E-mails, E-mails, E-mails: How to Have a Good E-mail Habit

Ah. E-mails. They are such a crucial part of my student/work life but I hate them. They make my life more convenient but I hate them. They save millions of trees and enable fast communication around the world, but, I HATE THEM.

(Why is good e-mail etiquette so crucial? As you probably have already heard, it's considered a communication skill. Before, there used to be a stack of paper on your desk for any sort of communication at work. But now, it's all about e-mails. Any real working adult or professional has mastered this essential skill (well, maybe not everyone, because I still have coworkers not being responsive everywhere and even at my school) or is expected to master this before they get hired.)

My e-mail life started in my undergraduate school years. I was a preceptor for a class with a professor with high standards. One of the things she emphasized was e-mail etiquette. So whenever I received an e-mail from her, I was rushing to reply to her as soon as possible. This was not that horrible. I actually liked this because I learned how to communicate via e-mails and to be responsive. However, when I got to my graduate program, I started getting overwhelmed. In undergrad, I only had to worry about e-mailing one person. But when I got more officer positions in student organizations in graduate school, the number of e-mails I was reading everyday increased exponentially.

The first two years, I was not stressed out too much. When I started getting sick, that's when the domino effect started. I wasn't able to carry out basic daily tasks (such as showering), so naturally, e-mails became the last thing on my mind. Not off my mind, though. I would be in too much pain to worry about it and then when I was feeling better here and there, they became heavy weights on my mind. I kept thinking about how I should be replying to these individuals but wasn't, although a few minutes on my phone would have sufficed. When I got better, it was challenging to get my good e-mail habit back. I took a few days to reply to things, I didn't reply to certain e-mails, and I wasn't checking e-mails at all some days.

What did I do to get back my old good habit of e-mailing? Here are some tips:
1. Read them at certain times of the day. 
For example, I designated 9AM, 11AM, 3PM, and 6PM to be reading e-mail times. One thing I noticed is that I got distracted by e-mails when I heard a notification sound or mark indicating that I got a new e-mail. I would immediately stop everything I was doing, go on to my e-mail, and start doing what the e-mail asks me for. This eventually made everything take a longer time. So I decided that I'm not going to check my e-mails outside of these times to improve my productivity. I'm trying to see if 9AM is necessary or not because I don't like starting my day with e-mails due to the same reason.

2. Reply right when you read them. 
One thing I noticed is that if I don't reply right when I read the e-mail, I forget about them and remember them a few days later. So I just reply right then and there. This way, I don't have to worry about the e-mails throughout the day. Another trick I do is marking the e-mails as unread (the ones I can't reply to right away), which will make me read the e-mail again later on.

3. Always be the last one to end the communication.
If someone asks you to do something and you actually finish the job, then please let them know that the job is done. Or if they said thank you to you, then reply back saying the same thing or something as simple as 'you're welcome'. This will make other people feel less ignored and have them notice you. It will make them think that you are genuine, that you are responsive and responsible. Unfortunately, workplaces have a tendency of rating someone's performance based on the person's likableness. So it won't hurt to take a few extra seconds to reply to a simple e-mail with a "thank you" or "have a great day".

So what do you guys do for your e-mails? I would love to hear feedback from you guys and cheers to being a better professional and having good communication skills.

My Auto Loan

It's been almost 4 years since I got my car. According to the plan I had when I first purchased this car, I was supposed to be done with the payments this May. But... I don't think it's going to happen. I was traveling a lot every year and my trip to Italy last year wrecked my finances. Now that the last year of my graduate program is nearing (aka I won't be able to work at all), I'm kinda getting nervous about still having to pay a large amount of money every month.

Because of this, I made my own auto loan pay off sheet so that I would be able to keep track of my payments and stay close to my goal timeline. I'm still going to shoot for my original plan of paying everything off in May. In front of each "2018", I'm writing in the months of the year, so please fill them out according to your plan.

Here are things I learned for the past 4 years by making payments (must read the last one!):

1. Refinance.
I didn't learn about this until later but there is a minimum amount of debt you have to have in order to apply for a refinance. I always considered refinancing my loan but got too lazy with it. By the time I was looking for a refinancing opportunity, they couldn't offer me anything because the minimum amount of auto loans you had to have was $5,000. So look into your loan contract and consider refinancing it to get a better interest rate.

2. Negotiate.
When I went to my bank, I was going to transfer my auto loan to a federal credit union since I heard that they usually offer the lower interest rates and because my bank was not offering an interest rate that was lower than what I already had. BUT you can negotiate with a banker. When I told the banker that I was going to transfer my loan, she said that she would be able to look into something that would offer me a lower interest rate although it was not "officially" offered to everyone. So talk to them! (I wasn't able to get the refinance due to the low amount of debt that I had).

3. Transfer. 
Just like refinancing, look for another option for your car loan. You can look into federal credit unions or another bank. There are many options out there that can offer you a better interest rate. Please research before you go in though, since applications can affect your credit score.

4. Learn: Regular Payment vs. Principal Payment.
There are many things I wished I had googled before I was at the end stage of my car loan. One of them is types of payments in loans. "Regular payment" is a regular payment you are supposed to pay and your regular payment pays off your interest first and then your actual loan. But your principal payment is the amount you actually borrowed and what your interest rate is based on (I didn't know about this until this week?!?).

For example, you owe me 100 apples and your interest rate is 5%, which means your interest is 5 apples the first month. You have to make a payment of 10 apples every month. If you make the regular payment, the 10 apples you pay goes towards your interest first, and then towards the 100 apples you borrowed. In this case, only 5 out of the 10 apples you pay are going towards your actual loan. So now, you owe me 95 apples with a 5% interest rate (which equates to 4.75 apples) for the next month. Got it?

Okay. Then what if you pay me 20 apples the first month instead of 10 apples? Then you are paying me the first month's interest and actual loan and the second month's interest and actual loan. So you paid me 5 interest apples and 5 actual loan apples, then, 4.75 interest apples and 5.25 actual loan apples. Another thing about this is that you don't have to make any payments until the third month.

But if you pay me 20 apples and pay the extra amount to the principal payment, then you are paying the first month's interest, 5 apples, and putting the rest into the actual loan, 15 apples. This leaves you with 85 apples that you owe me. The second month, you will owe me 85 apples with the interest being 4.25 apples. Although you made a payment with extra apples, you still have to pay the second month's payment since the extra was not applied to the next month's regular payment.

If that was too difficult to understand look at the pros and cons of paying extra into regular vs principal payments:
Regular payment:
-pro: you don't have to make a payment until you are actually due since you paid your next month's required payment
-con: you pay more interest overall
Principal Payment
-pro: you pay less interest overall
-con: you have to make monthly payments no matter how much you pay

5. Consider.
Refinancing and transferring your auto loan can affect your credit score. I'm not sure how much of an effect this has on your credit score. This is one post I found so far: https://www.supermoney.com/2016/12/refinancing-car-loan-hurt-credit-score/. I will do more research and write a post on it.

Once again, cheers to those of you guys who are as lost as me in this finance game and let's work hard towards our goals!

Investing Your Future (Scholarship)

It seems like there is a race between students trying to graduate before tuition costs are increased and schools trying to raise tuition before students graduate.

Being in professional grad school equates to not having many scholarship options. That's what I thought before I started my program. One of the reasons why I chose to go to my school was that it had a good scholarship program, which was unheard of, especially for my major.

Luckily, the scholarship that I have been receiving is a four-year scholarship, with the requirements being that I keep my GPA above a certain number. On top of that, our program has scholarships that they give out to students who are in need (aka taking student loans out). With those two scholarships, it adds up. Since I'm taking out student loans and I don't physically see the money, sometimes I don't even feel like I get them. But when I calculate how much help I'm getting or when I purchase a laptop with that money, I'm immensely grateful. I hope to be the one giving to others in the very near future.

In order to help you guys get the most help you need, I made a scholarship checklist. This is my way of giving back to others for now. It has a list of places where you can look for scholarships for free (yes, please be careful about some websites out there) and I got this information from this website: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/grants-scholarships/finding-scholarships, which is the FAFSA website, which is reliable. Left is the preview to the checklist.

Please use this very simple checklist I made to plan your scholarship process, and cheers to getting your education and working towards your future!

Receipt Journal Update (1 week later)

It has been over a week since I started my receipt journal. Not going to lie, even a simple thing like gluing your receipts on a notebook was hard to keep up with. There were days I forgot to do so and had to do two days worth of receipts. 56 more days to go (takes 66 days to build a habit) to be comfortable with this.

Warning: my handwriting and organization skills are not the best in the world. But here is a photo of my journal.

 

Excuse me for all the blurred out parts. I don't want to give out any private information and I am super paranoid about that kind of stuff so I had to do what made me feel comfortable. 

So as you can see it's simple. This is the first step towards my financial independence. This is it! My daily journal. I didn't include how much money I have left in my bank account either (more like I forgot to), which seems a bit stupid now that I think about it (I will include this from now).  

Then I organize this into an excel every Saturday. Like this:

Wow, I spent a lot of money this past week (sad all over again). I will work on reducing my shopping money. 

Now, the excel spreadsheet provides several pre-made templates on budgeting, so feel free to use them. I wanted to start my own and customize it later.  

It feels like I have a long way ahead of me, but hey, I've already taken the first step. Cheers to everyone and let's buckle down on the buck!

Savings Account (Finally!)

I used to have a savings account back in high school and during the undergraduate years of college. However, I ran low on money and had to transfer the money in my savings account to my checking account and get rid of the savings account (otherwise, I was going to be charged for the account). Ever since then, I have not saved any money.

Why? Because I was running out of my loan money at the end of each semester and thought that I was too poor to save any money. Boy was I wrong. I realized that if I saved at least $10 every month from the time that I had gotten rid of my savings account, that I would have had $720 by now.

I want to start saving money so I can have a fund for investing and emergencies.

I kept a savings account with a bank that I regularly use, like Chase or Bank of America. The nice thing about this is that it's easy to transfer money between accounts. Also, these banks are everywhere. The downside is that the interest rate is usually very low. One thing I learned about savings accounts is that federal credit unions offer better interest rates than banks (they usually offer lower rates for loans too but I will talk about that later).

So, I simply googled "federal credit union", looked into a local federal credit union, and started my research on a savings account. I specifically compared two savings account products from a bank (Chase) and a federal credit union (Hughes) because these are the ones that I will most likely open my savings account with.

Here are the results of a few hours of research while worrying about my kinetics exam next week.

Here's what I found: 
Pros of bank savings account: 
-easy online banking,
-no ATM fees at the bank's ATM machines
-many locations
-usually lower minimum deposit
Cons of bank savings account: 
-lower interest rate (for example Chase offers 0.01%)
-service fees applied (conditions apply)

Pros of federal credit union savings account
-higher interest rate (for example a local federal credit union offers 0.2%)
-variety of savings account for different purposes
Cons of federal credit union savings account
-fewer locations
-ATM fees and fewer ATM machines
-higher minimum deposit
-membership needs to be approved and termination fee may apply

After all this and asking around, I decided to open mine at a bank. Why? There are several reasons.

I'm not good at keeping up with my money. I recently started (literally 5 days ago) working towards improving my finances. I'm working on building a habit of saving and I would need to closely monitor how I'm doing and have easy access to my account (physically and online).

My savings will not be some huge amount of money. 0.01% vs 0.2% will not make much of a difference for me at the moment. Once I have more money and experience, I'm planning to move my money. Meanwhile, I really want to get myself started with saving.

Lastly, I am not sure where I will be. Because I don't know where I will live after graduating, I would like to use a bank I can have easy access to. It is crucial for me to be able to go to a bank or federal credit union without wasting my time (I need to save my time for studying and all these extra things I'm doing).

So here I go. I will update you guys on how I have been doing with my savings in 3 months. Cheers, everyone! We can do this.

p.s. if you guys are looking into high interest rate savings accounts, I found a nice article. They do get compensated for their articles though so make sure to keep that in mind. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-high-yield-online-savings-accounts/ 

Being Sick is Expensive: Medical Bills

For a twenty-something-year-old grad student without any income, I have had appointments with too many doctors in the past couple of months. I got to the point where I didn't care how expensive my medical bills were going to be because I was sick and was feeling horrible.

One frustrating thing about medical bills is that I wouldn't know how much I was being charged until a few weeks after seeing the doctor or getting a procedure done. Aside from being sick, I even had to worry about checking my mail since I knew the bill was coming.

So naturally, when I got my first, my first (SIGH), medical bill, from a lab, I couldn't believe how much I owed them. It was from a visit that I didn't find helpful at all in any way (and in retrospect, really wasn't helpful), and I owed them around $300 (even after the first adjustment)? But guess what? YOU CAN NEGOTIATE YOUR MEDICAL BILLS (it does not always work but it's worth a try). Luckily this place attached a form where I could make a request for an income-based adjustment for the bill (medical offices usually don't, maybe this place did because it's a lab). It was a simple process. I filled out the form, scanned it, and sent it to them via e-mail. Then I called them a week later and found that I was eligible for a 98% reduction on my bill. 

I got another bill saying that I owed them around $250 for my procedures. So I called the billing department to see what they could do for me. I asked them if they could adjust my bill but the person on the phone said that the adjustments were already made. I asked a lot more questions to attempt to get some sort of adjustment, but I was not successful. I felt embarrassed because having to ask for discounts and admitting that I have financial issues to a stranger on the phone was not an easy thing to do. I gave up after a few tries and paid half of my bill. After this, I soon found an article written by Shannon Insler with great negotiation tips for medical bills as I started researching for this post (wish I saw this before this morning). Please check this article out before you make any phone calls to talk about your medical bills: https://studentloanhero.com/featured/how-to-pay-medical-bills-you-cant-afford/. I am definitely going to try these tips the next time I have to pay my medical bill.

I'm still waiting for few more bills to arrive in the mail. I get a mini heart attack whenever I check my mail and see an envelope from a medical office, but I believe that I will get through this. I hope everyone is well and if you are not, you know you are not alone in this shit hole of sickness with a pile of medical bills (I'm with you guys). Everyone, stay healthy!

Where Do You Spend Your Money: Receipts

Tracking where you spend money is crucial to understanding your own finances. There are now a large number of great apps that categorize and analyze your spendings. I have downloaded them but I always ended up not using them. I don't know what it is but pressing the icon of the app in order to check how much and where I had spent my money was difficult for me. I mean, I don't even check my bank account everyday...(gotta fix this).

So in order to counter this problem, I am going back to the old school way. Receipts, a notebook, and a glue stick. I mean, I love arts and crafts so why not have fun gluing things on paper? I started yesterday and because I'm not used to it, I forgot to save my receipts from some places. In these cases, I decided to go back into my bank account and write those down (this will force me to check my bank account everyday).  There are some places that don't offer paper receipts and I am going to get a text receipt for these. I will be organizing my receipts at the end of the day every day and do a weekly and monthly summary. I am still debating where I will put these summaries, but it will most likely be saved onto my laptop as an excel spreadsheet. I will post pictures of my receipt book and the spreadsheet as I continue on!

Why am I doing this? What are the benefits of keeping track of your receipts at the end of the day?

First, it is going to help me realize how much I spend every day, every week, and every month. I still don't know how much I usually spend every month. If I check how much I spend every night, then the next day, I will be more conscious about how much I spend.

Second, this will help me to analyze where my spendings go to. This helps with decreasing the amount of money I spend on certain things. This will give me extra money!

Last, with extra money, I can start saving and investing (by the way, I don't have a savings account yet so I am going to research this)! At age 26 and after working for a while, I realized that I didn't want to spend my life working day after day at a job that I don't like. So investing would be something I need to start looking into. My goal at this time is to generate $300,000 without working (it sounds crazy but there is no harm in having a big goal, right?!).

For me, it's always a good feeling to look back and review yourself not only in your finances, but also in many other aspects (health, goals, etc.). With my receipt book, I will be able to see where I spend my money and where I have made improvements every day. I hope to see myself grow financially stable and independent (I hope you guys achieve your financial goals). Also I hope this financial independence can help me achieve my other goals.