The “What we’re looking to do with our finances in the next year” contest yielded a total of 775 entries via comments, links, subscriptions, and social love.
I loved hearing about everyone’s financial plans for the next year. The stories were uplifting and it’s great that so many people have positive financial goals.
Here are some of the responses:
Bart: “I’ve been pretty good with finances as of late, last year I opened an ING savings account and have been pouring auto-deposits into there among other things. This coming year, I want to pay off my car before the loan ends, saving me about $400 in interest and the money I will save each month from not paying for my car will go straight into savings to fund some more bigger buys like a house, condo, or a move to an entirely new city.”
Mindi: “We anticipate being completely debt-free (excluding the house) by the time our tax return comes…and we are thinking that we may not even need to tax return in which case that would be an automatic 2-3 months of expenses in our emergency savings fund. After that, my husband really needs a new/used car. He is currently driving a 2000 Plymouth with over 100,000K miles on it. He’ll drive it until it dies on him, but we need to save for that!”
CelticBuffy: “This next year I am planning on getting a handle on my finances, fully fund an emergency account, pay down my car, and go back to school. I also want to do a better job of teaching my children about money and how if you don’t manage it, it will manage you.”
Elizabeth: “We’ll continue to work to pay off old debt. We haven’t accumulated any new debt since we stopped using credit cards nearly two years ago (yay!) but we still have plenty of old debt. We make the final payment on the car in December and from then on every bit of what we would have paid for that will go toward debt. That will really make an impact this year and I’m looking forward to seeing the results.”
In order to keep track of all of the entries I created a spreadsheet in Google Docs. I assigned a number to each entry and entered it into a random number generator on Random.org to come up with the winning numbers.
So at this point you may be asking yourself “who won?!?”
The winner of the $75 Amazon.com Gift Card
The winner of the $15 Amazon.com Gift Card
The winner of the $10 Amazon.com Gift Card
Congratulations and thank you for entering! I will be contacting you via email to confirm your address before I send the gift certificate. If I hear no response in a couple of days or the email is not valid I’ll pick another winner.
Sign up with ING Direct and get a $25 bonus
photo credit: Javier Volcán
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks FFB for running this contest! I can’t believe I won!
Now I love your website even more than before, ha, ha!
Congratulations to the winners!
I didn’t win but it was fun, still benefited. Can’t wait for the next contest! Thx.
@ Beatriz – Is that all I have to do? Give gift cards to readers? Haha. Thanks for entering. Hope to see you back here often!