We’ve been updating you on all the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals — and now it’s time to talk about Giving Tuesday! Are you giving to charity today? In general, do you prefer to focus your contributions locally, nationally, internationally, or a mix? Is your city doing a big Giving Tuesday campaign today — led by the United Way, for example?

{related: the 411 on how to help charities — how to start donating money, time, or something else}

Giving Tuesday Resources and Tips

1. Find your country’s Giving Tuesday hub with this map. GivingTuesday.org offers lots of info and ideas.

2. Consider using an online platform that evaluates charities, such as Charity Navigator, BBB Wise Giving Alliance (Give.org), and CharityWatch. (ProPublica has guidance on evaluating charities.)

3. On Giving Tuesday, lots of nonprofits will have a particular donor matching people’s donations up to a certain amount, so look for those opportunities on individual charities’ websites to double your contribution!

{related: under pressure: charitable giving at the office}

4. Check if your employer has an employee matching program — you can ask HR, use Charity Navigator’s search tool, or check the website of the organization you want to donate to.

5. Think about lending a hand more “casually” and/or in person. You can help local mutual aid groups, for example. To find them, use this search tool from Mutual Aid Hub or google “[Your City] Mutual Aid Network.” (The Cut offered tips in this 2020 story.)

GivingTuesday.org has lots more options, such as giving blood (here’s what it’s like), distributing necessities to unhoused people, and paying for the person behind you at the drive-through (just not like this (NSFW)).

6. Remember to deduct your charitable contributions on your taxes if you use Schedule A of Form 1040 to file. (Here are tips from Investopedia.)

Have you donated to charity today, or are you planning to? Does your company typically match donations?

Stock Photo via Pexels / RDNE Stock project.

Some of the top matching opportunities we’re seeing for Giving Tuesday 2023…

(Let us know if you find any! Here’s Charity Navigator’s article on how these “matching” opportunities might be working behind the scenes. Mentions are not endorsements of the charity.)

• American Red Cross – 2x match up to $100,000, ends 11/28
• Americares – 8x match
• Doctors Without Borders – 2x match through 11:59 p.m. EST on 11/28
• Donors Choose (specific classroom resources requested by local teachers) – 2X match, ends 11/28
• Greenpeace – 5x match, ends 11/28
• Heifer International – 4x match, ends 11/28
• Nature Conservancy – 2x match, ends 11/28
• NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) – 2x match up to $70,000, ends 11/28
• No Kid Hungry – 2x match by Citi up to $500,000, ends 11/28
• UNICEF – 5x match, ends 11/28

The post 6 Tips for Giving Tuesday 2023 appeared first on Corporette.com.

Here’s something I don’t think we’ve discussed in years: What changes do you make when you want to save money? (Have you tried to kick your savings up a notch recently?)

{related: not sure what to do first/next in your personal finance journey? here’s our money roadmap}

Changes I Make When I Want to Save Money

Some of the things I do when I want to save more money (or at least stop spending quite so much) include the following ideas:

Use what we have. We eat down the fridge, freezer, and pantry contents, and if I’ve been lazy about looking for something (a pair of my older son’s shoes that I’ve saved to hand down to my younger son, or a book I need to return to the library or risk paying for the entire book), then I do what I can do look for it.

Return what we don’t need. I tend to base my shopping heavily at spots with great return policies, and then stuff tends to collect… So if there are things that I’m not sure of that still have tags on them, then I look at them with new eyes and return a lot of them.

Limit shopping opportunities. There are certain stores where it seems like it’s a $50 entrance fee because I just never get out of there without spending at least $50, largely on stuff that I really don’t need. So I’ll avoid those stores, or the aisles that are the most tempting. Where possible I’ll order something online for delivery or curbside pickup rather than going into the store because I tend to stick to my list better that way.

Choose the budget options. Do we need to spend $100 at the local delivery place or can we choose the option where we only spend $35? Do I need a glass of wine with dinner or am I OK with a water? Do I really need that fancy shampoo this month, or is the budget option fine? Those are the easiest things for me to cut, of course.

{related: financial tips for new lawyers (or other women in their first high-paying jobs!)}

Bigger Changes I Make to Save Money

All of the above are things that are somewhat intuitive and easy to do, and usually do the trick. In times past where I’ve needed to do more, I’ve taken these steps:

Assess past spending to figure out where the money is going. This usually involves downloading a lot of statements and categorizing stuff in an Excel chart. Sometimes it yields useful information (subscriptions, easily identified overspending), and sometimes it doesn’t.

Assess my other saving goals (and automatic savings). If I’m trying to save more money because it feels like I never have enough money in accounts, that might be because I’ve got a lot of automatic savings set up for multiple financial goals — and maybe those savings are a bit too much for where we are right now. I might dial back the money going to our Vacation Fund, or our “fun fund…” or I might choose to live with the stress of not having a ton of money in our accounts because the stress helps me tighten our belt in other areas, and the automatic savings are high level goals.

{related: how to set up automatic investing}

Make a budget. For a lot of people this is the first step, but for me this is one of the last. I only partially use Mint now (and really did not like YNAB when I downloaded it recently, although I know readers love it), and I prefer to use automatic savings for budgetary items like vacations and then use whatever’s left for those of-the-moment purchases like restaurants, clothes, etc.

Readers, what do you do when you want to save money?

{related: cash savings or retirement savings? where to stash your cash when you’re unsure what you’re saving for}

The post What Changes Do You Make When You Want to Save Money? appeared first on Corporette.com.

We’ve talked a lot about vacations over the years — how to prepare your workload for a vacation, how many days you get to take vacation, whether you repeat vacations, how to travel solo, etc., — but we haven’t really talked about how you pay for your vacations. Readers were discussing this a bit recently, so let’s get into it!

How do you pay for your vacations, readers? With your bonus or other “found” money, by saving money either in the abstract or belt-tightening in the months leading up to the vacation, by putting it on credit card and paying it off as you can, or some combination thereof? Do you save for the big things like flights and hotels and then give yourself a daily budget while traveling? Where do you think vacation spending (or vacation saving) falls with your other spending and saving?

(If you’re coupled, how did your vacation goals change once you got married or partnered? For those of you with children — how have your vacation goals changed as they’ve grown?)

How I Pay for Vacations

As I’ve mentioned before, my family and I heavily use automatic savings to save for these kinds of goals — we figure out roughly how much we want to spend on vacations, then divide by 12, and save that amount monthly.

Other friends set aside a big chunk of their bonuses in order to pay for relatively lavish vacations, and I definitely know friends who have chosen to focus on other financial goals and thus don’t travel a lot.

I didn’t travel a ton in my 20s because I didn’t feel that comfortable traveling by myself, and coordinating with friends seemed overly complicated at the time. To be honest, I just kind of assumed there’d be time to travel with my future husband — but other things took priority once I found my guy, such as buying a home and having kids. And since then a lot of the travel budget has gone towards visiting family members so they can spend time with the kids.

Readers, how about you — how do you pay for vacations?

Stock photo via Stencil.

{related: not sure what to do first/next in your personal finance journey? here’s our money roadmap}

The post How Do You Pay for Your Vacations? appeared first on Corporette.com.

I know everyone (including me) loves to read those money diaries on sites like Refinery29, and I’ve been meaning to create a “personal money snapshot” series to feature readers who are willing to share a summary of their financial situation. We now have a Google form (similar to the form we have for the CorporetteMoms Week in the Life of a Working Mom posts), and I would love to a) open it up for participants, b) get your feedback (too long?), and c) note that everything is possible for change. (The nice thing about Google forms is that we can edit questions, which is not always the case with surveys and things.)

Click here if you’d like to see the form and/or submit responses! You can also see a PDF of the questions if you want to review them ahead of time. See others in the Personal Money Snapshot series here.

Notes on the Personal Money Snapshot Form:

1. The reason we ask for your email address: It would be much, much better if we could have your email address so that Kate or I could ask follow-up questions for clarity — sometimes not everything is obvious from an outside perspective. THAT SAID, there are a lot of personal questions on the form, so I understand if you don’t want to share your address. I can’t quite figure out how to make that question optional, though, so just put something obviously fake and we’ll deal. (If you DO trust us with your email address, thank you very much! We will keep your info safe pursuant to the Corporette Privacy Policy — and I promise to never ever hit you up for a loan if you’re loaded.)

2. The general nature of the questions (and why it looks longer than it is): I’ve been observing reader comments and discussions on money for a long time, and I think the usual “what I spend in a week” summary isn’t necessarily illuminating or educational. That’s why the questions on the form are pretty wide-ranging — and it may seem long when you first look at it, but that’s because I’m not expecting EVERYONE to have something to say in EVERY category. (I’m assuming readers will have a lot to say in one or two of the sections and less in others.)

I also believe that people have “quadrants of knowledge” when it comes to personal finance. Maybe you know everything about country club fees, which markets are awesome for second homes, and which ostrich bag is REALLY worth the $10,000. That’s awesome, and we want to hear from you! We also want to hear from people who are in six figures of debt, flirting with bankruptcy, and/or living paycheck to paycheck (yes, even if you have a high income and are living paycheck to paycheck). We also want to hear from the FIRE people who are putting away $100K of their $120K income, and people who had their lives wildly shifted (for good or bad) by something like inheritance (hopefully good) or crazy medical bills (probably bad). 

3. Big Picture questions: There are a few questions I want everyone to answer because I think they generally inform the reading of responses. One question asks specifically what your net worth was when you started working since I think there’s a huge difference in what your personal finance journey looks like if your net worth at 25 or whatever is -$260,000 (in debt) vs. $5,000 vs. $150,000. Another question asks, “Is there anything else we should know about you from a “Big Picture” perspective up front, for context, as it relates to your net worth, expenses, or debt?” I included that to delve into situations that we wouldn’t know to ask about but certainly affect your money situation, e.g., “had to be life-flighted to the hospital and had $100K in medical bills,” or “private schools are not optional for my family because I don’t believe my kids will get a fair shake in public school” or “all of our home-related finances are super high because my in-laws live with us and we pay for everything.” 

Like I said, it’s pretty wide ranging and hopefully not TOO… asky. If there are specific questions that are offensive to people or otherwise problematic, I’d love to know which ones in particular. If people think there need to be specific questions added to any part of it, we’d love to hear those too.

Here’s a quick question for discussion today, though: what are your favorite resources to learn about money? What’s your favorite podcast, book, blog, or other resource?

Psst: here’s our last discussion on the best personal finance books for beginners, as well as my “money roadmap,” or what my own personal finance journey has looked like. 

The post Personal Money Snapshot: Corporette Edition appeared first on Corporette.com.

Has the pandemic changed your thoughts on retirement, or retirement planning in general? If so, how?

I’ve seen a lot of reader comments noting how the pandemic has changed their thoughts on their career in general — lots of people are leaning out, prioritizing better work-life balance, and in general trying to find happiness through their jobs and careers.

{related: not sure what to do first/next in your personal finance journey? here’s our money roadmap}

But I’m curious: Have your thoughts on retirement changed because of the pandemic? If so, how? I could see this going in a few ways:

• The carpe diem approach — after all, we only live once, so why save for a retirement that may or may not happen (due to pandemic, illness, etc.) when you can spend the money today and know you’ll enjoy it?
• The buckling down approach — you realize you won’t always have health and youth, and decide to buckle down to take care of Future You
• A pause to your regular approach — it’s been a few weird years! The stock market has been weird, the job market has been weird, so let’s take a brief pause and figure out what’s going on.

My own practices changed slightly because we were so Covid Cautious, for so long — so it felt like money we would have been spending on vacations and dining out could be redirected to (before-tax) savings accounts. So this isn’t quite retirement thinking, but it is Future Me thinking.

What are your thoughts? Have you changed your approach to retirement savings at all in the past few years?

Stock photo via Stencil.

Further reading from Corporette on retirement:

• Cash Savings or Retirement Savings? Where to Stash Your Cash When You’re Unsure What You’re Saving For
• The 411 on FIRE: Financial Indepence / Retire Early
• How Much Do You Save for Retirement?
• Planning for Retirement — But Not How You Think [guest post from Lisa @ Privilege]
• Our last open thread on when you plan to retire

The post How Has the Pandemic Changed Your Thoughts on Retirement (If At All)? appeared first on Corporette.com.

I’ve written before about how I keep a ton of lists for various things in my life, but I don’t think I’ve written about how much I absolutely adore Excel and spreadsheets in general. I’ll admit, I always kind of thought this was a weird “me” thing, but I’ve seen a lot lately on social media and comments here from other women who all love a good spreadsheet… so if this is you as well, let’s share some of our tricks and tips, as well as some of the weird things we keep in spreadsheet form.

(I fully admit this may be a part and parcel of my ADHD — is there any better way to procrastinate than jumping into action and creating a good spreadsheet? I think not.)

I will note that I am not an Excel expert by any means, despite using it daily — it’s such a powerful program and has so many cool functions. I worked with Excel twice in my legal career in ways that really made it clear that I had barely scratched the surface of the program — once for a reinsurance dispute involving, if memory serves, fraud and theft from one of the brokers, so we were trying to figure out insurance tiers and percentages after the fact (whee). The second time was a few years later, when I inherited a 50-state survey on libel that involved crazy macros… it felt like I broke the chart more often than I got it to work right.

Still, it’s kind of surprising to me how often I have Excel sheets open on my computer, so I thought it would be fun to discuss the ways we use spreadsheets for personal use.

Do you use spreadsheets to keep track of personal data? What do you keep track of — and are you Team Excel, Team Google Sheets, Team Airtable (or other, or all)?!

How I Use Excel for Personal Stuff

I’ve written about some of these personal spreadsheets in depth before…

Health stats spreadsheet: I keep track of my health stats in spreadsheet form, guided primarily by an old Real Simple article I read years ago that went through the important stats to pay attention to. I’ve added some from an article I read with advice on perimenopause, and I’ll probably add some stats to track from the recent NYT article on ways to measure your fitness and health, apart from weight.

I don’t get all of the data every year — there are huge gaps in the spreadsheet, in fact! — but it helps me see general trends with the numbers that my doctors may be missing because they’re all in the normal range.

You can read more about my health stats and download my spreadsheet here.

Financial Snapshot spreadsheet: I first posted about this in our discussion on frugal fatigue, where you just feel a little burned out from saving so much. This is a great way to see major progress because you’re comparing snapshot overviews of your finances — it isn’t like logging into Mint or Quicken where you get the latest data but can’t necessarily compare it easily. I update my chart about twice a year.

I’ll be honest, the volatile stock market has hit us pretty hard, so it’s been a little depressing to check the snapshot because it doesn’t look like we’re making a ton of growth… but even the slight growth makes me feel like we’re doing something right when so many of our investments are down, down, down.

You can read more about my spreadsheet and download a sample one here.

Kids’ Schedule spreadsheet: I’ve written about my Kids’ Schedule spreadsheet over at CorporetteMoms — I cannot take credit for this brilliant idea, but I use it every summer to plan summer camps for the kids. (If you’re scratching your head how this is possibly spreadsheet-worthy, I highly recommend this McSweeney’s article with word problems to help you design your summer camp schedule. Sample:

Your eight-year-old’s guitar camp, located five miles east of your house, starts at 8:45 AM. Your daughter’s robotics camp is seven miles southwest and begins at 9:30 AM with no early drop-off. You work ten miles north and have to be at work by 8 AM. How long will it take you to bend the time-space continuum?

How is it better than a regular calendar? It’s much more condensed, and the data is easier to consume — if I’m adding a description of a camp, I can see it more easily — and if there are multiple weeks that they could take a camp I can see all of that data too.

Read more about my method for scheduling kids’ activities and download my spreadsheet.

Budget spreadsheets: We don’t currently really have a budget, but in the past when I’ve needed to really limit my spending, I’ve been a fan of downloading expenditures into an Excel sheet and manually separating them so they’re in themed categories.

You can read more about my thoughts on how to make a budget here.

Rebalancing investments and assessing your asset allocation: I wrote about my attempts to rebalance our investments a few years ago… it can be trickier than you think! I have three different retirement accounts, my husband has two, and we have four different after-tax investment accounts (not counting the kids’ 529s or their investment accounts). I tend to be super boring and invest in the same index funds, but because the investments are spread out over all those different accounts (and held in different banks and brokers!), it’s hard to get a handle on just where the money is allocated.

I wrote about different ways to assess asset allocation (small cap! large cap! foreign! bonds!) and some different services I’ve used to figure it out — but I keep a very rough spreadsheet of our allocations along with my financial snapshots.

My “first of month” spreadsheet: This is more a feature of my being self-employed with uneven income streams — on the first of every month I consult a spreadsheet to keep track of different bills like the electric bill and so forth, and I calculate how much money I can move from my business to my personal account, and how much money I should put in my online savings for my eventual tax bill and for the eventual transfer to my retirement account. Then I calculate how much money I need to keep in our personal account, based on all the different automatic savings and automatic investments I have happening.

Yearly planner spreadsheet: I use this more for content planning than anything, but if you’re a Very Busy Executive with various conferences, speaking engagements, family vacations, and more to keep track of, this year-at-a-glance spreadsheet (auto download from MichaelHyatt.com) that automatically updates the dates can be a great thing.

Corporette analytics spreadsheet: Again, this is more a “me” thing, but every month I update analytics for the blogs, such as pageviews, followers, money, etc. I also have some SEO-related spreadsheets, but I’m more of a passive participant.

Tax-stuff spreadsheets: Our taxes can be a bit complicated because I have a lot of different income streams and we take a fair number of deductions — for years I’ve kept a clean Excel chart of my Schedule C, essentially, listing all of my different sources of income. The tax planner my accountant gives me has the previous year’s data for reference, so I’ve done that also, although my Excel charts include all of the years. (But the printable version only shows last year as a comparable.) I really like having my data like this — it’s an easy way to compare different years and compare the income streams.

This year, frustrated by having my poor handwriting all over the place, I made three new charts to give my accountant, all inspired by pages in his tax planner — a list of my expenses broken down by category, a list of my charitable contributions, and a list of my dividend income. (My dividend income isn’t huge but reporting it requires a lot of data.)

I keep a few more spreadsheets in the cloud (Google Sheets and Airtable), but I vastly prefer Excel.

Readers, are you fans of Excel, or spreadsheets in general? How do you use them?

Stock photo via Deposit Photos / AndreyPopov.

The post How to Use Excel for Personal Stuff (Or: An Ode to Spreadsheets) appeared first on Corporette.com.