The article, 7 Money Mistakes We Make Every Day, at Yahoo Finance mentioned the following important points and here’s how we stack up:

1. Buying expensive mutual funds - My 401k is in the Vanguard 2035 mutual fund and our Roth IRA is in the Fidelity Freedom 2045 mutual fund.  The expense ratios for these are 0.2% and 0.8% respectively.  That is under the 1% limit suggested.  Woot!

2. Neglecting credit scores – I just recently looked up our actual credit scores and I have checked our credit reports every 4 months for a while.  You can actually check your score for free – really free – at Credit Karma and your reports at AnnualCreditReport.com.

3. Equating monthly payments with affordability – This is a mistake I see happen with friends and coworkers a bunch when it comes to cars. I try to keep in mind the total cost of things so everything is in the right perspective, but I will admit that things do seem enticing if they ”only” cost such-and-such a month.

4. Overpaying on a mortgage – The article was talking about the importance of refinancing when possible. We looked into refinancing, but with our rate of 5.375% and less than $75,000 left in principal, even the lower rates wouldn’t have saved us anything after we took into account closing costs. Oh well…

5. Missing good deals online – This sounds like they were encouraging spending, but they only meant to look at online prices for things you were going to buy anyway. Since I hate driving and love finding good deals, I pretty much do as much of our planned purchasing online as possible.

6. Overpaying taxes – This is always a controversial issue. During a normal year, hubby and I are within $200 of the target one way or another. While hubby has been in graduate school, we’re getting larger refunds. It will go back to normal next year.

7. Making minimum payments on credit cards – Yeah, this is a killer. We love using our rewards cards and paying them off in full every month…nothing sweeter than cash back on something we were going to buy anyway. The trick is making sure you still feel spending pain when using plastic. I always feel the hurt, so we don’t spend any more than we were anyway.

How do you stack up on these points?  Anything you have mastered or need to work on?