SmartyPig is an online savings account that currently pays 2.01% APY. That rate isn’t much different from most of the other online (well, nearly double ING Direct’s at the moment), but how the account works is drastically different.

To demonstrate how it works, lets say I want to save $2000 by November 1st to help with holiday expenses like airfare and Christmas gifts. Instead of just dumping money into a savings account every now and then and hoping I reach the goal, I can use SmartyPig. I tell SmartyPig how much I have saved already (let’s say $500), how much I want to save ($2000), when I need it by (November 1st), and how often I want to deposit more money to the account (let’s say once a month on the 1st). I can then click a button and SmartyPig informs me that at the current APY, I need to deposit $185.27 per month to reach my goal. If I want I can adjust that amount up or down, although if I adjust it down then I probably won’t reach my goal in time.

Once the goal is setup, SmartyPig automatically transfers my scheduled deposit out of my checking or savings account at another bank and deposits it into my goal account. I can easily see how close I am to my goal in both dollar amount and percentage. If I want, I can even put a widget on Facebook or my website showing how close I am to my goal.

I can also tell SmartyPig that I want to accept contributions for my goal. This makes it easy for mom or dad to chip in a few bucks to help me fly home for the holidays.

So those features are neat, but not really earth-shatteringly amazing. So what makes SmartyPig so awesome? You can withdraw money from your goal at any time, but if you wait until you reach the goal then you can utilize the SmartyPig cash boost!

Let’s go back to the holiday expenses example. It is November 1st and we have $2000 in our SmartyPig savings account. Time to cash out. We already started doing some Christmas shopping, so we can transfer $1000 to our checking account to help pay for that stuff. We need a hotel, so we can request a $250 Travelocity gift card and they’ll send us a $275 gift card. We need to buy some tools for dad, so we request a $250 Home Depot gift card and they’ll send us a $257.50 gift card. Some clothes from Macy’s would be nice, so we request $200 from them and get $224. The wife wants some jewelery so we request a $300 Jared gift card and get a $321 gift card.

If you’ve been keeping track, our account only had $2000 in it but we got $2077.50 in cash and gift cards. That is because SmartyPig gives your money a boost when you cash out your reward in the form of gift cards. You can find a list of their “best-in-class” retailers here. Sure, the average 2% to 6% doesn’t sound like much, but in this example we get $77.50 for free just for shopping at places we were already planning on shopping at! And if you don’t want to spend your money at one of their retailers, you can withdraw your money to a prepaid debit card or to your bank account.

How can they afford that? Volume. SmartyPig purchases gift cards in bulk at a discount from the retailer. The size of the discount varies based on the retailer. If they get a 10% discount then they might give you an 8% boost and pocket the 2% difference. The retailer is happy because you are forced to spend that money at their store, SmartyPig is happy because they just made 2% of the gift card face value, and you are happy because you just got 8% more than you ordered. Everyone wins. Note: Percentages are for example only, I have no idea what the actual amounts are…

Check it out at SmartyPig.com!

To help us track the goal, we made a Google Doc that listed all of our accounts and our goal. We included all of our stock and IRA accounts, our checking/savings accounts, cash we have in the house, our credit cards, my PayPal account, and a Walmart gift card that we keep funded for using at Sam’s Club. We left off Becca’s student loans (the only debt that we have) because we don’t have to start paying them back until Becca finishes school in ~5 years and the amount is relatively small as far as student loans go. Perhaps we’ll add them to the spreadsheet in the future.

Anyways, I set up a few formulas in the document to automatically calculate how many days were left before May 1, how much we needed to save per day and month, how close we were to reaching our goal (%) and to add up our accounts for us. Every couple weeks when we reconcile all of our accounts, we take a minute to punch the numbers into the spreadsheet to see how we are doing.

Overall, we did a good job of growing our savings at a pretty consistent rate. We made some good decisions, such as investing a good chunk in the stock market (mutual funds) near the bottom of the crash (which has grown by about 30% over the past year!) and setting up automatic savings plans with SmartyPig and ING Direct. For the past few months, however, it looked liked we were starting to spend faster than we were saving. We were traveling and buying gifts for the holidays, my wife applied to grad schools (expensive!!) and then bought plane tickets to visit them, I renewed a bunch of domain names and paid business taxes and registered agent fees, etc etc. It looked pretty bad.

But then suddenly we got a big tax refund (which was unexpected because I strive to get $0 back at the end of the year, and normally I have to pay quarterly payments to accomplish this), Becca was reimbursed for some of her grad school traveling, my home business revenue picked up, and the stock market made another minor leap. Suddenly we went from being at 96.4% of our goal on 3/1 to a whopping 109.66% of our goal on 3/19! We are both so excited to have not only reached our goal 42 days ahead of schedule, but also to have beaten the goal by over 9%!

To help keep us saving, we have a little more than doubled our original goal and reset the goal date to May 1, 2011. We are confident that we can meet the goal while maintaining our current lifestyle, so with a little luck we’ll hit the goal early and be able to up it again.

I’ve replaced those two goals with Allred Tech and IP Addr.es, two of my newest sites. These are both a bit niche, but I still think I can get a good amount of traffic to them with a little more work.

Back in March 2009, I decided I’d start tracking my online earnings, and set a goal for where I wanted to be. My gross earnings at the time were about $160 per week with all my sites running off of a shared hosting account. I set my goal to be 40 hours of minimum wage per week (gross). At the time, this made my goal $262 per week, but in July I increased the goal to $290 to match the increase in federal minimum wage. To make sure I didn’t meet my goal thanks to a fluke, I decided that I had to earn this amount 4 weeks in a row.

It’s now 11 months later, and I’ve come a long way. I’ve built several more sites, paid for a major re-design of my largest site, and dropped non-performers. I’ve ditched the shared hosting account for a dedicated server at The Planet (and even had to upgrade to a bigger dedicated server due to increased traffic), and have earned an average of $358 per week over the past 4 weeks. This is $68 per week more than my goal!

My next goal was going to be to net 40 hours of minimum wage (i.e., $290 per week after expenses, such as domain registrations and hosting), but I accidentally hit this goal at the same time as the original goal. Because of this, I’ve decided my new goal is to reach the 50% mark of the $40,000 per year I need to earn in order to quite my day job. This works out to $398.50 per week, averaged over the previous 8 weeks. Not a huge increase, but a nice round percentage that I think I can hit in the near future.

My goal for a long time has been to make enough money from my own business to be able to quite my day job and work from home full time. My wife is very supportive of this (really, she is!) but she is also rightfully concerned about our family’s financial well-being. So we sat down, talked it through, and came to an agreement.

I can quite my job (or at least, significantly reduce my hours) and work from home once the following conditions are met:

1. Becca must be employed (being a grad student counts) and earning an income.
2. Becca must be able to obtain health care for the two of us through her employer.
3. My business must be earning an average of $770 per week (gross) for 8 consecutive weeks (roughly $40,000 per year) — or in other words, at least $6,160 over an 8-week period.
4. To keep things simple, the $770 per week includes any money that Becca’s websites earn.

I have a ways to go. $770 per week is a lot of money, but I’ve made some really good progress over the past year in increasing my earnings, so I’m confident that I can get there in the next 3 to 5 years.

I’ve written some code to keep this automatically updated as new data is released by the USDA, and am working and fleshing out some additional features (ability for the site to remember who is in your family, maybe some sort of notification when new data is available, etc).

Check it out on the Cost of Food page.

We looked over how much we had been spending in the past, and found that we typically spend less than the USDA low-cost plan and so we decided that we will just use that number as our monthly goal.

To make this easier for us to see how food prices are rising or falling, I took all the of USDA cost of food data and put it into a chart. Check it out here.

Instead of going over the virtues of frugal living or the feeling of safety we have in knowing that we have money in the bank, I’d like to talk about what I call quality of life purchases. These are purchases that, as the name implies, improve our quality of life. For example:

• We just purchased a memory foam mattress topper. I used one of these when I was serving a mission, and I got to sleep faster, slept better, and felt better throughout the day. In short, the quality of my life was better. I’m confident our new purchase will similarly improve our lives.
• I purchased some nice spatulas for Becca. Every time we cook she complains about our lack of a decent spatula. I splurged and paid a bit more than I would have if I had shopped at Wal-Mart, but the spatulas I purchased have great reviews and are well constructed. Becca’s daily chore of cooking is now a little easier, my chore of cleaning up is easier (dishwasher safe spatulas!), and life is a bit better for both of us.
• Over the past year or two we have paid a good chunk of money on exams and schooling for both Becca and myself. The education has been expensive, stressful, and provides no tangible benefits. But we are both better prepared for our jobs (or future job in Becca’s case) and have gained a valuable asset: knowledge.

So what are the criteria for a quality of life purchase?

1. Long-term. It is hard to say something is changing your life if it only lasts for a few minutes. A good quality of life purchase lasts for more than a day, a week, or even a month.
2. Quality. Lets say you have the option of paying $20 for something that you expect to last 6  months, or $100 for a similar item that you expect to last 5 years. Which do you think is the better deal and will ultimately leave you happy with your purchase?
3. Improvement. Whether it makes you smarter, builds your confidence or self-esteem, or makes your life easier, a quality of life purchase has to improve your life.

So yes, my wife and I are cheap. We don’t watch every movie at the theater. We don’t eat at Ruby Tuesday every week. But we are happy, and I suppose that is all that matters.

So to give myself a goal and to help encourage myself to promote my sites better, I’ve set up a little feature on this blog that will automatically pull my Google Analytics stats (using some code by Chris Hope) for some of my sites and compare the traffic to the website for the company I currently work for (listed as “baseline”). My goal is to get more traffic for each of my little side projects than my employer gets to their fancy uber-expensive website.

This feature is located above the list of books I’m reading in the column to the right. As you can see, my Fake Name Generator is absolutely demolishing the competition by receiving an astounding 2,435% of the unique visitors that the baseline receives. Not too bad!

However, The Awkward Turtle isn’t doing so hot at 1%. This poor little guy is perhaps too awkward to get going, but I’d love to try so that is why he is on the list.

Why doesn’t it list actual traffic numbers, you ask? My goal isn’t to embarrass or hurt the company I work for, but rather to help motivate myself to do better. The actual numbers are completely irrelevant to that goal.

The exam is similar in format to the Zend practice tests (70 questions in 90 minutes, with multiple choice and fill in the blank answers), but the topics and content appeared to be fairly different. I’m not allowed to share the test with you, but I think it is alright to make some vague references to the type of questions I was asked, as Zend themselves share this information freely on their website.

Many of the questions were crazy easy, sort of in a “if you’ve ever used PHP then you should know this” category. For example, the basics of how loops work. Some took a little more knowledge, but should still be fairly easy to someone that has been programming in PHP for a few years.

Some were ridiculous and shouldn’t (in my opinion) have been on the test. For example, one question referenced the function strspn. In the PHP world, the usefulness/popularity of a function can generally be determined by the number of comments it has in the online documentation. This function has a whopping three: two explaining what the function actually does because the official description is confusing, and one trying to help people understand why they’d even want to use this function.

One thing I thought was interesting is that the test is probably easier for people who have spent a lot of time digging in other people’s code. For example, there may be 5 common ways of getting a task done. Some ways may be faster, or easier to read, or use a single function call, or whatever. If you haven’t had to spend time in other people’s code, then you may never have seen all 5 ways of getting the task done because you always do it 1 way. The exam expects you to not only be able to understand how the other 4 ways work if you happen across them, but ideally you know what they are before you go to the testing center.

If you’re an established PHP programmer and want to take the exam, I’d recommend taking the practice tests, determine what areas you are rusty in (for me it was PDO and XML) and study up a bit.

I have this post categorized in Goals because it has been a goal of mine to get this certification, Investing because it is an investment in myself, and Web Dev because, well, PHP is web dev to me.