Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Orange Savings Account Opened

I took another step in making sure I'm saving money and having it spread around a little bit. Still haven't taken the step of investing yet, but now having $50 a week automatically deducted from my checking account each week, ($25 to two different accounts) should help me put something away.

When I bought the Quicken software last week, I installed it that night and noticed the icon that it put on my desktop plugging an offer to get $50 for opening an ING Direct Orange Savings account. I had thought about creating a second savings account to use for larger ticket items or vacations while still maintaining and not touching my "Emergency Funds" sitting over at VirtualBank. After reading earlier this week that ING Direct had raised the APY in their Orange Savings account to 3.00% I went ahead and decided to open the account.

It took less than 5 minutes to fill out the online forms and link my checking account. I initially funded the new savings account with only $50. Now looking at it this morning, my $50 is in there, as well as my $50 bonus for opening the account. In addition I set it up so that each Thursday $25 will be transfer from my checking account. So now I am sending $25 to this new account and $25 to the VirtualBank account.

In other financial news...I canceled my personal cell phone this week. My contract had run out in January, and I have been provided with a cell phone from my work, which my boss has told me is perfectly fine to use for personal calls, as there are a ton of minutes in the plan. So that will save me approx $80 a month, which is now going towards the Orange Savings account.

I've also been able to make a little money each month on one of my other web ventures, and that money comes to me via PayPal. Last month I got a PayPal debit card which allows me to use the money in my PayPal account anywhere I can pay with a credit card. I've decided that I'm going to use that account as much as I can to pay for the gas in my car. Right now my short term goal is to make enough coming into PayPal each month to pay for my gas. That's going to require me to be making about $300 a month. If I can do that, I will then put that extra $300 towards my credit card debt each month.

So there's a few things I'm doing financially right now...

4 comments:

Neville said...

Good going. You are ahead of most Americans as you have started to seriously think about your fiscal future, and actually ACT on it.

-Nev

Dawn said...

You can also save the shipping and check out what price you can get at cellforcash.com

B said...

Cellforcash apparently doesn't want the phone as it isn't listed in their models.

The phone isn't that old...I only had it two years...and it's a nice color screen, web enabled... oh well. Maybe the eBay is an option.

As for getting a Gas rebate card...my credit is shot...no chance at getting a decent card for me.

Anonymous said...

Don't forget PayPal gives you cash back, a definite plus, and its money market account is one of the top yielding MMAs, according to last week's Wall Street Journal.