Smartypig.com

I read about this site in a magazine a while ago and then promptly forgot about it.  Good thing one of my intrepid readers reminded me!  Smartypig.com is an online savings account that helps you track savings goals, and allows friends and family to help you meet those goals as well.  Unlike mint.com, smartypig is a site that you actually contribute money to for savings--it's like a really pretty and smart online bank.  You can share your success with other people as well, and once you've met your goal, you have the choice of taking your money in a debit card, gift certificate or bank transfer. Everything is FDIC insured and the interest rate is currently much more than I'm getting on my regular savings account, so I decided to take it for a test drive.

I need a new iPod.  When I bought mine, about six years ago, I got the largest one in the market, which was 80 gigs.  Well, it's now full and I've been frantically going through and through trying to find stuff to delete, which I really don't like doing.  Problem is, despite my love of minimalism, I do have hoarder tendencies, which may be genetic, and those tendencies have always included music.  When I had 600 CDs, it was a bit of a pain in the ass, but now that it's all electronic and stored in a portable device, why not have as much music as I can?  I imagine that a situation will present itself some day where I will need to school someone about some obscure musician, or will want to listen to as many cover versions of  Superstar by the Carpenters as I can find.  I shouldn't have to give up that dream!

I can get an iPod that is twice the size of my current model for $249.00, and I can probably sell my old one pretty easily.  I'm going to enlist smartypig.com to reach this goal, so we can all learn something, and so I can store my music for the next ten years instead of having to go through and delete all the stuff I haven't listened to.  Once I figure out how it all works, I should be able to put a widget in the sidebar of this blog so any interested person can monitor my progress.

I really hope I like this, because I think it's a pretty great idea.  Anything that makes savings fun is a win/win in my book; and the implications for major purchases like college education or buying a house are pretty swell since parents or grandparents or whomever can contribute at their convenience.  It sure beats that $5 bill I used to get in the mail from my Grandma for birthdays.