$500 for Me, $25 for (Each of) Thou

Handsome devil that I am, it is difficult to understand why my list of acquaintances is limited to family and ex-frat guys. Neither group is renowned for fiscal or technical savvy. Thus, my referral bonuses for ING Direct Savings and ING Electric Orange checking remain (mostly) unclaimed.

Whether you stumbled upon Villager in pursuit of Japanese Pee or enlightened social commentary, you owe it to yourself to open one one or both flavors of account. With an invite from the gate keeper (me), you get a $25 bonus for opening an account with $250. If you don't have $250, I suggest borrowing it from your friendly neighborhood payday loan store, or betting against any or all of Big Ern's Locks.

If you want a referral (did I mention you get $25?) post your e-mail in the comments, and let me know if you want to open savings, checking or both. Alternatively, shoot your request to villagergmail dot zem at gishpuppy dot com. Note: all I get is you e-mail address. ING doesn't even tell me who signed up, all I know is that someone did.

Sign-up today, the number of referrals is limited:
Remaining savings referrals: 15
Remaining checking referrals: 25

And the Horrible Pie Chart Truth Will Set You Free

Alternate title: Save Money, Lose Weight, Play More Video Games

After playing with Mint for a few weeks, and fixing some of the (few) mis-labeled transactions, 2 things became abundantly clear:

1. Owning and improving a home in the DC area is expensive as balls.


2. I am spending enough money on fast food and coffee to lease a Kia.

The home improvement isn't that troubling, assuming anyone ever buys or sells a house again. Ever.

But the fast food spending is killing me (quite literally) in several ways. First, there are many better ways to utilize $310/month than Panda Express and Starbucks. Second (and I haven't done the legwork on this) I suspect there are healthier dining options extant.

Enter the magic of the internets. Starting Columbus day (no time to grocery shop before then) I will harness the self-improvement (and waist-line reducing) power of Joe's Goals, ING Direct, and self-loathing to banish fastfood and Starbucks from my (weekday) life. This should help me save money (for to pay off credit cards and buy a 40GB Playstation 3) and bring sexy back.

I typically spend ~$5 on breakfast/coffee and $10 on fastfood lunch and dinner. My thinking is that I can replace $125/week of fastfood with ~$50 of groceries, saving $75/week. Tracking my (hopefully) good behavior on Joe's Goals, I plan on dumping the first $35/saved each week into a no-fun ING account that will go towards credit cards. The other (possible) $40 will go to fun.

I'll check back in a month and let you know how it's going. If you don't hear from me, I'm probably at Pentagon City mall gorging myself on Kung Pao and Orange Chicken.