I just did the sign-up and it’s really easy.  I’m sure you can do it over the phone, but I did it by logging onto the Direct Loan website and going through the screen to add my checking account info.  They said to continue paying normally (I use BoA‘s BillPay service online) until I recieve a notice in the mail.

Easy to do, and a quick way to save some money.

p.s.  Don’t do this if you carry such a low balance on your checking or savings account that you’ll risk overdrafting if you forget about this auto-pay!

Now, if your life is seriously too busy for you to sit down while you’re watching TV or something at night and roll your own coins, then this blog entry is for you.  In fact, this whole blog is probably not for you.  But if you DO have the time, then simply spending it rolling your coins and depositing them at your bank manually (we’ll get into what happens if you have an online bank only later…) lets you keep ALL of your spare $$!  No more lost money due to laziness.

Of course you probably don’t have any of those coin sleeves that your parents had in droves in the junk drawer at home.  But I found out today that if you ask nicely, your bank will just give them to you!  I have an old checking and savings account at Wainwright Bank and stopped in their Central Square, Cambridge branch during lunch today.  The teller was very nice and gave me a ton of rolls (tubes, sleeves, whatever you want to call them) for free.

I know that losing 9-10 cents on the dollar is not a big amount at all when we’re talking about small numbers, but it all adds up over time.  The point of my Watch Every Penny blog is just that, watch EVERY penny.  As long as being frugal does not take up too much of your time or affect your lifestyle much, a lot of the things I’ve been doing are simply a matter of changing wasteful financial habits.

That said, I’m gonna be rolling about $50 in change this evening.

Side note: Since I switched banks from Wainwright to Bank Of America, I have been charged $1 / month on my Wainwright savings account.  I found out today that I needed a minimum of $10 in that account to avoid being charged.  The bank customer service lady was nice enough to remove the two months of fees for me and I’ll shove $10 in the account just to keep it open for a while.  I love this bank, they just couldn’t do everything that I need done at BoA, and they aren’t national in case I move out of the Boston area.  If you’re looking for a great, simple, no hassle, fee bank and you live in Cambridge or Boston, please check them out!  I have nothing but good things to say about Wainwright.

I figured it was a good thing to let go of because we can always buy a new (used) one for cheap if the need to PS2 game arises, and it was only going to lose value while sitting around the apartment.  It was taking up space, and as you will see by further banal posts, I’m trying to get rid of some of the various unused and unnecessary junk around the house.

Goodbye, PS2.  You got us through four seasons of Six Feet Under, two seasons of Carnivale, three seasons of Deadwood, and countless other random shows and movies

Postscript: Anyone want to buy an Atari 2600 system?  I’m selling mine – complete with games!

Right now I’m trying to put together my own little personal finance blog, called Watch Every Penny. It’s focused on all my personal finance decisions, including even the little ones. I’m trying to eliminate even the smallest of bank fees and stuff. I just realized recently that earning something like 3% on a savings account doesn’t matter one bit if I’m paying a $6.50 monthly fee for a credit card or the $4.00 a month to GoDaddy for their CashParking service.

Right now, I’m just starting out on a better financial ground, and I’ve spent years squandering my money on bank fees and surcharges and everything. I’ll get into that at some point on the blog. That said, I’m trying to make every penny count right now.  Some year soon, I’ll be happy to not care about the little charges when I have more money to play around with.  Right now though, I need to make responsible decisions regarding both spending and saving.

I’m off to GoDaddy….

On the subject of credit cards, I currently have four of them.  They’re all fee based horrible cards.  I need to get rid of them.  There is one problem with just getting rid of them though: the potential to damage my credit score.

Still, yaay for me!  I’ll write an extended post in the otherblog over the weekend regarding the challenges that lay ahead for my credit building adventure.  (Ugh, adventure…)

As an added bonus, BoA will match your Keep The Change transfers at 100% for the first three months, then at 5% every month afterwards. They pay out annually. I have only have my account with BoA for a couple of months, so I can’t really say how smoothly the matching things works. I can say that I’m moving over $20 per month from checking to savings, which even though is very little, is still something. Plus, the extra little $ from BoA at the end of the year will help me feel better about it. It’s free money!

Since the BoA savings account doesn’t give much interest at all, I transfer out the money as often as possible to my Etrade savings account. More on that later.

I bought ten shares.  Just to try the thing out.  They do the cool Bodies exhibits!  (Plus, if there is a court ruling in their favor, they own a TON of Titanic artifacts!)

The thing is, I’m brand new to investing and don’t expect to make money on this one.  I just wanted to execute a trade with the brokerage account to see how it’s done.  I’d be happy to make money, but at $10 to buy, it would have to go up something like 14.7% for me to start making any $$.

Still, it’s a start.

So then I saw a a sale at Best Buy two weeks ago for the new version of the printer for $95!  I was excited and ran to the Best Buy in Watertown, MA (near the house) and picked one up.  I believe that this was the time the cashier, upon noticing G’s shirt, exclaimed “pickles are made from cucumbers?!?”, but ANYWHO…

The printer, the HP PhotoSmart C4280, is a great little machine.  It scans, copies, prints, and has a built in media reader.  It prints pretty good photos as well.

I noticed in Sunday’s Best Buy Ad in the Boston Globe that the printer is now priced at $59.99.  That’s almost $40 different than what I paid!  I called Best Buy asking if I could return my printer and buy a new one at $60, or if there was something else I could do, and they were very nice to me and said to just show up with the receipt and that they would give me a ‘price match’ on the item.

I’ll be stopping up after work tonight and can’t wait to see if this works.  This could be awseome.