expensive invitations. (Or counter with a cheaper option.)
Use the library to entertain yourself and cut out your paid subscriptions. Don’t get depressed: most of these changes can be temporary (if you want them to be) once you pay off all your high-interest debt.
Spending $1,000 today on, say, a new laptop will cost you $300 extra at 30% credit card interest rates vs using that $1,000 to pay off some credit card debt today vs waiting to upgrade your computer a year from now. Would you rather have a new laptop now, or a new laptop + $300 a year from now?
Use these three articles for specific recommendations on how to cut your spending.
Can you make more money? Apply for a better job. Ask for a raise or promotion (or at least have the conversation about what it will take to get one in, say, 6 months’ time.) Take on a side hustle like a small business or gig work to earn extra, and put ~100% of those earnings to debt payoff.
Earning more and spending less are two sides of the same coin: more take-home pay after your expenses that can go to debt payoff (and later to building wealth!)
Write down all your balances, interest rates, and minimum monthly payments. To get these, create online accounts for each of your debt accounts. Your statements will also have your interest rates and your balances, but online is better. Enter all these balances, interest rates, and minimum payments into a spreadsheet like this one that you can copy.
Once you’re logged in, set up autopay for the minimum amount due on ALL of your debt accounts: credit cards, student loans, personal loans, medical debt, etc. Even IRS debt can have a payment plan created for it. Autopay means you’ll never miss a payment and pay even more fees, and it frees you up to prioritize where your extra cash can go to pay down the highest-interest cards first.
Change all your due dates to the 3rd – 5th of each month so that they get paid right after your rent/mortgage as part of your banking system. Almost all credit cards let you do this; just search their sites for ‘change due date’.
Make sure to note any 0% APR periods, and what happens once those end (does all the interest you would have paid come back with a vengeance all at once? Or is the credit card more generous in allowing you to just start accumulating interest at the end of the 0% APR period?
Pick your lowest rate card, or a 0% APR card if you have it, to keep using ONLY for any recurring charges like subscriptions you’ve decided to keep, utilities, insurance payments, etc. Set up autopay to that credit card for all of these accounts as well.
It’s ‘allowed’ to use a credit card so long as you only put stuff you can’t overspend on. If you’re nervous about using any credit cards, you can instead schedule all your individual bills to autopay on a debit card, or direct ACH, from your checking account. Try to set the dates to be the first week of each month if you can so that all your ‘must pay’ bills are taken care of up front for each monthly spending cycle.
Take all your credit cards except for that one and literally freeze them, as described here. (Do the other things listed in that post as well. Come back here after you’ve read it.)
Leave your one main credit card at home, or freeze it too, since it’s ONLY for recurring expenses, not for random spending. Stop using your other credit cards or debt accounts. Do not cheat on this. You have one card to use in an emergency if you must, so keep some credit limit available on it. No store cards for perks, or Costco card for gas, etc UNLESS that’s the one card you chose to use for recurring expenses.
Make sure to remove your credit cards from all electronic accounts where you could be tempted to spend money, replacing it with your debit card if you must: Amazon, Venmo/Paypal, other online retailers.
You could even get cash and put it in envelopes for eating out, in-store purchases, to really emphasize spending a fixed amount per that category per month.
https://www.usa.gov/credit-freeze
While it’s important to free up cash to pay off your debt, that takes time. While you ‘wait’ for this to happen as income flows in to pay down debt, you need to try to reduce the total amount of interest you are paying on all your debt.
Every dollar of interest you must pay is a dollar you won’t have to actually pay the debt principal off.
Now that you know your balances and rates, you can easily calculate how much each balance is costing you in interest every month. We want to drive that number down so that more of the money we put towards debt goes to actually paying it off instead of just keeping up with the extra interest charges.
Many credit unions offer 0% APR cards on balance transfers + new purchases for a full year, AND with no transfer fee. (Most for-profit cards charge 3-5% of your transferred balance in fees. Yuck.) BECU has one such example that you can apply for, and talks more about balance transfers and debt consolidation.
You also want to make sure interest is not ACCRUING during the 0% APR phase so that you don’t get surprised if you’re unable to pay off the balance in full at the end of 12 months.
Navicore is a reputable, low-fee, non-profit debt consolidator that negotiates reduced rates with your creditors. This will negatively impact your credit, but that may be totally worth it! After all, credit generally only matters when you need a loan: so if you have a car/will pay cash for a used one and aren’t gonna buy a home anytime soon (how could you, with all your debt!?), best to get the debt paid off fast.
Be very wary of any for-profit debt consolidator. Check all fees and terms. I personally would ONLY trust a non-profit company like Navicore for debt consolidation.
Personal loans, like this from BECU for up to $30 K: Apply here after creating BECU account.
Do you have a family member that would be willing to front you the cash to pay off high-interest debt while you switch your repayments to them instead? This would be a win-win for all involved as long as you have the banking system in place so that you know you can accelerate your payback to the family member.
For large, longer term loans for those worried about IRS gift tax implications, here’s info on the IRS’s loan rates that won’t count as a ‘gift’:
https://www.irs.gov/applicable-federal-rates & https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/applicablefederalrate.asp
Once you’ve cut your spending/earned more, automated your minimum payments, and reduced your interest costs, it’s time to just keep plugging away at your debts until they’re all paid off.
Start with the highest-interest credit card first, and focus all extra cash about your minimum payments + other spending needs towards that. Make lump sum payments aggressively as your income piles up, including any emergency sources of cash that you already have.
It makes no sense to earn a few percent in a bank account while paying 25% on a credit card. If you have an emergency, most expenses can just be put back on the credit card, leaving you no worse off. If you have five grand in savings, and five grand in debt, you need to have $0 in savings and $0 in debt instead.
Here’s the math: $5,000 at 4% in the bank = $16.67/month in interest. $5,000 at 20% on a credit card = $83.33. Net loss to you is $66.67/month, which is $800 a year, from keeping those emergency funds in cash instead of paying off the debt with them. (And then of course, you have $5,000 in open credit limit on that card IF you had a true emergency that required you to run up $5,000 in debt again.)
Once your high-interest debt is paid off, change your auto-pays to the FULL balance for each payment cycle. This is the only way, combined with the banking changes you already made, to ensure you never go back into debt.
After that, boost your 401k contribution and start building wealth per my blueprint, or contact me for how to work towards financial independence.
Many clients have expressed concerns and requests for what to do in the face of Trump’s tariffs and other possible policies. I recommend doing nothing at all differently UNLESS you believe your personal situation will change as a result (i.e.: slowdown in Tech or Federal employee purge might hit your job. Have more cash on hand, and keep that resume fresh.)
Markets are generally ‘efficient’ in that all available knowledge is baked into stock prices already. Even if it’s true that investors think Trump (or something else) will tank the economy, those viewpoints should already be in the market’s current prices. There’s no gain for us to, say, try to sell now and buy back later (when..?)
Only ‘surprises’ move the market, and very few of us have enough insider info & wisdom to predict these surprises in advance.
Yes, yes they are. All economists generally agree that artificially changing prices is ‘bad’ in terms of economic efficiency. Taxes, tariffs, price controls, etc reduce the amount of free trade that would go on between individuals– including individuals across national borders.***
Either the market has already priced these things in, OR the market doesn’t really believe that Trump will stick to the tariffs in a meaningful way. Trump has already decided to wait a month on the Mexico tariffs, a day before they were scheduled to roll out. I believe that the feedback of markets will hit Trump and his wealthy advisors hard enough that they back off later.
The market (and I) could be terribly wrong, and Trump– or something else– may tank the market for a long(er) time. No one knows, so the best thing to do is just ride out any bumps. The amount of time your money sits in the stock market is the best predictor of your future wealth. Investors who trade the most frequently have the worst returns.
Stick to the game plan on what you can control:
(0) Pay off any high interest debt (> ~8%)
(1) make sure you have a cash cushion of 3-6 months’ living expenses on hand. Count what you have in other investments as well when thinking about how well you could weather a financial storm.
(2) max out your tax-advantaged accounts (HSA, 401k, Roth IRAs, 529 plan)
(3) invest the rest in a taxable account if you still have more take-home cash
(4) Enjoy life to the fullest and strike the right balance between spending now on making great memories & living a fine life vs saving for the future.
If you’re not currently a client, or have family or friends that could use a good advisor, contact me to learn how I can help.
Pretend you knew with certainty that COVID was coming and it’s December 2019. Patient Zero just started to feel sick in his home in Wuhan. The S&P 500 is at 3,200. You pull all of your money out of the market, intending to move back in when the pandemic feels over. The S&P 500 craters to 2,600 by Feb 2020, dropping 20%. You pat yourself on a market well-timed, but remind yourself that things could get worse! Schools are closed, unemployment has spiked, and the Federal government is running huge deficits trying to deal with the fallout. Best to wait a few more months.
In July 2020, the market is hovering around 3,400, but you continue to wait: new variants keep coming up all the time. What if a majority of people won’t take the vaccines being worked on, or what if it’s not effective? (The first COVID vaccine didn’t start until Dec 2020. ~80% of schools were still closed in Jan 2021.)
You wait a full year, but by Dec 2020, the S&P 500 has climbed to 3,700, and has never gone below that to date (it’s over 5,000 today.) You missed out on a 16% gain during the year you were out of the market, not to mention the missed dividends, even though you KNEW (correctly) that the pandemic would tank the market. Timing is hard. Better just to buy & hold those index funds after all…
***Microeconomics 101 sidebar: If you want to buy Canadian whiskey at $30/liter, and the Canadian Club people want to sell it to you at that price, adding a 25% tariff to make it $37.50/liter cuts out all those Americans that would’ve been happy to pay up to, say, $36, but not $37.50. This loss of trade means someone who valued the whiskey at $35/liter loses out on his $5/liter ‘gain’ above the original $30 asking price.
