Some of this year's hacks were totally unexpected and some I had some interest in previously, but finally followed through on them and so I thought I'd document them and share them here.
Rental
With a little prodding she got me to go and look at it. It was in fairly decent shape and when we were walking out the door they had a flier on what the payment would be with the current offer price and certain interest rates and down payments and we got excited because the numbers were close to what we could do and what we were paying. I can't remember if it was that night or what, but we reached out to my mom to see if that would be something she'd be interested in or not.
She said she'd have to think about it as she wasn't too keen on having a condo as because often you are giving up money to pay the hoa that at times can be exorbitant and not warrant the cost for the "benefits" they espouse, which is a valid concern. There was some extended dialogue on that point, but once done Ashlee and my mom dove right in to figuring out the lendors, down payment amount, terms, move-in/move-out dates, etc.
We didn't use a realtor and so this involved a lot of work on Ashlee's part, for which she is to be commended.
The hack portion came in the form of us getting to move into a bigger place, have part ownership in the investment, and then participate in the cash flows once we move out and the property is experiencing positive cash flows (and paid off!).
So far the place has been great for our family. More space to host and for storage and to grow our family. My wife updated the kitchen practically all on her own. She is a boss!
This one is the one that was a total surprise hack for the year. A few years back when I first got married I had the desire to go and get MBA to help in opening up new opportunities for me. The heading of this section is to a link of my experience there and how I hacked getting my MBA. Long post short...I got my MBA in 87 days for a total tuition cost $3,395.00. Check out the post if you want more deets. Crazy awesome hack. Traditional public school and university systems are broken in my opinion and WGU and MOOCs and coding bootcamps and technical schools are the needed change we need to see in education these days. We need more people with real skills without saddling them with insane amounts of debt afterwards. Not to mention the time wasted.
Excellent hack, WGU.
This was my first attempt at becoming a published author. This idea was spawned from an earlier blog post I'd done. I learned how to self-publish on Amazon and I've been paid twice real money by amazon for the work done. The total payments are less than $5.00, but I thought it was a cool experiment and would recommend it to anyone interested in publishing a book to try it here before trying to go big with a publisher to see if they're up to the task and to see if the market actually likes what you have to offer.
My parents are well acquainted with using the rewards system via the free flights they're able to bag, but I'm new to the scene. A while back I was reading the blog by mr. money mustache and he mentioned how he'd done a little bit of credit card hacking. For the uninitiated there are certain cards that offer certain rewards year round or that cycle through the generosity of their rewards based on when you sign up for them. There are rewards for anything from vacation packages, free flights, and of course cash back and statement credits.
My interest was in cash rewards. I signed up for my first one earlier this year and through the course of regular spending on gas, groceries, and what not I got my first credit of $100. I've since signed up for another card and will be taking advantage of $225.00 in cash credits to my account once I spend the needed $500 over the next three months.
The last credit card hack I did this year was signing up for a Home Depot card, which gave me $25 off my purchase that day, which was a minor sum, but I only had to spend a few extra minutes for that win.
So on the year I'm looking at cashing in an additional $350.00 after tax dollars for less than an hours worth of work. Not too bad. Even if I spent two hours researching, waiting in line, setting up a new account and paying off my bills, which I didn't it still equates to earning $150.00/hour, or the equivalent of a $300,000.00 salaried job. Not sure of how many people (Bill Gates and Warren Buffet aside) can scoff at that amount of free money, but I must say I'm sold on it and would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in it. As info I only signed up for the no annual fee cards so that I don't have to worry about paying the fee or remembering to shut down the card before the next annual fee is due.
This one is another Mr. Money Mustache hack. I was introduced to this idea via his blog and had a brother and a friend who also signed up for cell phone plans there. I have to say I'm very pleased with it so far. Instead of the typical $30-$50/month cell plan for smart phones mine is less than $15/month.
What I like about it too is that if my kids need a cell phone in the future they have sensible plans for $5-$10/month that allow the kids to call/text/use data whether they're using wi-fi or not and with the phones being as low as $50 to purchase it is certainly an affordable luxury if the parental units decide to splurge on a communications line for their child.
This last one is hacking that I'll be doing starting in January that I've already started into with the pre work that is required. About a year and half ago I developed a small interest in learning to program and progressed through codeacademy's code year and even signed up for a short time with teamtreehouse.com. Then I put that on hold to prep for having my first kid, moving, enjoying the first kid, then buying the rental, then hacking my MBA and finally after that was done noticing that I still wanted to do coding and so I applied to a local coding bootcamp, Devmountain, to learn to become a front end web developer. My hope is that I can enjoy some of the camp's placement rate success (98% placement for their students within 3-6 months of completing the program) and combine it with my experience and education to land something well paying. Then I hope to be able get my skills up enough to do freelance work on the side so that I could eventually travel the world and just diversify my streams of income.
So there you have it, the year of the hack! Merry hacking! Do it! Let me know how it goes for you!
